In 2014-2016 faucets were more profitable, proportionally speaking, than nowadays. Everything changed after google adsense ban against faucets. Before the ban, faucet owners had a superior income from this network, so they could pay their users more generously. After the ban, they were left with cheap income from secondary ads companies, which aren't enough to make the faucets worthy for most users.
Neither the adoption of intrusive pop-ups and ads was enough to revert the situation, and that is why faucet industry lost relevance. Many users and faucet owners gave up, because it ended not being sustainable in a worthy way, neither fun for users to claim anymore.
In 2015 and 2016 I was able to make 100K satoshis daily, with little effort, by doing 2 daily runs through the most popular faucets of those times. Payments were instant to micro wallet, what was also a quite good aspect of it, while nowadays every faucets have internal thresholds, which take a long time to be met, and go completely against the concept of micro earnings.
Your post gave me flashbacks to good old days of faucets era. I also was earning nice amounts of money from faucets. First it was microwallet like Faucethub, then Faucethub which probably was best service in industry.
Faucets still were ok fro some time after Adsense ban, but eventually it was getting worse and worse. Popups, shortlinks, mining scripts in background - these things were making user experience worse, while payments also were going into lower direction. I left faucets completely shortly after Faucetub closed.
I was able to earn some nice money from faucets myself and with help from referrals and I don't regret at all that I used it despite that people always been saying that's waste of time
Maybe you remember that website called farmsatoshi and similar ones.
It was the first game I signed up to earn satoshis. Unfortunatelly, it didn't last for too long after I joined the website. It was free, anyway. Then there were a couple of websites later containing games where we could earn daily satoshis.
This one was great too!
There was also one which worked as a generator I remember waking up during the early morning to not waste a single minute of the generator's potential, but I don't remember the name (it paid quite decently). And there was another which displayed small monsters' icons on the screen, so if you were agile enough to click them before they disappeared (and they moved fast), you earned a large bonus.
They didn't last long, though, because they paid a lot for the industry's standards. The trick was to use those websites in the beginning, as faucet owners were testing the balance and sustainability. That was the moment when you could make superior profit.
I also got one once which didn't have timer and paid 100 satoshis for each claim, by just solving a simple captcha, although it lasted just for a day.
