Ok, So I presume that the owner is Male?
I have to confess I haven't asked that but it is usually my default assumption on the internet that everyone is either a dude or a dude pretending to be a chick. /jk
Let's fire away and see if he would want to respond to some of the questions. I will not ask anything that will compromise his
real identity.
1. Is the Faucet a huge profit drain on the whole operation after advertisements were stopped? {rough percentages?}
2. What is the biggest expense for the site? {Faucet pay-out or referrals or hosting fees and Admin cost?}
3. Do you have redundancy? {Backup plans if something goes wrong?}
4. How difficult is it to stop the bots? {I know from experience that they are a pain in the ass.}
5. What percentage of new users stay active? {My referral drop-off is about 100% in only 1 or 2 months}
That is all for now, he can pick what is too private or inconvenient to answer, but I steered away from being to personal.
I will pass those questions on but wetsuit isn't about much at the moment so it could be a while before I get any answers. I also wouldn't expect too much information on the financial side of things as that's understandably confidential. There is a bit of information you can see on the stats page. The chart "BITCOINS WON IN THE LAST 10 DAYS" shows gross winnings including free-rolls. The chart "WAGERED IN THE LAST 10 DAYS" shows how much was bet so statistically, you could assume with a 5% house edge that would make 5% of that figure the gross income. As well as the faucet that also has to fund the lottery as most tickets we give away, then the reward points, referral payments and then hosting etc.
I can answer #4.
It's impossible to actually detect them anymore as they have become so sophisticated they look more like humans than actual humans do now. That's why we ended up having to lower the rewards. The botnets buy captcha solves and if we pay more than the price they pay then there's a profit to be made by them.
#5 Speaking personally I've got 517 referrals and about 25 of them have been active a very long time. I think there's just a lot of luck involved there.