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very good topic, can I ask you something about altcoins? I would like to set up a faucet through MultiFaucet with an alternative cryptocoin, if I follow these steps I can create a similar one with the one below: http://evilcoin.xyz/faucet/
It depends on which altcoin you want to create a faucet for. Using a Wordpress plugin we've created you can a Bitcoin, Litecoin or Ethereum plugin. The script mentioned in the original post is no longer working. You could use Faucethub's script to create a faucet as well though.
very good topic, can I ask you something about altcoins? I would like to set up a faucet through MultiFaucet with an alternative cryptocoin, if I follow these steps I can create a similar one with the one below: http://evilcoin.xyz/faucet/
Guess it might only need a tip from a competitor then... and it looked to me like adsense was the only working solution for a working faucet that will bring the owner at least a little bit coins.
Actually I've been running the faucet for the past month or so with a profit without Adsense. Unfortunately it's like 10% of what I would be making with Adsense...
I can imagine... there is nothing like adsense. Which, at the end, leads to one having to be cautious alot when deciding where and how to implement adsense at all... no fun having to fear it being taken away easily.
Guess it might only need a tip from a competitor then... and it looked to me like adsense was the only working solution for a working faucet that will bring the owner at least a little bit coins.
Actually I've been running the faucet for the past month or so with a profit without Adsense. Unfortunately it's like 10% of what I would be making with Adsense...
Guess it might only need a tip from a competitor then... and it looked to me like adsense was the only working solution for a working faucet that will bring the owner at least a little bit coins.
I just want to ask , are you use trafict exchange ? or hitleap ? or other service like it , to get more visitor ? or you have tutorial how to get more visitor ? Thank's
anyway nice tutorial
If you use a traffic exchange ad sense will ban you
Which makes it look like a risky thing to create and run a bitcoin faucet. Competitors only would need to hire such cheap traffic, or maybe even clickers... and you would be out of business. That's used in other areas since a long time already. Dunno if there is a protection against.
thank you so much your post helped me so much in getting the idea to setup faucet. keep up with your good work also I will keep coming to this thread for more updates
I just want to ask , are you use trafict exchange ? or hitleap ? or other service like it , to get more visitor ? or you have tutorial how to get more visitor ? Thank's
anyway nice tutorial
If you use a traffic exchange ad sense will ban you
In case somebody wants to create a faucet with a new system: www.fauceting.com
The concept is that users can create sponsored faucets with a banner (that goes to a referral link, for example). Faucets can be fully customized, you can choose the currency, amount, frequeny of the reward, etc...
The advantage for eaners is that they have access to a large list of faucets with multiple currencies in one single account
Thumbs up man.A really nice effort.You spend a lot of time to write such a long & informative post. It surely helps all new users who wanna start as faucet owner.
I've just added another update on how I'm doing with Milli. Here's the link to the update, should be interesting if you're running your own faucet.
Ofir, you mentioned hiring a free lancer to help you with the layout of your faucet, but I don't see you mention how much that cost in your blog post. Maybe you could update that as well. It would be good information ,I think, to find out where you found him and how much he cost. Thanks for the update. Look forward to hearing about how you're faucet continues to grow! Also, may want to compare your increase in traffic to price of bitcoin. I've noticed with mine it seems that traffic spikes as the price of that coin goes up.
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that those calculations should have gone into the post. I found the contractor on Upwork and it cost about $130 to set up the new design using Wordpress. I will be sure to keep you updated.
I've just added another update on how I'm doing with Milli. Here's the link to the update, should be interesting if you're running your own faucet.
Ofir, you mentioned hiring a free lancer to help you with the layout of your faucet, but I don't see you mention how much that cost in your blog post. Maybe you could update that as well. It would be good information ,I think, to find out where you found him and how much he cost. Thanks for the update. Look forward to hearing about how you're faucet continues to grow! Also, may want to compare your increase in traffic to price of bitcoin. I've noticed with mine it seems that traffic spikes as the price of that coin goes up.
