I think people are misunderstanding what faucets are for. We see many posts a day now from newbies asking how they can get rich hosting a faucet. The ones that make $10k+ a month aren't doing it from the faucet -- they use the faucet to drive traffic to their main site. This greed from people trying to cash in on faucets is what's killing it, though. It's largely why I haven't really kept up with my rotator -- scam faucets are popping up daily, and many people start them hoping to get rich and then ditch them when they realize it's not going to happen.
Hahaha thats an old marketing tactic, they also use to put exit popups on their websites like "Why do you want to leave empty handed", sometimes its a double popup or triple one.
There are all sorts of shady marketing tactics, but most of them are inefficient and only annoy people
In the beginning, none of this was true. Faucets gave out coins with NO advertisements at all -- just an address spot and a claim. In fact, they didn't even have captchas. The whole point was to help Bitcoin take off the ground. Note that back then, they also gave out 0.25+ BTC per claim as well (but they had little value so people bitched about how they were worthless).
After a while, some people released theirs with captchas to "fight bots," and that became the adopted standard. This I don't fault them for.
Then came a couple ads, usually related to a-ads, as a way to "pay for hosting." They weren't annoying, though, and were just like any other site.
Then came late 2013, with the ATH. All of a sudden a flood of people come in that are trying to "get rich" off Bitcoin, and think faucets are the way to do it. It was this that spawned the whole "let's spam popups and ads and hope people accidentally click them so we can get a couple cents!" scenario we still face today.
They still give out free coins for NXT for example, but yea that free giveaway only lasts until the coins are worthless, when it becomes valuable, nobody will give out free money.
Thats why you can use zimbabwe dollar on the toilet, but nobody would use usd for example.
Its all about making money.
