[piyush_soni]

Yes, ads remain the major e-business model till date (and will probably remain for a long time to come). I guess one of the problems is, everyone needs money to maintain a website and to make a profit, but not everyone has content (or products) that could sell. It's a difficult problem to solve in theory. I think simple text based (or even small images based) ads should be fine .. it's the flashy ones or the ones that delay my workflow that I hate to the core.

[gpvos]

Micropayments should be a solution, but it's hard to get the cooperation needed for that going.

[rhaps0dy]

What about leasing visitors' processing power to run scientific computation? Maybe MapReduce jobs?

Would that be more intrusive or less intrusive than advertisement?

[gpvos]

If I could choose in advance which kind of computations would be done, maybe. And there definitely should be an enforceable limit on the amount of processing.

[rhaps0dy]

It should not alter the user experience. Maybe use at most 30% CPU, leaving priority to the other processes. Also avoid computing on devices with battery, or with low battery.

[piyush_soni]

Personally, if this processing infrastructure is managed by a big/trustworthy company (MS/Google/Amazon etc.) I should be OK with it, as long as its sandboxed. But if every individual website wants to implement its own way of using my processor power, I will prefer ads to it any day.

[quadrangle]

An attempt being developed for that, not ready yet: https://snowdrift.coop/