Nice guide! For newbies will be good. But now it's very hard to make faucet and got big profits because there is a lot of bots that take coins from faucets.
That's not true - I have had my faucet for only 2 months and already am making about $300/m. I will post an update about this on my blog soon.
Nice guide! For newbies will be good. But now it's very hard to make faucet and got big profits because there is a lot of bots that take coins from faucets.
Interesting article even though you only copied it. It would be interesting to see how far he could push it into the profit zone. Are there updates already?
Yeah a link to the original article should due. However it's a good read nonetheless. They should be credited for this. Will add the link to my bitcoinlist i show new people into bitcoin.
Thanks for sharing. I've been looking for something like this for quite a while, but have yet to find anything so detailed or with such good examples. Hopefully one day I'll be this awesome at running a faucet and be able to share my experiences.
You invested some decent time into writing this article/post. Before I say anything else, I'd like to thank you very much for that. It's written nicely and covers a lot of stuff.
I've been working on a custom game/faucet for a quite while now, and I've been looking for many answers. You covered around 85% of my questions in just 1 topic.
Wont waste more time. Going to click on all your ads on Milli, as a big thank you!
Appreciate it!
I really appreciate the feedback and glad I could help. No need for clicking on all of my ads, it will probably just get me banned from Google
You invested some decent time into writing this article/post. Before I say anything else, I'd like to thank you very much for that. It's written nicely and covers a lot of stuff.
I've been working on a custom game/faucet for a quite while now, and I've been looking for many answers. You covered around 85% of my questions in just 1 topic.
Wont waste more time. Going to click on all your ads on Milli, as a big thank you!
Very nice post i just made my faucet and this post helped alot
please update with complete status of the month of November and also 15 days of december
and is adsense safe for faucets ? because if you apply for adsense account with a faucet they wont approve it so how do you managed to get the adsense with the faucet ?
Just updated my current status here. Including all the questions you ask.
Ofir
Dont forget to mention that you already lowered your payouts to 70satoshi every 15min and still receiving traffic on publishers pocket, who promoting you and nothing geting back.
Not sure I understand what you mean. I have written in the post that I have lowered the payouts. Regarding the referral fees I have raised them to 85% from 45%. I'm mainly testing things out at this stage and trying to find the "sweet spot" that is able to generate profit for me and the publishers.
read - The last thing I'd want to do is hurt the publisher's income as they are bringing in a lot of traffic.
Very nice post i just made my faucet and this post helped alot
please update with complete status of the month of November and also 15 days of december
and is adsense safe for faucets ? because if you apply for adsense account with a faucet they wont approve it so how do you managed to get the adsense with the faucet ?
Just updated my current status here. Including all the questions you ask.
Ofir
Dont forget to mention that you already lowered your payouts to 70satoshi every 15min and still receiving traffic on publishers pocket, who promoting you and nothing geting back.
Very nice post i just made my faucet and this post helped alot
please update with complete status of the month of November and also 15 days of december
and is adsense safe for faucets ? because if you apply for adsense account with a faucet they wont approve it so how do you managed to get the adsense with the faucet ?
Just updated my current status here. Including all the questions you ask.
Very nice post i just made my faucet and this post helped alot
please update with complete status of the month of November and also 15 days of december
and is adsense safe for faucets ? because if you apply for adsense account with a faucet they wont approve it so how do you managed to get the adsense with the faucet ?
I just want to ask , are you use trafict exchange ? or hitleap ? or other service like it , to get more visitor ? or you have tutorial how to get more visitor ? Thank's
anyway nice tutorial
I use the referral reward for my visitors and also contact rotators - exactly like what I wrote in the tutorial under "how to get more traffic to your faucet"
I just want to ask , are you use trafict exchange ? or hitleap ? or other service like it , to get more visitor ? or you have tutorial how to get more visitor ? Thank's
anyway nice tutorial
It's not the website or tutorial of the OP. See his first sentence in OP.
With that much traffic how could you possibly break even... to test something....? You should have made way more money, trust me i know !
