Taken from 99Bitcoins. This is
the original article .
Brace yourself; this is a long post
The good news is that it’s super informative as well. This post will teach you EVERYTHING you need to know about Bitcoin faucets. Here’s what we’re going to go over:
- What are Bitcoin faucets
- My own faucet case study – Milli.io
- How to build a Bitcoin faucet
- How to make money from your Bitcoin faucet
- How to get traffic to your Bitcoin faucet
- How to protect your faucet from spammers and bots
- 3 faucets to follow
Before I begin I just want to say that my experience of running a Bitcoin faucet isn’t vast. I’ve started 99BItcoins’ faucet,
Milli, a little over a month ago, but I’ve learned a lot since. And now I would like to pass on this information to you.
What are Bitcoin faucets?We’ve covered Bitcoin faucets many times in the past so I won’t go over them in detail. In short, a Bitcoin faucet is a website that gives out a small amount of Bitcoins to its visitors. The amount can vary anywhere from 100 Satoshis (0.000001BTC) up to 10,000 Satoshis and more (0.0001BTC).
Usually after you receive your coins you need to wait a certain amount of time until you can ask for another batch.
The original Bitcoin faucet was operated by Gavin Andresen, The Bitcoin Foundation’s chief scientist. It started out around late 2010 and it gave visitors five Bitcoins for free. Back then, each Bitcoin was worth something like $0.08. The whole idea was to spread the word about the world’s first cryptocurrency.
How People Make Money from Bitcoin faucetsYou 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.
How I Got Started with Milli (my own Bitcoin faucet)Around a month ago I noticed an ad on Flippa that listed a Bitcoin faucet called “BitcoinGenie” for sale. At the time the site had a huge amount of traffic (around 240K users each month) and was making (according to its owner) $850/month. Here’s an overview of the site’s traffic between Sep. 1 – Sep. 30, 2015:
As you can see, the site was doing pretty well. I decided to jump on the opportunity and bought the website. However I wanted to use a different name for my faucet, something shorter and more catchy. I ended up going with Milli and redirected all of the traffic from Bitcoin Genie to miili.io.
Ever since then I’ve been testing out different payment models and ads in order to try and maximize my profits through this faucet. In this post I’m going to reveal to you my exact stats from Milli and I will also keep updating the blog from time to time once I get any additional insights.
Milli – First Month’s Profit and Loss ReportI’m a big believer in what is known as
lean methodology. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, it basically means don’t invest any effort in something that hasn’t proven itself to work. To give you an example, when I started out with Milli, I could have created a very well designed website and my own custom faucet software. But that would be a waste of time since I’m not sure if this whole faucet scenario is even going to work.
Instead I decided to go lean. Create a low budget website through
FaucetBox which looks pretty crappy. If I see that I can monetize off that site, then I’ll give it a face-lift later on.
FYI – FaucetBox is currently the largest “out of the box” solution for Bitcoin faucets and it will charge you 2.5% from your deposit for managing payments to your users. Even though I consider this fee to be pretty high, it’s worth paying in accordance with my lean methodology principles at the moment. In the future if I want to increase my profits I’ll just create my own personalized faucet.
As a start, I placed 3 Adsense blocks on Milli. Adsense is Google’s advertising system for website owners. You just place a line of code on your site telling Google, “This space is yours to advertise on, just give me a share of the profits.” The reason I put only 3 ad slots on the site is because Google limits you to this number, although you can add additional ads that are not by Google. I’ll cover additional monetizing methods later on in this post.
Here are my traffic stats for Milli.io for the first half of November:
As you can see, this is considerably lower than what BitcoinGenie had but it’s still a good start. There are a lot of page-views, the time on site is decent and the bounce rate is low.
