Still trying to understand this , so you have to have a miner running for the starter contract to payout in full? Or are you saying the software has to be simply running regardless ? and if so why is that makes no sense.
CoinMiner is not required to earn profit from cloud or hosted contacts. But it has benefits if you run. Your contract earnings will be higher if you run CoinMiner. According to my observation, there is bonus rate on contract earnings. So if have many contracts like me, daily earning bonus will also increase. It's about 8 euro per day with 935 MHS hashrate.
I guess it will be more if run CoinMiner with a better computer.