Maybe not the best placement for the adsense ads. Many make that error. Though it's a risky game since you don't want to play against the adsense rules, which can quite easily happen.
FunCaptcha is much more successful at stopping bots than the other forms of Captcha available for FaucetBox
Sorry but that's not correct coz right now bots solving that captcha in 15-20 seconds with 100% success. (if you need more info send me PM with your e-mail and I will give you link with explanation).
Anyway greath tutorial.
Regards.
I think image captchas are harder to solve since first captcha solvers need to implement them and especially for small captcha tools that is not worth it.
Or implement your own answer-questions since everyone wanting to game the faucet would need to first put all answers and questions into his bot to automate the process. Only few would do that at all.
Interesting article even though you only copied it. It would be interesting to see how far he could push it into the profit zone. Are there updates already?
I just want to ask , are you use trafict exchange ? or hitleap ? or other service like it , to get more visitor ? or you have tutorial how to get more visitor ? Thank's
anyway nice tutorial
I don't know about him but SEO is 25% of traffic . You want them to come back and stay for other reasons than claims. Buying a faucet for traffic is good for a month then it dies down like he said. I wouldn't do that unless you want your alexa rating to go up for advertising with mellow ads for a moment or season should i say. The OP had to put out his own money in the first month and took a risk, this is something i dont recomend for a novice faucet owner. If you really want a faucet to not go dry or make you go broke. I suggest having another income with bitcoins before starting the faucet. Affiliate custom ads is where you make your money. Adsense will help with payments but you will not make enough with it using Adsense. Here is a hint.... A faucet is nothing more than a advertising tool to sell something on it, using bitmedia ,mellow ads and adsense barely covers cost of the faucet if you pay above 500 sats an hour. Using anti-bot "am i human" is a deterrent for users . Funcaptcha is enough with .htaccess denying all tor nodes. I dont use a proxy but my service does that i pay, so you will lose a lot of biz. People might try to get around the timer and succeed for a moment but they will tire from it, its hard work to have that many wallet id's and do that many captchas and funcapthca is not vulnerable to bots yet. Hope this helps someone.
I just want to ask , are you use trafict exchange ? or hitleap ? or other service like it , to get more visitor ? or you have tutorial how to get more visitor ? Thank's
This is a good article that explain in detail everything you need to know how faucet work behind the scene. I definitely will create my own faucet if I have enough money to maintain it.
Well done OP, this is a really well documented and well written guide for any people in here that want to start a faucet business. It's good to have the feedback of an owner who doesn't mind to show some figures in order for people to see how faucet works behind the curtains.
Really good guide for the novice user as well. That site that provided this guide does give a little bit of free bitcoin when you signup there. Just for a newsletter of theirs that gives you special promos and news headlines every few weeks. That is how I started with bitcoin.
FunCaptcha is much more successful at stopping bots than the other forms of Captcha available for FaucetBox
Sorry but that's not correct coz right now bots solving that captcha in 15-20 seconds with 100% success. (if you need more info send me PM with your e-mail and I will give you link with explanation).
Very useful and informative.I was about to buy a faucet in auction here but after reading this I have decided to create my own.Thanks for step to step guide
Thank you for such a informative article which I'm sure will be very useful for the beginners to get familiar with and understand the principles of Bitcoin fausets
i hate the antibot faucet, but this is the best guide for create faucet and earn i have see in all forum, congratulation, no more site add completely statistic for user see
Very good article...you have covered in detail all the aspects of running a faucet including a detailed stats of profit and loss + anti-bot tricks. This will definitely help people who are serious about starting a bitcoin faucet and consider it as an investment
This post deserves some massive props! Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation!I'm glad you didn't come up with a lame scheme to make money by wrapping this up into a ebook and sell it for $10.
First of all sir I want to thank you for sharing your experience on this matter. It's a rather detailed guide and I'm really happy to have learned about it. May I ask you why are you doing so? It might be of pure generosity but maybe you're expecting something in return?