Here’s a screenshot from FaucetBox of how much money I’ve spent on Milli throughout this time frame:
If you calculate on the payments made from November 1st up to November 15th you get 0.65334251BTC. Keep in mind that I also pay a 2.5% fee to FaucetBox so it means my expenses were around 0.67BTC. At today’s exchange rate, this equals about $220. The spike you are seeing around November 5th is when Bitcoin boomed to $500. Additionally, I’ve been running some different tests throughout this time frame.
Now for the revenue. Here are my earnings with Adsense alone on this exact same timeframe:
So at the moment I’m basically breaking even with a revenue of $223. Of course this result would change if Bitcoin’s price would increase (and then I’d be at a loss) or decrease (which would put me at a profit).
By now some of you may be saying, “What’s all the fuss about? You’re just breaking even, it’s not worth all of the hassle.” I beg to differ. You see, this is what lean methodology is all about. I used minimum effort to get to a point where I’m breaking even. Now I can take the time to optimize my faucet in order to create a profit.
I have proven my assumption that I can generate a revenue stream with a Bitcoin faucet using minimal effort. Also, even if I was just breaking even I’m still “converting” my Bitcoins to Fiat money at a 0% commission (assuming this is something you want to do).
In the following month’s I’ll keep you updated on different tests I run with Milli, and way to improve the site’s monetization. In the short amount of time I’ve been running the faucet have come to the following conclusions:
- It’s better to pay small amounts of money at shorter intervals than large amounts of money in longer intervals. This is due to the fact that some people will apply bots to claim their Bitcoins multiple times and override the site’s timer. If your payout is larger this will put you at a loss.
- The larger the time interval the higher the “Time on Site” metrics in Google Analytics will be.
- Bots will destroy your profitability and you have to learn how to protect yourself from them.
- I haven’t completely managed to prove this point yet, but I think It’s better to pay out smaller amounts and give a higher referral reward. This will get more people referring visitors to your faucet than a higher payout for the visitor and a smaller referral reward.
These are all just initial assumptions which I’ve tested in the past 3 weeks but I’ll continue to test them as time goes by. After all tests were concluded I decided to go with a payout of 300-1000 Satoshis every 45 minutes (you can see the chances of getting each payout on Milli). I’ve set the odds so that on average people will receive 300-500 Satoshis. This allowed me to put a super high referral commission of 65%.
How to Build Your Own Bitcoin FaucetSo now it’s time to create your own Bitcoin faucet!
If this sounds scary, I assure you that this guide will make it very simple. I have almost no coding experience myself, yet I’ve managed to set up a faucet. The whole process should take 20 minutes and no more than $4.
Step 1 – Download the faucet scriptGo to
FaucatInaBox.com and click on “Install Now” to download the faucet script.
Step 2 – Get a domain name and a hosting providerIn order for your faucet to be available online, you will need to register a domain name and place the faucet files on a server. I recommend using
Bluehost, as they have very cheap plans ($4/month) and they will also give you a free domain name when you register. This way you kill two birds with one stone.
Step 3 – Create a MYSQL databaseThis step will be different for each hosting provider. For the sake of this example, I will use Bluehost in this post, but this can easily be done with any other provider.
Under “Hosting” click on “Databases”.
Follow the instructions for giving your DB (database) a name, a user and a password. Make sure to write all these three details down. Don’t forget to click “save” once you’re done.
Now open the folder you downloaded from FaucetInaBox and find the config.php file. Open that file with any text editor and edit the values of the database to the ones you just determined:
Once you’ve finished, upload the folder to your root directory (i.e. home directory) via ftp. If you are not sure how to do this then contact your hosting support; the process is fairly simple and should only take a few seconds.
Step 4 – Configure API and Captcha keysCongratulations! The hard part is over.
Go to your website’s address and you will see a page asking you to click for the faucet’s password. Click on the link and write down the password. Enter the password in the next page and you will now arrive at your new faucet’s control panel.
