You may be asking yourself why people give away free Bitcoins. Well, there can be 2 answers for that:

They are trying to teach people about Bitcoin (like we do here).
They are somehow making money from it.
Of course you can probably guess that #2 is the main reason people set up faucets. Just so you’ll get an idea of how big the faucet industry is, almost 50% of the leading Bitcoin websites today in terms of traffic are faucets.

But the question remains: How can you make money from these faucets? Well, most of these websites have an overwhelming amount of ads placed all around them. Some deceitful faucets even place their ads in places which will get you to accidentally click the ad instead of the “claim bitcoins” button.

So the business model of these faucets is bringing cheap traffic in and getting them to click on ads. But where do they get their “cheap” traffic from?

From a referral system.

Faucets will let you earn a percentage of the Bitcoins they give away to visitors you brought in. This method is so successful that it’s the main traffic source for most faucets and it also created a new type of website – The Bitcoin faucet rotator.

A rotator site is a site that allows you to quickly surf through different faucets without opening a new site or tab each time. The links to each faucet inside the rotator are referral links and the rotator owner earns a commission from each faucet you visit through it as well. You can take a look at 99Bitcoins’ rotator to get a better idea of what I mean.

At this point you may be thinking, “Hey I can make lots of money by visiting faucets!” Well I’m sorry to burst your bubble but trying to get rich out of visiting faucets isn’t a realistic option. You’d probably just be wasting your time going from website to website ending up with no more than a few bucks after hours of work.

Even if you sit at your computer 24 hours a day, claim a new batch of coins every 30 seconds and manage to find only faucets that are paying 10,000 Satoshis (which practically don’t exist), you would still only be making 0.0024 Bitcoins a day. At today’s exchange rate, that amounts to 70 cents.

Another thought that may pass your mind is, “So maybe I can make a lot of money by creating a faucet!” Well, this may be true, but you’re going to need A LOT of traffic in order to generate substantial revenue. However this is exactly what this post is about.

So keep on reading and let’s see exactly how much I’m making with my own faucet at the moment.