The word "faucet" literally means tap or key and these reward systems take their name from there because they "drip" minute amounts of cryptocurrencies, just as a tap could drip small amounts of water every so often. These gifts usually range from 5 satoshis (the minimum unit of bitcoin) to 1,000 satoshis or more. For January 2022, this is equivalent to between $0.0025 and $0.42 per claim, which varies between minutes and days.
Why are they free?
A page that gives away cryptocurrencies just because, without a doubt, can be suspicious. However, most faucets are legitimate. To explain why, we must go back to its origins.
The first faucet was created in June 2010 by renowned developer Gavin Andresen, Principal Maintainer of Bitcoin Core for 4 years. At that time, the first commercial exchange using bitcoins (BTC) had hardly been made, so the cryptocurrency was almost completely unknown. In order to change this and make it known among the common people, Andresen developed a website where small amounts of bitcoins would be given away to anyone willing to visit it. In this way, it would get more and more people to know the cryptocurrency and make their first transactions, risk-free.
The first versions of that faucet gave each visitor 5 BTC for free, equivalent to $0.4 at the time and at the best time (to date) of the bitcoin price in 2021 at $330,000. Of course, neither Andresen nor anyone else could have imagined such a leap at the time.
The tradition has remained since then and the faucets, increasingly numerous and offering different cryptocurrencies, have established themselves as a learning method for the most inexperienced users. However, the administrators of these pages do not feed them just out of generosity: faucets are also a business model.
There are several ways that faucet page or app owners can generate revenue, but perhaps the main one is through advertising. Faucets are usually high-traffic pages, which is not that hard to achieve when you lure visitors in with the promise of free money. Taking advantage of this, many faucets place ads in almost all of their free spaces.
These ads, at least for the administrator and advertisers, can be of three types: cost per thousand visitors (CPM), cost per click (CPC) and affiliates, where the user must register or buy a product so that the administrator of the faucet receives some percentage of commission.
Other faucets have installed web miners that take the CPU and/or GPU processing power of their visitors to produce new cryptocurrencies, or have a lottery and gambling system that their profits depend on.
In this sense, it can be said that faucets are not actually as free as they seem. You can get some fractions of crypto there, but it will always be in exchange for being part of the traffic of the page for as long as possible, which helps to produce their income.
Faucet types
In this section we could divide the faucets by the type of cryptocurrency they offer or by their method of earning income. But since the first factor is self-evident and the second goes rather unnoticed by the user, we can instead divide them by the type of task the user must complete to get their reward.
Básics
This is the most common type of faucet. The only task that the user must complete is to see ads, click on the Captcha test or on a link to receive their small reward. This simple action with a prize included can be carried out, depending on the faucet, every few minutes, every few hours or every day. It should be considered that the more spaced the claims are allowed, the greater the quantity offered and, the less spaced, the less. For example, a faucet can allow you to get a reward of 1 satoshi every five minutes or 5 satoshi every hour.
Beyond that method, these faucets also offer other ways to earn a little more. They can be lotteries or bets for which you must buy a ticket, loyalty bonus (connect every day, for example) or random, contests and referral systems. The latter are very common and, in addition, they usually give much higher rewards than clicks. It is basically about getting new users to join that faucet and start charging. For each referral, a certain percentage is offered with respect to the amount that the attracted user charges in the faucet.
complexes
This class of faucets requires slightly more complex or creative tasks from the user, but they are still too simple to fall out of the category. They can also take longer, but they can also offer higher rewards. The most common are completing surveys, watching videos or passing levels in some simple game. The payment would then be made for each task performed and can vary depending on its complexity or even depending on its sponsor. The entire page or app may or may not also come bundled with a basic faucet.
Other categories
The following are not as such "types" of faucets, but they can be related to that category to a certain extent.
Auto faucets and rotators: these are bots or pages that allow, at least in basic faucets, to facilitate or skip the only task to be carried out by the user, since they collect automatically (in the case of auto faucets) or partially automatically ( the rotators) the fractions of cryptocurrencies. To do this, they mechanically jump from faucet to faucet.
Auto faucets operate with little intervention, while rotators just change the page to another registered one of the same type, and it is the user who completes the required task. It is very important to note that auto faucets are actually detrimental to the faucet business model as it is the admin who loses: the companies you advertise in your ads pay for views from real people, not bots. . Also, just visiting a faucet for a few moments yields fairly insignificant earnings and the page is likely to retain all earnings from the account if it is found to be linked to a bot.