The first thing you’ll need to do is input your faucet API key. You can obtain such a key for free at FaucetBox. After you get the key, enter it in your admin panel as shown here:
Once you’ve finished, move on to the Captcha tab and make sure to obtain Captcha keys, as well. This will make sure that your rewards are only given to actual people and not bots.
Step 5 – Rewards and additional settingsOn the main tab of your faucet’s control panel set up the following things:
- Your faucet’s name and tag line
- How much time will the user needs to wait until he can get another reward
- Referral percentage for users who bring in other users
- The amount of rewards given to a user
Using the other tabs on the control panel you can change your faucet’s design on the “templates” tab. In this tab you will also be able to add and edit HTML code for ads you want to display on the site.
Step 6 – Funding your faucetBefore you can activate your faucet, you’ll need to fund it so you can send out the rewards to people. This is done through FaucetBox’s dashboard. Go to the “Balance” tab and click on “Activate” on the Bitcoin currency row.
You will then receive a Bitcoin address. Send funds to that address and FaucetBox will now automatically pay your faucet users (minimum to fund it 0.001BTC). Keep in mind that FaucetBox charges a fee for this service (currently 2.5%).
That’s it! Your faucet is now fully operational.
How to make money from your faucetNow for the fun part, how to actually make money from your faucet. At the moment I’m only using one out of various methods I will list below. In the future I plan to expand my ways of monetization (making money) but I want to take it one step at a time (remember? lean methodology).
Using ads on your websiteBy far the most popular way for monetizing your faucet is through ads. If you’re new to online advertising I suggest heading over to
Google Adsense and signing up as a publisher. They have great tutorials to get you on your way.
If you’re looking for more options aside from Google Adsense then I’ve seen many faucets use
CoinAd. However it seems that you’ll need to gain some serious traction before you’ll be able to sign up with them. At the moment CoinAd states on their homepage that they accept only websites with an Alexa ranking of under 100,000 or more than 10K pageviews daily.
Another option for generating money through advertising is
Anonymous Ads. Unlike CoinAd they do not have a screening process and will accept practically anyone as a publisher.
When putting your ad placements on the page it’s best to make sure that they are as visible as possible. This means you should use large ad formats and place them next to where to visitor will probably be looking (e.g. the “Claim Reward” button). Since at the moment I’m only using Adsense I am limited to 3 placements maximum. I used 2 wide skyscrapers (300px width x 600px height) and one medium banner (468px width x 60px height), this seems to be the standard for most faucets I’ve visited.
Using affiliate/referral linksAnother way you can monetize your faucet is through affiliate/referral links. One example for this is to place a link saying, “Don’t have a Bitcoin wallet?” under the text box where the user needs to enter his Bitcoin address. This link can be your referral link to Coinbase and you will receive a referral commission if an eligible user signs up and later on buy Bitcoins from Coinbase. However
Coinbase is pretty crappy in their payment ethics, so keep that in mind.
Here’s a detailed list of available affiliate offers you can choose from and perhaps integrate into your faucet.
Build a faucet rotator and earn referralsSome faucets will also refer their users to other faucets in order to receive a referral commission from them. One way of going about this is by building a faucet rotator. Since I already explained what a rotator is in the beginning of this post I won’t go over it again.
How to get more traffic to your faucetIt would be impossible to generate a substantial amount of revenue from your faucet without a reasonable amount of traffic. Getting cheap converting traffic for your faucet will probably be the hardest task you’ll need to accomplish but here are a few pointers to help you get started:
- Approach popular faucet rotators in order to get your faucet listed on them. Some examples are iFaucet and Makejar.com. These sites have unbelievable amounts of traffic and if you manage to get your faucet on the top of their list you’re golden. If you’re using a FaucetBox faucet then you should be showing up on FaucetBox’s list as well.
- Create a thread on BitcoinTalk promoting your faucet. The relevant board to post this on will be Micro Earning. Here’s an example thread. The main idea is for you to have a place where you can post updates about your faucet or even have “flash hours” where you give away higher rewards and get more traffic.