Brace yourself; this is a long post The good news is that it’s super informative as well. This post will teach you EVERYTHING you need to know about Bitcoin faucets. Here’s what we’re going to go over:
What are Bitcoin faucets
My own faucet case study – Milli.io
How to build a Bitcoin faucet
How to make money from your Bitcoin faucet
How to get traffic to your Bitcoin faucet
How to protect your faucet from spammers and bots
3 faucets to follow
Before I begin I just want to say that my experience of running a Bitcoin faucet isn’t vast. I’ve started 99BItcoins’ faucet, Milli, a little over a month ago, but I’ve learned a lot since. And now I would like to pass on this information to you.
What are Bitcoin faucets?
We’ve covered Bitcoin faucets many times in the past so I won’t go over them in detail. In short, a Bitcoin faucet is a website that gives out a small amount of Bitcoins to its visitors. The amount can vary anywhere from 100 Satoshis (0.000001BTC) up to 10,000 Satoshis and more (0.0001BTC).
Usually after you receive your coins you need to wait a certain amount of time until you can ask for another batch. The original Bitcoin faucet was operated by Gavin Andresen, The Bitcoin Foundation’s chief scientist. It started out around late 2010 and it gave visitors five Bitcoins for free. Back then, each Bitcoin was worth something like $0.08. The whole idea was to spread the word about the world’s first cryptocurrency.
How People Make Money from Bitcoin faucets
You may be asking yourself why people give away free Bitcoins. Well, there can be 2 answers for that:
They are trying to teach people about Bitcoin (like we do here).
They are somehow making money from it.
Of course you can probably guess that #2 is the main reason people set up faucets. Just so you’ll get an idea of how big the faucet industry is, almost 50% of the leading Bitcoin websites today in terms of traffic are faucets.
But the question remains: How can you make money from these faucets? Well, most of these websites have an overwhelming amount of ads placed all around them. Some deceitful faucets even place their ads in places which will get you to accidentally click the ad instead of the “claim bitcoins” button.
So the business model of these faucets is bringing cheap traffic in and getting them to click on ads. But where do they get their “cheap” traffic from?
From a referral system.
Faucets will let you earn a percentage of the Bitcoins they give away to visitors you brought in. This method is so successful that it’s the main traffic source for most faucets and it also created a new type of website – The Bitcoin faucet rotator.
A rotator site is a site that allows you to quickly surf through different faucets without opening a new site or tab each time. The links to each faucet inside the rotator are referral links and the rotator owner earns a commission from each faucet you visit through it as well. You can take a look at 99Bitcoins’ rotator to get a better idea of what I mean.
At this point you may be thinking, “Hey I can make lots of money by visiting faucets!” Well I’m sorry to burst your bubble but trying to get rich out of visiting faucets isn’t a realistic option. You’d probably just be wasting your time going from website to website ending up with no more than a few bucks after hours of work.
Even if you sit at your computer 24 hours a day, claim a new batch of coins every 30 seconds and manage to find only faucets that are paying 10,000 Satoshis (which practically don’t exist), you would still only be making 0.0024 Bitcoins a day. At today’s exchange rate, that amounts to 70 cents.
Another thought that may pass your mind is, “So maybe I can make a lot of money by creating a faucet!” Well, this may be true, but you’re going to need A LOT of traffic in order to generate substantial revenue. However this is exactly what this post is about.
So keep on reading and let’s see exactly how much I’m making with my own faucet at the moment.
How I Got Started with Milli (my own Bitcoin faucet)
Around a month ago I noticed an ad on Flippa that listed a Bitcoin faucet called “BitcoinGenie” for sale. At the time the site had a huge amount of traffic (around 240K users each month) and was making (according to its owner) $850/month. Here’s an overview of the site’s traffic between Sep. 1 – Sep. 30, 2015:
As you can see, the site was doing pretty well. I decided to jump on the opportunity and bought the website. However I wanted to use a different name for my faucet, something shorter and more catchy. I ended up going with Milli and redirected all of the traffic from Bitcoin Genie to miili.io.
