Salon tests alternative to advertising by offering visitors who use ad-blocking tools an option that allows the site to mine Monero using readers' computers
Do you use an ad blocker? That's cool — just let us use your computer's processing power to mine cryptocurrencies.
Context & Ripple Effects
Salon's experiment takes a practice that until now lived in the shadows and makes it explicit: five months after [[a:922499|Adblock Plus shipped a filter blocking sites from covertly mining cryptocurrency on visitors' machines]], Salon asks ad-block users to consent to exactly that — Monero mining instead of ads. The choice of coin matters: Monero's privacy features have already made it the payment rail of choice for ransomware gangs, so any publisher adopting it inherits that association.
The test also sits inside a longer arc of non-advertising monetization experiments, from Brave's Bitcoin-based Payments rewarding sites directly to PageFair's ad-blocking middleware being hacked into pushing malware across 500+ sites — each attempt to route money to publishers around the display-ad pipeline has carried its own trust burden.
First-order effects
- Ad-blocking Salon readers face a new trade-off — view ads or donate processor cycles — while Salon gains a revenue line that bypasses ad networks entirely.
- Adblock Plus's anti-mining filter now confronts a consent-based case: its blocklist logic was built for covert cryptojacking, and an opt-in miner forces a distinction between hijacking and disclosed use.
Second-order effects
- Other ad-dependent publishers will watch Salon's opt-in rates as a signal for whether reader-supplied compute can offset blocked impressions, potentially normalizing mining clauses in visitor agreements.
- Anti-mining tooling and browsers must evolve consent UIs — distinguishing disclosed miners from Coinhive-style covert scripts — or risk blocking a model publishers argue is legitimate.
Third-order effects
- Salon's bet is exposed to forces publishers don't control: Coinhive's shutdown a year later, citing the crypto crash and a Monero hard fork, showed browser-mining economics collapse when coin prices fall or protocols change under them.
- If consent-based mining proves viable where covert mining failed, publisher monetization structurally diversifies beyond advertising into reader-supplied resources — attention, payments, and now compute — with each channel carrying its own regulatory and trust surface.
The trend: Publishers are testing reader-funded alternatives to display advertising — Brave's tip-based payments, Salon's CPU mining — but their viability tracks cryptocurrency markets more than media economics.