- Add social buttons to your faucet allowing people to share it with their own reflink (short for referral link).
- You can always try to find faucets that have closed down and ask to buy them. This way you can redirect the traffic that’s hitting their website to your faucet. However this method will only work for a limited time so keep that in mind. Once people understand that the original faucet is no longer active you will probably see a drop in traffic (just like what happened to me with Milli).
- By far the best way to get more traffic to your faucet is by giving away higher referral payments, however this will also boost your expenses. You can always offer a high, one-time payment for one of the popular faucets or rotators in exchange for sending you some more traffic.
Protecting your faucet from spammersWhen you own a faucet, you’re waging a constant battle again spammers, bots and hackers that will try to steal your faucet’s Bitcoins. Usually spammers will use a VPN or a proxy in order to change their IP and allow themselves to reclaim coins from your faucet without having to wait for the timer to relapse. Bots can also be used in order to visit your site, claim the coins automatically and leave you with no profit, as bots do not click on ads. Last but not least, hackers may try to hack your faucet and steal the coins inside it.
Fortunately, the good people of the Bitcoin community have come up with different solutions on how to slow down these malicious attacks (it’s impossible to remove them completely). The following methods were composed from various BitcoinTalk threads (sources listed at the end of this section) and are ever-evolving. After I’ve implemented these methods I’ve noticed my payouts have stabilized, and I got my cashflow under control.
Don’t deposit more than you can afford to loseIt may sound obvious but it has to be said. Don’t deposit large amounts of Bitcoins into your faucet. This way if someone does hack into your faucet or manages to claim more Bitcoins than they deserve, at some point the faucet will run dry and he will leave. I try to deposit a week’s supply of Bitcoin into my faucet and check the balance every Sunday. It doesn’t add up to much (around 0.1BTC) and if I somehow lose this amount, I can cope with it.
Installing FunCaptchaFunCaptcha is much more successful at stopping bots than the other forms of Captcha available for FaucetBox. Installing it is pretty simple – Just
create an account, add a site, and put the API keys you’re given into FaucetBox’s admin panel.
However here is an additional measure you may want to take to increase security on your site:
- Go to “Site Settings” and click the “Setup” wheel icon showing next to your site.
- Go to the “Security” tab and choose “Always enhanced”.
Blocking proxy serversIn order to block people from viewing your faucet via a proxy and overriding the faucet timer you will need to add the following script on in your faucet’s template file.
Go to: ROOTDIRECTORY/faucet/templates/YOURTEMPLATE/index.php
Place this code, above <!DOCTYPE html>:
<?php
function checkProxy($ip){
$contactEmail="EMAIL";
$timeout=3;
$banOnProability=0.99;
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://check.getipintel.net/check.php?ip=$ip");
$response=curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
if ($response > $banOnProability) {
return true;
} else {
if ($response < 0 || strcmp($response, "") == 0 ) {
//The server returned an error, you might want to do something
//like write to a log file or email yourself
//This could be true due to an invalid input or you've exceeded
//the number of allowed queries. Figure out why this is happening
//because you aren't protected by the system anymore
//Leaving this section blank is dangerous because you assume
//that you're still protected, which is incorrect
//and you might think GetIPIntel isn't accurate anymore
//which is also incorrect.
//failure to implement error handling is bad for the both of us
}
return false;
}
}
$ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
if (checkProxy($ip)) {
echo "It would apprear you're using a proxy, so please, go fuck yourself! <br />";
}
?>
After entering this line of code you can then check to see if it is working by trying to access your site through a proxy (e.g.
Boomproxy). You should be blocked from the site and get an error message if you implemented the code correctly.
Installing an Anti-Bot mechanismNext, you may want to implement an Anti-Bot script that will force your users to click links in a certain order to prove that they are human. You can see an example of this on
Milli.