Ever since then I’ve been testing out different payment models and ads in order to try and maximize my profits through this faucet. In this post I’m going to reveal to you my exact stats from Milli and I will also keep updating the blog from time to time once I get any additional insights.
Milli – First Month’s Profit and Loss Report
I’m a big believer in what is known as lean methodology. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, it basically means don’t invest any effort in something that hasn’t proven itself to work. To give you an example, when I started out with Milli, I could have created a very well designed website and my own custom faucet software. But that would be a waste of time since I’m not sure if this whole faucet scenario is even going to work.
Instead I decided to go lean. Create a low budget website through FaucetBox which looks pretty crappy. If I see that I can monetize off that site, then I’ll give it a face-lift later on.
FYI – FaucetBox is currently the largest “out of the box” solution for Bitcoin faucets and it will charge you 2.5% from your deposit for managing payments to your users. Even though I consider this fee to be pretty high, it’s worth paying in accordance with my lean methodology principles at the moment. In the future if I want to increase my profits I’ll just create my own personalized faucet.
As a start, I placed 3 Adsense blocks on Milli. Adsense is Google’s advertising system for website owners. You just place a line of code on your site telling Google, “This space is yours to advertise on, just give me a share of the profits.” The reason I put only 3 ad slots on the site is because Google limits you to this number, although you can add additional ads that are not by Google. I’ll cover additional monetizing methods later on in this post.
Here are my traffic stats for Milli.io for the first half of November:
As you can see, this is considerably lower than what BitcoinGenie had but it’s still a good start. There are a lot of page-views, the time on site is decent and the bounce rate is low.
Here’s a screenshot from FaucetBox of how much money I’ve spent on Milli throughout this time frame:
If you calculate on the payments made from November 1st up to November 15th you get 0.65334251BTC. Keep in mind that I also pay a 2.5% fee to FaucetBox so it means my expenses were around 0.67BTC. At today’s exchange rate, this equals about $220. The spike you are seeing around November 5th is when Bitcoin boomed to $500. Additionally, I’ve been running some different tests throughout this time frame.
Now for the revenue. Here are my earnings with Adsense alone on this exact same timeframe:
So at the moment I’m basically breaking even with a revenue of $223. Of course this result would change if Bitcoin’s price would increase (and then I’d be at a loss) or decrease (which would put me at a profit).
By now some of you may be saying, “What’s all the fuss about? You’re just breaking even, it’s not worth all of the hassle.” I beg to differ. You see, this is what lean methodology is all about. I used minimum effort to get to a point where I’m breaking even. Now I can take the time to optimize my faucet in order to create a profit.
I have proven my assumption that I can generate a revenue stream with a Bitcoin faucet using minimal effort. Also, even if I was just breaking even I’m still “converting” my Bitcoins to Fiat money at a 0% commission (assuming this is something you want to do).
In the following month’s I’ll keep you updated on different tests I run with Milli, and way to improve the site’s monetization. In the short amount of time I’ve been running the faucet have come to the following conclusions:
It’s better to pay small amounts of money at shorter intervals than large amounts of money in longer intervals. This is due to the fact that some people will apply bots to claim their Bitcoins multiple times and override the site’s timer. If your payout is larger this will put you at a loss.
The larger the time interval the higher the “Time on Site” metrics in Google Analytics will be.
Bots will destroy your profitability and you have to learn how to protect yourself from them.
I haven’t completely managed to prove this point yet, but I think It’s better to pay out smaller amounts and give a higher referral reward. This will get more people referring visitors to your faucet than a higher payout for the visitor and a smaller referral reward.
These are all just initial assumptions which I’ve tested in the past 3 weeks but I’ll continue to test them as time goes by. After all tests were concluded I decided to go with a payout of 300-1000 Satoshis every 45 minutes (you can see the chances of getting each payout on Milli). I’ve set the odds so that on average people will receive 300-500 Satoshis. This allowed me to put a super high referral commission of 65%.
