Dear Bitcoin enthusiasts!
I am writing this to discuss how bitcoin faucets make money and to share my experience running a simple faucet. I wanted to calculate the possibility to earn if you have a simple FaucetBox style bitcoin faucet here's an example of what I am talking about (
http://bannanabtc.fun/). So to understand the amount of money faucets are earning vs spending. We have to understand what ads are they using if short links are enabled and are they doing sponsored posts, affiliate marketing, etc. My faucet is using 2 ad services A-ads and Moonads(Legit not paying almost anything 2k impressions = 0.007$) biggest problem is that you need a high Alexa ranking to get some of the better-paying ads like Mellow ads that from what I hear are the best-paying ones. The CPM (cost for 1000 views) on A-ads is 0.30$(3200 satoshi) so at worst if 1000 people claim from the faucet without clicking any ads the site will earn 3200 sat. Now we can calculate the amount of satoshi I can pay without losing money 3200/1000= 3.2 sat. If I pay any more than that I will be out of profit zone, I am leaving out the fact that my faucet has a referral system that pays 30% commission. New faucets don't have a huge amount of referrals so let's just leave them out of this calculation. The short links on average pay about 1$ for 1000 views some pay a little more some pay a little less. So how much can the site give out for completing a short link? 1$ in sat is 11000/1000 = 11 sat. Now, remember that there are more costs for site owners like the domain name (about 11$/year) and hosting (3$/month) so about 3.7$ per month. So let's calculate how many users need to claim from the faucet so that I can keep the site up for free. Let's assume the site pays 2 sat per claim on average and the short link is not required but for completing you would get 5 sat. The problem with this calculation is that most people don't want to do short links and so they just claim from the faucet and leave. But let's assume half of the people complete the short link. The goal is to find out how many visitors does a faucet need, to stay alive.
39000=(x*3.2)-(x*2)+(x/2*11)-(x/2*5)
Here is the explanation of this equation
39000(cost for domain and hosting every month)
x-amount of visitors that complete an action
(x*3.2)-(x*2)- calculate profit from faucet claims
(x/2*11)-(x/2*5) - calculate profit from short links.
So just to keep this type of a faucet alive you would need 9285 visitors every month. Not bad huh? Well, not good either. So now the problem is how do you get 10k visitors without advertising costs. Your site will get about 40-80 claims per day if it's listed on FaucetPay.io faucet list. That means in 30 days you would get 60*30=1800 visits but you need 8.2k more. So what now? Well launching an ad campaign won't get you far since 1st of all you only pay 2 sat and you have FaucetBox style faucet while there are sites like cointiply, freebit.co.in and more that will pay you bank compared to this small faucet also that would mean more expenses on your side. Without any knowledge in marketing your best bet is to go to a place where everyone is your target audience and that is FaucetPay.io. So I only tried PTC ads people are very random so you never know who will claim and how will only stare at the screen for 7 seconds before closing. In my experience, 150 people form 1000 claimed their satoshi. Well okay, but if you get 1000 clicks don't you make 3200 satoshis from A-ads? Well yes and no, often for some reason some of the impressions are not counted about 200-300 and to get 1000 clicks it costs you 6000 satoshi. So PTC ads are a no go! Or are they?
I had some other ideas for advertising like
Post a lot on Reddit and Bitcointalk advertising your site.
And that's it
really I couldn't come up with anything else and I am sure I read all the blogs on bitcoin faucets and they didn't give me any good ideas for advertising either. What now? There must be a reason people still own their faucets. I took a look at the top faucets on Faucetpay that were similar to mine. I noticed that they were getting anywhere from 300-400 claims could that be it? The idea here is that I could boost my website on Faucetpay's list and get more people claiming from my site. 400*30=12000 visits! Ding Ding Ding Ding so that is the way I can make my site profitable. But how much I'd have to spend to reach the 1st page. Also even if I am up there seams that there are faucets that don't get even close to 100 claims a day. In conclusion, although I did not test this theory I will just let time slowly bring my faucet up to the top. But what do you know there is a problem with that too. Since you get ranked depending on the amount you pay in a week I will have to get very lucky and just hope that one week 10k people will decide to visit my faucet. In my head, I have an idea of how I could make a full equation on calculating the full cost with PTC ads that would be needed to take you up to the top of the faucet list. Tell me if you would be interested in reading about that. Maybe you could help me reach the top, here are all three of my faucets.
http://bannanabtc.fun/
https://applebtc.fun/
https://pearbtc.fun/
Thank you for reading!
PTC ads are definitely not a bad way to advertise, I have a site which requires you to make an account to use the faucet & other services such as offerwalls, shortlinks & more. And while your corrections may be somewhat right, it's not completely right. As your faucet grows the rates you get from advertising will most likely get better (using premium advertising networks such as Mellowads, Bitmedia, Cointraffic & Coinzilla) so if you run a faucet, don't expect any profits in at least the first few months.
The PTC ads are not a great way for faucets with no registration maybe but for a faucet with registration it's a great way! If you spend 6000 satoshi ($0,60) I'd get 30-60 new users depending which service I'd be using. Now out of these 30-60 members between 5-15 will stay active for a week, after that between 5-10. So you pay $0,06 per new active user. Which you should earn back within a few weeks as long as you use multiple banner ad networks & a popad network (I personally use popads)
I've run faucets with a off the shelf premade script such as FaucetinaBox script, but it sucks. It's very difficult to be profitable with a script like that, that's why I now made one with a registration method and it's working out much better now, I'm still nowhere near profitable but it's a start & it's definitely better then using a non registration script, the reason I made it with registration because I'm trying to build a community around my faucet, and if someone needs to make an account to use the site they'll most likely use it more then once compared to a click and get paid right away script. The reason Freebitco.in, Cointiply & others can pay much more then a regular faucet is because of this. They also have games such as dice and cointiply has a game like mines on their site to multiply your coins, but with these type of games the majority of players will end up losing more then winning so even if they pay out more. A lot of users will also lose their coins again right away which will have them earn from ad revenue but it costs them nothing because the user has lost their balance.
And if you want to reach the top of the faucetpay faucet list so badly, you can always buy the top spot for $20/week if it's worth it to you, personally for me it's not.
I started about 3-4 weeks ago and right now my faucet has 4000 registered users and around 500-600 daily active users, I don't need that type of promotion I'll get there organically and for promotion I'll just use bitcointalk, BMF & ptc.