Only after the user clicks on these links in the right order will the “Claim Reward” button appear.
In order to get the script up and running you will first need to
download this set of files. Here are the instructions on how to implement this script once you have downloaded the files (credit: MakeJar.com).
Files to add:
/libs/antibotlinks.php
Files to edit:
/index.php
/templates/*theme-name*/index.php
Ok, let's start.
First make a backup of your faucet (everything could go wrong, better safe than sorry).
Then
Copy:
antibotlinks.php
To:
/libs/antibotlinks.php
Now you will need to edit 2 files. I suggest using Notepad++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ to edit files but any good editor will do the job.
This is based on FB R60 but should work with newer/older versions.
Open:
/index.php
Find:
$data['captcha_info'] = $captcha;
add after:
# AntiBotLinks
require_once('libs/antibotlinks.php');
$antibotlinks = new antibotlinks(true);// true if GD is on on the server, false is less secure
if (array_key_exists('address', $_POST)) {
if (!$antibotlinks->check()) {
$antibotlinks->generate(5, true);// number of links once they fail to solve min 3 - max 5, the second param MUST BE true
}
} else {
$antibotlinks->generate(3);// initial number of links min 3 - max 5
}
Find:
$data['captcha_valid'] &&
add after:
# AntiBotLinks
$antibotlinks->is_valid() &&
Open:
/templates/*theme-name*/index.php
Find:
</head>
Add before:
<?php
# AntiBotLinks START
?>
<script style="text/javascript">
$(function() {
var clicks = 0;
$('.antibotlinks').click(function() {
clicks++;
$('#antibotlinks').val($('#antibotlinks').val()+' '+$(this).attr('rel'));
if(clicks == <?php echo $antibotlinks->get_link_count(); ?>) {
var rand = Math.floor((Math.random() * clicks) + 1);
var button = '<input type="submit" class="btn btn-primary btn-lg" value="Get Reward!">';
var z=0;
$('.antibotlinks').each(function(){
z++;
if (z==rand) {
$(this).replaceWith(button);
}
});
}
$(this).hide();
return false;
});
});
</script>
<?php
# AntiBotLinks END
?>
Find:
<?php if(!$data["captcha_valid"]): ?>
<p class="alert alert-danger">Invalid captcha code!</p>
<?php endif; ?>
Add after (the input field must be between <form> and </form>):
<?php
# AntiBotLinks START
?>
<input type="hidden" name="antibotlinks" id="antibotlinks" value="" />
<?php if(!$antibotlinks->is_valid()): ?>
<p class="alert alert-danger">Invalid AntiBot verification!</p>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php
# AntiBotLinks END
?>
Somewhere between <form> and </form> add (you need to do it 5 times, this is where the links will appear):
<?php
# AntiBotLinks START
?>
<?php echo $antibotlinks->show_link(); ?>
<?php
# AntiBotLinks END
?>
And finally remove the default CLAIM button :)
Of course there are always additional security measures you can add to your faucets. For example, you can ask your users to answer a simple math equation in order to filter out even more bots. Also you can blacklist known scammer Bitcoin and IP addresses in your faucet’s dashboard. Check out the sources for this part of the post for additional info.
Sources:
Faucet owners against scammers and bots,
Stop bots + proxies from using your faucet3 faucets you can learn fromBefore we wrap up the longest post ever written on this blog, I just want to point your attention to a few faucets that are already making it big. It might be worth your while to study them and get inspired by the techniques they are using in order to make money from their faucets.
Bitcoin Aliens,
Bitcoin Zebra and
Moon Bitcoin are all leading faucets receiving millions of page-views each month. Also I will continue to update on my progress with
Milli as I optimize and improve my earning and traffic stats.
I hope you enjoyed this guide and that it helps you in setting up your very own Bitcoin faucet. If you have any questions, comments or want to add more resources to what was written here feel free to do so in the comment section on
the original post in 99Bitcoins.
