Arc.io Review — A Way to Monetize Any Website

What’s Arc.io?

In their own words, “Arc is a peer-to-peer Content Delivery Network”. Basically, a tiny portion of your users’ bandwidth and CPU will be used to power Arc’s CDN. Arc promises that “it never impacts the user experience” and anyone can join the network, whether you have a single or a million monthly visitors.

Generating money from any kind of website without charging your users or showing them ads is an enticing promise. So I gave it a try!

Note that I’m not using Arc as a way to serve my assets, so this blog post is not about how fast and cheap Arc is as a CDN. It’s about:

• How easy it is to setup
• Whether it really “never impacts the user experience” or not
• How much money it actually generates
• The ethical implications of renting out your users’ bandwidth

I tested Arc on my own little website.

Getting started with Arc

Setting up Arc was fairly easy. The whole process, from signing up to testing in production, took me less than an hour. It may take you a little longer if you’re not comfortable copy/pasting a few lines of code, but I think anyone tech savvy enough to have a website will be able to get…