I’m by no means any kind of authority on this but maybe I can offer some food for thought.
Unless you can find a way to turn profit your faucet is likely to wither and eventually die, so staying in the Black is important.
Depending on how harsh your filters are, short links will only be counted for part of the traffic you send.
Almost everything that will earn you revenue is seen negatively by the users. It’s impossible to please everyone, you’ll just waste precious time and effort if you try.
I personally like input from my users and try to give people what they want, but only as long as it doesn’t go against my overall vision.
Beware of bots, sooner or later most if not every faucet experience a bot attack and the more successful you become the higher the probability. If you don’t have security in place they can do serious damage in very little time.
Try to minimize your overhead costs, that way it’ll be much easier to make break even.
Always be honest with your users, if you try to fudge things, it will come out somehow sometime. You can recover from running a bad faucet, but if you get caught being dishonest, that reputation will never go away.
Just some thoughts from the top of my head, I’m still struggling myself and still have a lot to learn before my own faucets are to be considered successful.
Good luck, I hope you find a good recipe for your faucet.
Cheers.