When drafting Technoutopia back in 2016, I devoted much of the book’s opening chapter to the rise of clickbait and to the subsequent decline in journalistic standards online. Little did I, or any of us, know that clickbait was only the tip of a much larger and more damaging iceberg.

Today, sensationalist headlines are the least of online journalism’s concerns. With the rise of Fake News and the shift towards increasingly partisan reporting, internet debate has never been so disjointed, misleading and fundamentally at odds with the proposed ideology of the fourth estate.

While there are numerous factors that have culminated in the rise of clickbait (plummeting attention spans, shock culture, identity politics and a growing obsession with individuality), at a much more fundamental level, clickbait is the outcome of a flawed economic system upon which so much of the internet has been built.

While I don’t intend to add to the long list of articles comparing the merits of different publishing models, it’s important to at least acknowledge that the attention economy has been disastrous for those news outlets looking to share measured opinions, long-form explanations and tedious (but vital) context behind hard facts.

With the exception of a few news outlets that have been willing to jeopardise their bottom-lines to maintain high standards of reporting, it seems fair to say that the ad-funded internet has inevitably resulted in a lowered standard of fact-checking and a greater willingness to sensationalise truth.

While few internet pundits would deny this fact, the majority would still have to ask - what’s the alternative?

Content consumers have made their views on paywalls very clear. Unless a Netflix-style model can be developed, which would allow users to access a wide variety of news sources for an exceptionally low cost, it seems unlikely that paywalls will survive.

As for current models based on personalised advertising and clicks, the widespread adoption of ad blockers suggests that consumers are generally opposed to internet advertising as well.

People don't like ads, but they don't much like paying for content either

So what’s the alternative? One answer could come from this rise of Bitcoin. Or more specifically, the rise of script-based crypto mining services.

CoinHive is a “JavaScript mining service” designed for the Monero Blockchain (a digital currency similar in nature to Bitcoin). CoinHive received significant negative attention in October after torrenting sites such as the Pirate Bay were found to be downloading CoinHive’s code onto visitors’ computers without their consent.

Framed within this context, CoinHive has generally been treated as a form of malware. As a wider concept however, such services could pose an interesting ‘third-way’ alternative to monetising news sites.

CoinHive’s platform works by planting a small piece of software on a user’s computer when they visit a webpage – such as a news story. By activating this software in their browser, users can consensually donate part of their device’s processing power towards mining for Monero (which, unlike Bitcoin, use CPU mining rather than GPU or ASICS).

"The ad-funded internet has inevitably resulted in a lowered standard of fact-checking and a greater willingness to sensationalise truth"

By installing such code, news outlets could theoretically turn a profit from visitors’ processors, without having to install paywalls or plaster their sites in ads. At the same time, the incentive for sensationalism and clickbait will be drastically reduced, with processing, rather than attention, forming the main basis for the new economy.

This long-term vision has driven the rise of mining platforms such as CoinHive; but just how realistic is it as a solution to the problems of digital journalism?

According to one web developer, not very.

Writing on his blog, mobile app develop Maxence Cornet outlines his experiments into whether or not crypto mining could ever replace advertising as a way to fund online journalism.

According to Cornet, running a service such as CoinHive on a website with approximately 1,000 visits a day, with a 0:55 second session duration resulted in only 0.00947 XMR (Monero) in 60 hours. This equates to around £1.74 which, isn’t disastrous, but is certainly not much of a money spinner.

At the same time, the rapid currency fluctuations associated with Monero mean that this figure has dropped as low as 60p per 60 hours – a return of one penny an hour for pages with 1000 visitors.

Clearly crypto mining has a long way to go before we can consider it a serious alternative to the ad-funded internet. What it does do however is open up a whole new way of thinking about publishing models online.

While CoinHive may not be the answer, the idea of readers working for content rather than simply clicking for it does offer a serious point for consideration. Already many news sites are asking users to answer survey questions in order to access content rather than serving ads.

For many of us, the idea of answering three survey questions rather than watching 3 minutes of advertising on a site like 4oD seems a very welcome step in the right direction.

As this notion of working for content – whether through physical processing power, shared opinions or completed surveys –  develops, we should expect to see a whole host of new ways that content providers are monetising our active participation in tasks.

Perhaps that will be the ultimate solution to the problems of clickbait journalism - moving away from the attention economy and towards the participation economy.

Alex Warren is the author of Technoutopia.