Ad Networks as Distributed Computers
Mikeonads has a fantastic idea related to distributed computing: Let ad networks help.
He suggests using ad networks as basically a critical mass version of Seti@Home. If you have a huge computational problem, break it down into billions of chunks and then use ad server calls to client PCs to execute the chunks and the publisher would get paid for each unit.
Mike takes apart the economics and suggests they might work - i.e. the spread between what people pay now for computer processing versus what low CPM sites get. The trick would be to size the chunk so that the computational overhead to manage it isn’t too large and isn’t too big that it would meaningfully slow down a client machine for any period of time.
Either way, I love the idea.