Faucet wallets and dry taps: faucet wallets (wallet faucets) are apps or pages that offer a digital wallet service to store cryptocurrencies, but with the peculiarity of promising bonuses and interest for each deposit. Unlike micro wallets, they are not hubs for receiving faucet rewards, but isolated platforms.
Unfortunately, using faucet wallets does not usually end well for users: when trying to withdraw the funds along with the alleged earnings, it is likely to be discovered that the platform no longer exists, does not allow it or puts a successful withdrawal label but the cryptocurrencies never reach their destination. This may not always be the case, but it is quite common, so be very careful if you want to use one of these faucet wallets.
On the other hand, there are also some dry faucets around the net, that is, faucets that do not really pay or offer an unrealistic withdrawal goal, so that most of their visitors end up giving up before getting paid. Differentiating them with the naked eye from the legitimate ones is almost impossible, so before trying any faucet you should look for some external criticism.
Where are the funds?
After performing those little tasks in each faucet, it is worth asking yourself where the funds are and how to claim them. Many faucets require a personal wallet upon registration, and that's where they'll send any funds they earn, eventually. However, in principle, those small rewards stay within the site's system or go into a microwallet.
These micro wallets are identical to any that we could install on our devices or get online (Jaxx, Exodus, BitPay, Coinbase, etc.), but they usually have a limit on the amount they can contain, since they are specifically designed for micropayments. They are used to accumulate small amounts of cryptocurrencies without having to deal with transaction fees, which would erase the earnings as soon as the user withdraws them. Once the limit of the micro wallet has been reached, the funds can be automatically transferred to any other digital wallet.
Lots of faucets choose to use this service, so they redirect to the chosen microwallet page when a new user signs up, so that they get an address there first. Popular examples of micro wallets are FaucetPay and ExpressCrypto, which actually provides a list of the faucets that use it.
As for withdrawals from faucets, the vast majority of them have a minimum goal set that varies by platform. Until that goal is reached, it will be impossible to withdraw the accumulated funds. In that sense, it can be said that faucets are designed to keep their traffic stable: it is not enough to just enter a couple of times to get a sample of cryptocurrencies. You have to continue claiming between its established time intervals until you get the necessary amount, at least if you want to withdraw money.
Are they profitable?
When faced with this question we are faced with two faces: the user and the administrator of the faucet. Let's start with the user: the truth is that, at least to date, you will not become a millionaire using cryptocurrency faucets. The amounts that are given are only samples, small fractions of much less than a dollar, with an educational purpose. The most you can win with is referrals and maybe, if you're lucky, contests and bets. Coming up with enough for an average withdrawal, even if you claim multiple times every day, can take weeks and be just a few dollars, not even going into double figures.
What faucets offer the most to their users is not money, but experience. With them you can learn to manage a certain cryptocurrency without investment risks, open your first portfolio, make your first transactions. All of them offer an informative section with questions and answers about the crypto world, so, far from being just "pages that give away money", they are educational pages.
Perhaps the greatest expectation of economic return that users can have in this case is that the cryptocurrency of the faucet rises in price in the market later, as happened with Bitcoin since 2010.
Now, it must be said that the administrator of a faucet always takes much more than the users, but he has also put much more resources into it. He is in charge of choosing the type of income that the page will have, being aware of the technical aspects, he must take care of the bots and also of the hackers, and, in short, make every decision that can lead the faucet to its success or to its failure. his failure.
An experience
Ofir Beigel, general administrator of the educational page 99Bitcoins, recounted at the end of 2018 his own experience running a faucet, from its inception to the reasons that led him to close it. In this case it was Milli.io, a basic faucet that distributed a total of 12,795 BTC to its users for three years and even had a plugin so that others could install it on WordPress.
This faucet started out giving you just $223 in monthly earnings, already excluding expenses. By 2016, however, he managed to hit nearly $2,000 a month “almost entirely on autopilot.” Despite this, it didn't take long for Google AdSense, where the advertising that gave the revenue came from, to ban the traffic with incentives, which would basically end up killing the faucet.
Beigel says that he had to change his advertising provider, which led to him being forced to promote suspicious products, in addition, with much lower income. He tried to implement web mining, but this was also not very productive. So, in October 2018, Milli.io officially closed.
Despite everything, Beigel assures that running a faucet is still profitable, as long as you are willing to resort to any kind of advertising and work with other cryptocurrencies, in addition to bitcoin, because they have, says Beigel, more room for growth.
In other cases, faucets are more of a strategy by companies to educate and attract customers to their own products, such as wallets or exchanges, than a truly independent site to generate income.
