Website Monetisation Doesn’t Have To Be Intrusive or Exclusive
Having your own website can be a rather rewarding hobby or even a full-time business for some. As the internet continues to absorb more of our daily lives into spending time on the information super higher highway, we’ve seen a plethora of websites pop up all looking to generate value or merely trying to keep the lights on.
While eCommerce has become an option for many to indirectly monetise their traffic passive website monetisation has been a hotly contested topic for years as retargeting, programmatic advertising and remarketing has started to bring up some serious questions on data privacy.
Another concern is the centralisation of website monetisation, which has primarily been dominated by one player in Google with its Adsense platform and access to the broader Google Display Network (GDN).
Sites like bloggers, news sites and niche publishers rely on the impressions served from advertising as a way to pay the bills and reward their efforts, but it does come at a cost.
Ads slow down the rendering of pages and disrupt the experience users receive, especially on mobile devices where screen size is limited. As ads continue to annoy users ad blockers have grown in popularity with Brave Browser leading the way in Ad free internet browsing.
The introduction of crypto-jacking
Up until recently, ads were the only way to monetise users spending time on your site, then came the introduction of crypto jacking a nifty script that allowed websites to leverage users computing power to mine cryptocurrency while they spent time on browsing the site.
Crypto jacking would effectively encourage users to create a long form or engaging content to keep users attention longer and reap the benefits. The issue with crypto jacking at first was many sites using the tech did not fully disclose this to users or allow them to opt in and donate their extra computing power as a way to reward the site owner.
Also, the resources needed to mine coins like Monero (which was used in earlier crypto jacking scripts) become unsustainable due to competition and sites using this method of monetisation weren’t able to earn a reasonable living, especially when you consider the validity in cryptocurrency prices.
Introducing Gath3r
As mentioned earlier, crypto jacking has had somewhat of a bad rep from both users and website owners, but the idea still has merit and room for growth and widespread adoption.
Which is why the team at Gath3r felt that this was a task that could be solved by using refined tokenomics to create a website monetisation economy that works for all parties involved.
Gath3r aims to offer website owners the ability to monetise their site and reduce their need for ads and provide a better experience to their users where content is the focus of the site.
Readers can enjoy a site experience the way it should be and not to be disturbed by add banners or tracked across the internet by intrusive ad campaigns.
So how does Gath3r aim to take on the task of revamping web monetisation? By taking the promising parts of crypto jacking and adding a few new features to make it a more appealing option for web owners.
How does Gath3r work?
Gath3r’s in-browser mining can work to the benefit of both publisher and consumer. Gath3r allows site owners to inject a unique mining script into their site which activates on page load.
As long as a user remains on the site the script will use the user's devices spare resources to mine cryptocurrency in the native Gath3r token.
Gath3r also provides its own loyalty program, where site visitors can earn a share of the revenue earned on a publishers site. For example, a webmaster of a blog can configure the settings of their in-browser mining such that the users receive 5% of what they mine to reward readers or entice interaction and increase the time spent on the site.
Gath3r can be used as sites exclusive monetisation method, or it can be used in combination of in-browser mining with paywalls or advertisements. Which may allow website owners more flexibility, such as reducing ad placements or how far they ring-fence their content by paywalls.
Gath3r users will be able to cash out their earnings in their native token GTH, Bitcoin or local fiat currency.
Case studies for how Gath3r can be used
While all the technical talk may sound good, how can you use Gath3r and who should consider Gath3r? Here are a few examples to help you get a better understanding of the system.
Online training website
Perhaps you run an online training site where you host manuals and user guides as well as video training and personal one on one coaching on your site.
Users spend a significant amount of time on these sites reviewing content, completing exercises and courses, which makes it a perfect fit for in-browser mining.
You may not have to attract as many users as before as the time on site helps increase your earnings, which encourages site owners to attract more quality leads than merely going for quantity to improve ad impressions.
Independent news agency
News is big business online, and more significant sites often dominate or get preference on search engines and social media, which means the bulk of visits and impressions go to these sites.
Also, we’ve seen large scale censorship of certain independent news outlets due to their political views which have greatly affected these sites earnings.
By having a monetisation system that does not rely on centralised services like Google or Facebook can help independent media thrive simply on merit and not on having to play to the algorithms and status quo of current ad serving platforms.
Getting involved in Gath3r
Gath3r will be having an IEO which will be held in the second half of July 2019 with not much known as to how the tokens will be priced as yet.
You can find the latest on their IEO here
Additional resources
Should you have found my write up exciting and would like to know more about the project, I would encourage you to check out the following resources.
About the author
Ché Köhler is the co-founder of nichemarket, a South African Business Directory and digital marketing agency. He is an avid blogger who specialises in writing about marketing tech and cryptocurrency.
