Passive Income for Crypto Websites: The Best Ways to Monetize Traffic

Crypto media, analytics platforms, price aggregators, token catalogs and education sites have one thing in common: the same readership. That readership is people who already own and/or trade crypto. Here is how site owners monetize that audience, with examples and numbers.

Advertising and sponsored placements

Etherscan (the main Ethereum block explorer) has 80m page views and 8m unique users per month. They monetize that via banner ads on the homepage, ads alongside the search results, text lines in the header and a range of small button ads. They also tell their visitors that their sponsored links are not endorsements.

On DEX Screener's token catalog a project will pay from $299 to get its logo and socials added to its token page. It can also purchase Boosts which will push the token up in the trending list for 12 to 24 hours. DefiLlama data shows DEX Screener took in $5.11m from these fees over the 30 days to October 15, 2026. It's a figure that tracks the market: $51.31m in Q4 2024 and $14.68m in Q3 2026.

On CoinMarketCap Earn users watch the project's videos and then take a quiz to earn a small amount of the token. The project can pay CoinMarketCap a service fee to run the campaign. That's a format that any site with a learning section could replicate.

Affiliate marketing

An affiliate link pays the site when a visitor signs up or buys via it on a partner site. CoinMarketCap states that it will earn from such links where users click through and then go on to deposit or trade on the partner site. 99Bitcoins (an education site which has a lot of beginner tutorials and a free Bitcoin course) tells its readers that it may earn a commission when they buy the products it recommends via its links.

Binance pays affiliates up to 50% of the spot, margin and futures trading fees from each referral (no time limit) and invites platforms with 10k users or 10k daily visits to apply. CoinLedger (a crypto tax tool) pays 25% of what a referred customer spends each year that they file their taxes via CoinLedger.

To complete the action the visitor has to leave the site and the partner will set the rules around tracking and payment. A user who clears their cookies or signs up from a different device at a later date may never be credited to the site.

Embedded exchanges and revenue sharing

An embedded exchange allows users to swap one crypto asset for another without having to leave the page they're on. A site with no dev team can add one as a widget (a short snippet of code that gets pasted into the page). ChangeNOW's crypto exchange widget supports 1,500+ assets across 90+ networks and is completely free to set up and has no monthly fees. The site owner is paid from 0.4% of each completed swap. Its look is easy to customize, so you can match it to your site's colors and branding if you want.

Tonbankcard (an open finance protocol on TON) added the widget so users holding assets on other chains could fund their accounts without leaving the app. The company says this cut the steps to fund an account by 50%, and it earns 0.4% of the swap volume. Across all of ChangeNOW's partner programs, a CCN review states there are over 1,000 active affiliates, averaging $5,853 per month, with over $12m paid out in total.

Take a site with 50,000 monthly readers. If 2% of them make one $500 swap a month, that's $500k in volume and $2,000 at the minimum rate. On token and price pages the user is already looking at an asset they may wish to purchase so those pages are a natural place for the widget.

Subscriptions and premium features

DefiLlama (the platform that tracks the money in DeFi protocols) has its core dashboards free and makes money off the extras. Their Pro plan is $49/month and includes custom dashboards, CSV downloads and unlimited use of their AI assistant LlamaAI. Developers who pull the data into their own apps pay $250/month for API access (1m calls).

Paid tiers fit analytics sites whose audience uses the data in their day to day work (traders and funds being the classic example). Messari took it a stage further in 2026, dropping both its Lite and Pro plans and now only offering an Enterprise subscription.

Partner integrations

In a partner integration another company will build the site's data/index/brand into their own product and pay for the right to do so. It takes a recognized brand or a data set that other products rely on.

Alongside its newsroom, CoinDesk runs CoinDesk Indices, which licenses price indices such as the CoinDesk 20. The licensees pay a flat fee. Where an exchange traded product tracks one of the CoinDesk indices CoinDesk also receives a percentage of the product's assets or revenue for the life of the product. CoinDesk now has $49bn in assets benchmarked to its indices. In Q2 2026 Morgan Stanley launched exchange-traded products for bitcoin, ether and solana all based on CoinDesk indices.

CoinGecko licenses its price data in the same way. MetaMask shows token prices sourced from the CoinGecko API and CoinGecko lists Coinbase, Ledger, Etherscan and Kraken as some of their API clients.

Which model fits which site

These models can run side by side: one site can carry a sponsored banner, affiliate links in its guides and a swap widget on its token pages at the same time. If you’re picking where to start, ads need advertisers, subscriptions need premium data and licensing needs a known brand, while affiliate links and an embedded exchange work with the traffic you already have.

If you run a crypto site with steady traffic, the ChangeNOW widget can go live on your pages in minutes, with no setup or monthly fees. You earn from 0.4% on every completed swap, and ChangeNOW's support team answers your users 24/7.

This post is commissioned by ChangeNOW and does not serve as a testimonial or endorsement by The Block. This post is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment, tax, legal or other advice. You should conduct your own research and consult independent counsel and advisors on the matters discussed within this post. Past performance of any asset is not indicative of future results.