How to Build Your Own Bitcoin Faucet
So now it’s time to create your own Bitcoin faucet!
If this sounds scary, I assure you that this guide will make it very simple. I have almost no coding experience myself, yet I’ve managed to set up a faucet. The whole process should take 20 minutes and no more than $4.
Step 1 – Download the faucet script
Go to FaucatInaBox.com and click on “Install Now” to download the faucet script.
Step 2 – Get a domain name and a hosting provider
In order for your faucet to be available online, you will need to register a domain name and place the faucet files on a server. I recommend using Bluehost, as they have very cheap plans ($4/month) and they will also give you a free domain name when you register. This way you kill two birds with one stone.
Step 3 – Create a MYSQL database
This step will be different for each hosting provider. For the sake of this example, I will use Bluehost in this post, but this can easily be done with any other provider.
Under “Hosting” click on “Databases”.
Follow the instructions for giving your DB (database) a name, a user and a password. Make sure to write all these three details down. Don’t forget to click “save” once you’re done.
Now open the folder you downloaded from FaucetInaBox and find the config.php file. Open that file with any text editor and edit the values of the database to the ones you just determined:
Once you’ve finished, upload the folder to your root directory (i.e. home directory) via ftp. If you are not sure how to do this then contact your hosting support; the process is fairly simple and should only take a few seconds.
Step 4 – Configure API and Captcha keys
Congratulations! The hard part is over.
Go to your website’s address and you will see a page asking you to click for the faucet’s password. Click on the link and write down the password. Enter the password in the next page and you will now arrive at your new faucet’s control panel.
The first thing you’ll need to do is input your faucet API key. You can obtain such a key for free at FaucetBox. After you get the key, enter it in your admin panel as shown here:
Once you’ve finished, move on to the Captcha tab and make sure to obtain Captcha keys, as well. This will make sure that your rewards are only given to actual people and not bots.
Step 5 – Rewards and additional settings
On the main tab of your faucet’s control panel set up the following things:
Your faucet’s name and tag line
How much time will the user needs to wait until he can get another reward
Referral percentage for users who bring in other users
The amount of rewards given to a user
Using the other tabs on the control panel you can change your faucet’s design on the “templates” tab. In this tab you will also be able to add and edit HTML code for ads you want to display on the site.
Step 6 – Funding your faucet
Before you can activate your faucet, you’ll need to fund it so you can send out the rewards to people. This is done through FaucetBox’s dashboard. Go to the “Balance” tab and click on “Activate” on the Bitcoin currency row.
You will then receive a Bitcoin address. Send funds to that address and FaucetBox will now automatically pay your faucet users (minimum to fund it 0.001BTC). Keep in mind that FaucetBox charges a fee for this service (currently 2.5%).
That’s it! Your faucet is now fully operational.
How to make money from your faucet
Now for the fun part, how to actually make money from your faucet. At the moment I’m only using one out of various methods I will list below. In the future I plan to expand my ways of monetization (making money) but I want to take it one step at a time (remember? lean methodology).
Using ads on your website
By far the most popular way for monetizing your faucet is through ads. If you’re new to online advertising I suggest heading over to Google Adsense and signing up as a publisher. They have great tutorials to get you on your way.
If you’re looking for more options aside from Google Adsense then I’ve seen many faucets use CoinAd. However it seems that you’ll need to gain some serious traction before you’ll be able to sign up with them. At the moment CoinAd states on their homepage that they accept only websites with an Alexa ranking of under 100,000 or more than 10K pageviews daily.
Another option for generating money through advertising is Anonymous Ads. Unlike CoinAd they do not have a screening process and will accept practically anyone as a publisher.
When putting your ad placements on the page it’s best to make sure that they are as visible as possible. This means you should use large ad formats and place them next to where to visitor will probably be looking (e.g. the “Claim Reward” button). Since at the moment I’m only using Adsense I am limited to 3 placements maximum. I used 2 wide skyscrapers (300px width x 600px height) and one medium banner (468px width x 60px height), this seems to be the standard for most faucets I’ve visited.
