nah, for having a lot of referrals you still need to do a lot of work, which is not really useful work and in the end a lot of those faucets are not having a decent referral system or they are scamming people by either not paying the referral revenue or paying a lot less of what they should have.
Exactly. Getting referrals these days is not easy, because even new members of bitcoin industry are getting bored of small earnings from faucets.
And they are also leaving using all faucets and they just use some of them which pays a little more then usual faucets.
And someone for sure cannot earn 0.5btc from referral commissions of faucets in a short time, even if you have a lot of referrals but still it will take a lot of time to reach that target.
The truth is even by the time the first satoshi faucets and games came along the 50,000,1,000,000 satoshis a month they were paying out to players who committed and had the best strategies weren't worth anything. I think that's why there was a flux of those sites in the first place. Users didn't even make 25% of what they were making the site owners through ad revenue, but because most of them don't even know how much 1mBTC is worth they keep feeding the system.. Even with the captchas and random numbers you can closely approximate monthly earnings off averages and means.
If you look at my previous posts in this thread where I suggest approximating earnings you'd see I kind of hint at this. Nothing paying out 'free' satoshis has or had a profit margin.. You'd also lose money cheating using a VPS scheme with or without captcha solving services, but you'll see all kinds of 'bot' and 'hacker' forum-threads across the net suggesting otherwise.