facuet owners are starting to lose money

[freebitcoins4u]

i surf lots of bitcoin facuets, and i see that most of them start to reduce the amount they pay.

i think that facuets are going to vanish someday.

[Mahn]

They are already gone. Facuets had their time and place, and that was a couple years ago at best.

[galbros]

Giving away free money is a tough game to make money at.  The best ATM seems to be freebitco.in since they have a built in gambling aspect as well.

Faucets are great for new users to get some coins to play around with and see bitcoin in action.  However, bot makers seem to often get the upper hand, even freebitco.in had a guy who made over 1000 accounts, and so it just makes it even worse for the "legitimate" users.

I'll miss them when they're gone and agree, it wont be long now.

[cloverme]

Most are scams anyway... those that aren't just generate dust and take days or weeks to show up.  Has anyone ever really got anything good from a faucet? Maybe 4 years ago?

[michaelwang33]

Faucet owners make money from advertisements. So anytime that you visit their site to collect BTC they will earn money. Overall running a faucet is not very profitable as they likely make very little per visitor, but they do make something.

[lucaspm98]

Theyre over and done with. I'm sure a few will stick around, and continue to pay a few satoshis though. Great way to try out bitcoin for free.

[baztardo]

I run a couple of fairly popular faucets and have to agree, they are never going to make much profit, if any.
As galbros said, anything that is based on giving away free money is going to find it tough.

The reason I got into it was mainly for the learning experience and as a sort of hobby. After paying my hosting costs etc each month out of the advertising revenue I try to keep the faucets payouts as high as possible.  This isn't some altruistic gesture, I would have to give up quite quickly if I started regularly losing too much money. And to be honest, some of the abusive emails I get whenever there is any small downtime or technical issues, or when people suddenly decide that there are too many ads and not enough paid out, make me wonder whether its worthwhile sometimes.

One note about the OP though, faucets get most of their ad revenue in USD and are of course paying out in BTC. So the reductions in payouts are often related to movements in the BTC v USD value. You need to take that into account when you think that faucets are not paying as much as they did a few years or even months ago.
I think they are as relevant as they have ever been - maybe not for you personally as you become a bitcoin veteran, but for bitcoin newcomers looking for somewhere to start.