Using affiliate/referral links
Another way you can monetize your faucet is through affiliate/referral links. One example for this is to place a link saying, “Don’t have a Bitcoin wallet?” under the text box where the user needs to enter his Bitcoin address. This link can be your referral link to Coinbase and you will receive a referral commission if an eligible user signs up and later on buy Bitcoins from Coinbase. However Coinbase is pretty crappy in their payment ethics, so keep that in mind. Here’s a detailed list of available affiliate offers you can choose from and perhaps integrate into your faucet.
Build a faucet rotator and earn referrals
Some faucets will also refer their users to other faucets in order to receive a referral commission from them. One way of going about this is by building a faucet rotator. Since I already explained what a rotator is in the beginning of this post I won’t go over it again.
How to get more traffic to your faucet
It would be impossible to generate a substantial amount of revenue from your faucet without a reasonable amount of traffic. Getting cheap converting traffic for your faucet will probably be the hardest task you’ll need to accomplish but here are a few pointers to help you get started:
Approach popular faucet rotators in order to get your faucet listed on them. Some examples are iFaucet and Makejar.com. These sites have unbelievable amounts of traffic and if you manage to get your faucet on the top of their list you’re golden. If you’re using a FaucetBox faucet then you should be showing up on FaucetBox’s list as well.
Create a thread on BitcoinTalk promoting your faucet. The relevant board to post this on will be Micro Earning. Here’s an example thread. The main idea is for you to have a place where you can post updates about your faucet or even have “flash hours” where you give away higher rewards and get more traffic.
Add social buttons to your faucet allowing people to share it with their own reflink (short for referral link).
You can always try to find faucets that have closed down and ask to buy them. This way you can redirect the traffic that’s hitting their website to your faucet. However this method will only work for a limited time so keep that in mind. Once people understand that the original faucet is no longer active you will probably see a drop in traffic (just like what happened to me with Milli).
By far the best way to get more traffic to your faucet is by giving away higher referral payments, however this will also boost your expenses. You can always offer a high, one-time payment for one of the popular faucets or rotators in exchange for sending you some more traffic.
Protecting your faucet from spammers
When you own a faucet, you’re waging a constant battle again spammers, bots and hackers that will try to steal your faucet’s Bitcoins. Usually spammers will use a VPN or a proxy in order to change their IP and allow themselves to reclaim coins from your faucet without having to wait for the timer to relapse. Bots can also be used in order to visit your site, claim the coins automatically and leave you with no profit, as bots do not click on ads. Last but not least, hackers may try to hack your faucet and steal the coins inside it.
Fortunately, the good people of the Bitcoin community have come up with different solutions on how to slow down these malicious attacks (it’s impossible to remove them completely). The following methods were composed from various BitcoinTalk threads (sources listed at the end of this section) and are ever-evolving. After I’ve implemented these methods I’ve noticed my payouts have stabilized, and I got my cashflow under control.
Don’t deposit more than you can afford to lose
It may sound obvious but it has to be said. Don’t deposit large amounts of Bitcoins into your faucet. This way if someone does hack into your faucet or manages to claim more Bitcoins than they deserve, at some point the faucet will run dry and he will leave. I try to deposit a week’s supply of Bitcoin into my faucet and check the balance every Sunday. It doesn’t add up to much (around 0.1BTC) and if I somehow lose this amount, I can cope with it.
Installing FunCaptcha
FunCaptcha is much more successful at stopping bots than the other forms of Captcha available for FaucetBox. Installing it is pretty simple – Just create an account, add a site, and put the API keys you’re given into FaucetBox’s admin panel.
However here is an additional measure you may want to take to increase security on your site:
Go to “Site Settings” and click the “Setup” wheel icon showing next to your site.
Go to the “Security” tab and choose “Always enhanced”.
