It's also not profitable to do faucets, but people tend to spend their day doing captchas for cents - even if it's not worth the eletricity. This kind of web mining is just an extra "income" for those that just want a few satoshis just by letting their PC idling without having to do any investment or hard work. There's a user base for everything.
For newbies, yes they may give it a shot but as Op said only valid until 10/17/2017, then it will be fine.
Browser mining or faucets aren't worth for us (at least), but some newbies will always intrigue to do it for a while until they figure it out, that it's wasting time. Same thing goes on browser mining, ads will give more money for the owners if accidentally clicked by participants.
