A project that turns ads into bitcoin donation solicitations when adblockers are enabled.Turns Install directly from Wordpress Plugin Directory Thesis of this project is that publishers that have a loyal following might be able to get close to PPC unit economics with bitcoin donations.While we are building relationships with publishers to test this thesis empirically, I've conducting a rather-unscientific poll suggesting that a small sample of users would be willing to pay for ad-free content, but not if they are forced: Special thanks to these guys, who did much of the work and upon whom this project is based: //adblock-to-bitcoin/demo.html Demo code is tested with Adblock Plus and uBlock on Google Chrome on a Mac.Any other combinations, use at your own risk (and this is open source software, feel free to submit PRs).Contact @owocki on twitter.If there is enough interest, I will set up a google group for the project.You can donate to the author at 1A3KJ7f3YAS9jvhPjotLEzEMd1dNKZ9EPE.

Suggested donation for use on your ad-supported site: 0.045 BTCKevin Owocki woke up at 4am this morning with an idea.When someone visits a news site and their web browser uses an ad blocker, he thought, what if the site replaced ads with an invitation to donate a fraction of a bitcoin?Even in blocking its ads, readers could instantly contribute to the site’s well-being.They could pay, albeit a very small amount, for the stories they want to read.ethereum march 17“You read all the time about how publishers are having trouble migrating their business model to the 21st century,” says Owocki, a software developer in Colorado.cours bitcoin 2017“It just seems like micropayments is where that should go.” Even in blocking its ads, readers could instantly contribute to the site’s well-being.bitcoin market github

They could pay for the stories they want to read.So, at 4 am, Owocki built a tool that makes this possible and threw it onto GitHub.By mid morning, the tool—AdBlock-to-Bitcoin—was a popular topic at Hacker News, a major online hangout for software engineers.“Personally, I think bitcoin is the move,” said one commenter.“The long-term deflationary nature, the hivemind of sage engineers swarming around scalability, with the end-goal being tiny machine-to machine-payments, and the precision of value that you can achieve make it perfect.” In other words, he liked the idea.litecoin pool accountThis isn’t something that will appear on news sites and online magazines tomorrow.bitcoin api providersBut it’s designed to prompt conversation about the possibility of funding online publishers via micropayments.ethereum coin future

In that sense, it’s already working.In fact, it’s stirring up similar ideas publishers and engineers have offered in recent years—and in recent weeks—in an effort to mitigate the influence of ad blocking.Developers have built similar tipping services for publishers.And early this fall, the bitcoin outfit Coinbase proposed a browser that would let people pay small amounts of bitcoin for almost anything.Mainstreaming Micropayments Using micropayments to fund publishers is an old idea that’s never really caught on.But various tech trends are converging toward a point where such a thing finally seems viable—due in large part to bitcoin, a digital currency readily broken into tiny pieces.The rub is that bitcoin, though it continues to mature, has not reached widespread acceptance.“If your real objective is to get actually some income in place of the ad, I would highly suggest supporting traditional forms of payment in addition to bitcoin,” another Hacker News denizen said in response to AdBlock-to-Bitcoin.

“Although Bitcoin is interesting/cool/worthy of existence, 99.9 percent of users don’t have a Bitcoin wallet, so you’ll be missing out on a lot of potential income.” To make bitcoin donations via a tool like Adblock-to-Bitcoin, you need a bitcoin wallet, which is a service that lets you store, send, and receive bitcoin.And Owocki acknowledges that the number of people with such a thing is limited.But he says his tool can work with other payment methods.Make it easy enough for people to make small payments, he believes, and such a tool can underpin a viable business model for publishers.As it stands, the tool generates a QR code readers use to make a bitcoin donation.It suggests a donation size.And it can track how many people actually respond to these donation invitations—and how they respond.The idea still certainly a rough draft.But Owocki’s project shows how easily coders and developers can bring new ideas to the masses and refine them.Owocki built his prototype in about two hours, leaning on bitcoin and an existing open source tool called FuckAdBlock, which detects when someone is using an ad blocker.

And thanks to Github, the Internet’s central repository for open source software, he could distribute the code even faster.As new ideas and new suggestions arrive, they can almost instantly come to fruition.The future of publishing may be closer than you think.The team behind Opera, a web browser developed and released by Opera Software in 1995, may consider integrating Bitcoin after introducing a built-in Adblock feature in its newest release.Opera’s adblock-integrated browser received positive responses from online communities, particularly for its ability to load web pages 90% faster than other browsers.Because the adblock software is built into the system of Opera, it catches advertisements in the engine when a webpage is requested, enabling users to access the web more efficiently.Another browser to implement a similar concept of Opera is Brave, a web browser developed by JavaScript creator and co-founder of Mozilla, Brendan Eich.The Brave browser eliminates any advertisements seen on a webpage and replaces them with advertisements sold by the Brave Software team.

To compensate publishers, the team pays 55% of ad revenues in Bitcoin.The Brave Browser team’s release of a Bitcoin-integrated ad-free browser prompted the Bitcoin community to reconsider the implementation of micropayments and consider the possibility of using Bitcoin to payout publishers globally.The Bitcoin community praised the Brave Software team for their efforts in integrating Bitcoin and creating another platform publishers to be incentivized.Considering the positivity surrounding Brave’s new project, I personally asked the Opera team if they would ever consider integrating Bitcoin with an advertising model for incentives.When asked “Opera team created browser with built-in adblock.Will the team consider integrating Bitcoin micropayment to incentivize content creators?,” the Opera team responded, “In which browser would you like to see this ?Mobile or desktop?” @iamjosephyoung Hi :) In which browser would you like to see this ?:) /Rosi — Opera (@opera) August 26, 2016 Although the Opera team hasn’t released or hinted the integration of Bitcoin officially or publicly, it is possibility that the team might consider integrating Bitcoin in the future as a part of its initiative of eliminating ads on web pages.