Blocking proxy servers
In order to block people from viewing your faucet via a proxy and overriding the faucet timer you will need to add the following script on in your faucet’s template file.
Go to: ROOTDIRECTORY/faucet/templates/YOURTEMPLATE/index.php
Place this code, above :
Code:
function checkProxy($ip){ $contactEmail="EMAIL"; $timeout=3; $banOnProability=0.99;
if ($response > $banOnProability) { return true; } else { if ($response < 0 || strcmp($response, "") == 0 ) { //The server returned an error, you might want to do something //like write to a log file or email yourself //This could be true due to an invalid input or you've exceeded //the number of allowed queries. Figure out why this is happening //because you aren't protected by the system anymore //Leaving this section blank is dangerous because you assume //that you're still protected, which is incorrect //and you might think GetIPIntel isn't accurate anymore //which is also incorrect. //failure to implement error handling is bad for the both of us } return false; } } $ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; if (checkProxy($ip)) { echo "It would apprear you're using a proxy, so please, go fuck yourself! "; } ?>
After entering this line of code you can then check to see if it is working by trying to access your site through a proxy (e.g. Boomproxy). You should be blocked from the site and get an error message if you implemented the code correctly.
Installing an Anti-Bot mechanism
Next, you may want to implement an Anti-Bot script that will force your users to click links in a certain order to prove that they are human. You can see an example of this on Milli.
Only after the user clicks on these links in the right order will the “Claim Reward” button appear.
In order to get the script up and running you will first need to download this set of files. Here are the instructions on how to implement this script once you have downloaded the files (credit: MakeJar.com).
Code:
Files to add: /libs/antibotlinks.php
Files to edit: /index.php /templates/*theme-name*/index.php
Ok, let's start.
First make a backup of your faucet (everything could go wrong, better safe than sorry).
Then
Copy: antibotlinks.php
To: /libs/antibotlinks.php
Now you will need to edit 2 files. I suggest using Notepad++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ to edit files but any good editor will do the job. This is based on FB R60 but should work with newer/older versions.
Open: /index.php
Find: $data['captcha_info'] = $captcha;
add after: # AntiBotLinks require_once('libs/antibotlinks.php'); $antibotlinks = new antibotlinks(true);// true if GD is on on the server, false is less secure if (array_key_exists('address', $_POST)) { if (!$antibotlinks->check()) { $antibotlinks->generate(5, true);// number of links once they fail to solve min 3 - max 5, the second param MUST BE true } } else { $antibotlinks->generate(3);// initial number of links min 3 - max 5 }
Find: $data['captcha_valid'] &&
add after:
# AntiBotLinks $antibotlinks->is_valid() &&
Open: /templates/*theme-name*/index.php
Find:
Add before: # AntiBotLinks START ?>
# AntiBotLinks END ?>
Find: if(!$data["captcha_valid"]): ?>
Invalid captcha code!
endif; ?>
Add after (the input field must be between ):
# AntiBotLinks START ?>
if(!$antibotlinks->is_valid()): ?>
Invalid AntiBot verification!
endif; ?> # AntiBotLinks END ?>
Somewhere between add (you need to do it 5 times, this is where the links will appear):
Of course there are always additional security measures you can add to your faucets. For example, you can ask your users to answer a simple math equation in order to filter out even more bots. Also you can blacklist known scammer Bitcoin and IP addresses in your faucet’s dashboard. Check out the sources for this part of the post for additional info.
Before we wrap up the longest post ever written on this blog, I just want to point your attention to a few faucets that are already making it big. It might be worth your while to study them and get inspired by the techniques they are using in order to make money from their faucets.
Bitcoin Aliens, Bitcoin Zebra and Moon Bitcoin are all leading faucets receiving millions of page-views each month. Also I will continue to update on my progress with Milli as I optimize and improve my earning and traffic stats.
I hope you enjoyed this guide and that it helps you in setting up your very own Bitcoin faucet. If you have any questions, comments or want to add more resources to what was written here feel free to do so in the comment section on the original post in 99Bitcoins.