How Wikipedia can supplement its donations-based income.
I’m a big fan of Wikipedia. I regularly visit the site and derive a lot of utility from it’s well research, well sourced, fact-based and, most importantly, continually improving content. I’ve even donated to the site in the past and sometimes feel guilty for not matching every year.
If everyone who used Wikipedia this year donated, we wouldn’t need to fundraise for years to come. But less than 1% of our readers give.
Nonprofits are tough.
They do great work under cash-constrained conditions and are often under significant pressure to keep churning out programs, ignoring infrastructure investment that may help sustain them organizationally (see here for details).
Every time I get a letter from Jimmy Wales I wonder if there’s another way for Wikipedia to thrive (and be less reliant on donations). So when this post from Salon.com flashed across my twitter feed, I got excited.
Case Study: Salon.com
Salon.com is an online publication covering a wide range of topics from news, politics, entertainment, science and innovation. Traditionally, their revenue model consisted of renting out space on their site to run ads. Nothing new here, this is the model for almost every major online publication.
Recently, they’ve begun an experiment to give users a choice. To continue to see ads or to participate in their new “ad suppression” program. The set up is simply described as so:
by allowing Salon to use your unused processing power in the background while you are browsing Salon’s free content. This happens only when you are browsing Salon.com. Nothing is ever installed on your computer and Salon never has access to your personal information or files.
In short, Salon.com is hoping to supplement advertising income with mining cryptocurrency (Monero, XMR).
Given Wikipedia wide readership, why can’t it implement a similar program?
I reached out to Jimmy Wales and turns out he had a similar idea, ran the numbers and concluded that the project revenue per page views was so low it wasn’t justifiable.
Running the Numbers
I wasn’t entirely convinced.
How much processing power is required to mine 1 Monero(XMR) anyways?
Turns out the calculations have been worked out (see here). But things move fast in crypto, so I re-ran the calculations to get updated numbers.
First, we need to find the average number of blocks produced on the Monero blockchain per day. As of February 2018, Monero’s confirmation time is still, on average, 2 minutes (see here). At 2 minutes confirmation time; that’s 30 blocks per hour and roughly 720 blocks per day.
Next, we need to find Monero’s Network Hashrate; this can be inferred from the difficulty level at which Monero blocks are found, which is increasing in difficulty over time. Back when the original calculations were done, Monero’s network hashrate was at 23.3 MH/s or 23,300,000 H/s. As of February 16, 2018, the average network hashrate was 893.07 MH/s or 893,070,000 H/s (see here for latest figures).
We then need Monero’s daily block rewards. This is also decreasing overtime. The original calculations (~August, 2016) had the block rewards at 11 XMR. As of Feburary 16, 2018, the average block reward is at 5.207735311800 XMR (see here for latest figures. Alternatively, you could also see the most recent block issued on the chain).
Putting it all together, the to calculate Hashrate (H/s) to mine 1 XMR:
1 XMR ≈ (720 * Avg Block Reward * n)/(Network Hashrate)
Plugging in the above numbers:
1 XMR ≈ (720 * 5.20 * n)/(893,070,000)
Solving for n:
n ≈ 893,070,000 / 3,744
n ≈ 238,534 H/s
Monero uses Cryptonight proof-of-work hashing algorithm as its consensus protocol and the computing power I would need to mine 1 XMR is solving 238,534 hashes per second.
So how can we think about this in terms of Wikipedia’s context?
If Wikipedia were to run a similar program as Salon.com, it would borrow unused CPU space off of every visitor’s computer. I’d want to know how many unique visit Wikipedia gets per day. I’d also want to know how many hashes per second each visitor could contribute (on average).
Conclusion
Coinhive is a service that allows users to embed a Javascript miner for the Monero blockchain to borrow visitor’s CPU power. And people have already begun experimenting on their own website. Maxence Cornet used Coinhive over 3 days and got the following result (see here for details):
made 0.00947 XMR in 60 hours, a whopping $0.89, that’s $0.36 a day
What I found interesting was his estimate of 20–25 hashes per user (granted this is for this own website and would be different for a site like Wikipedia).
For the sake of our thought experiment, let’s say each user contributes 20 H/s per visit. To achieve 238,534 H/s (for 1 XMR), we would need 11,927 visitors.
How many unique visitors does Wikipedia get per day?
Conservative
Using Wikipedia Statistics, and the pageview analysis features; they receive a daily average of 19,148 page views.
Thus, taking 19148 / 11927, Wikipedia could be mining 1.6 XMR per day. As of this writing (USD$ 330.45 / XMR) that round out to USD$ 530 per day or USD$ 193,374 annually (of course assuming low volatility of Monero, which is of course, a big assumption).
Not Conversative
Another outlet has provided an astronomically more generous calculation of Wikipedia’s page views. According to this index, Wikipedia received 16 billion page views in January 2018. The analysis here suggests that Wikipedia could potentially make a significant amount from advertising revenue, but last I checked, Wikipedia doesn’t do banner ads.
If that’s any indication that’s potentially 1,341,494 XMR / day. That seems way too high.
The real number is likely somewhere between the conservative to not-conservative estimates.
Regardless, I say digital currency mining is something worth looking into for a site like Wikipedia that provides an invaluable service with no ad revenue.
