Are bitcoin faucets losing their advertising revenue?
The business model for bitcoin faucets is that they are funded by advertising paid for in fiat, and they dispense small amounts of bitcoin to noobs, (the noobs are the traffic source for these sites).
One of the oldest bitcoin faucets, BitCoinker, which has been going for two years, listed itself for sale on Flippa.com.
In their listing, they said the following:
This domain can not be used with Adsense since it has been banned from it.
There's a gap in traffic for the month of May due to the fact I've redirected the domain in order to try and create a faucet under a different domain, however it doesn't work - the site still gets banned by Adsense.
So mainly this means you probably won't be able to use Adsense on this domain. Since a week ago I've stopped redirecting the site's traffic and it should climb back to its usual height soon.
The reason I don't have reporting for stuff that happened before April is because I bought this site from its original owner and his account is banned so he cannot access it.
He goes on to describe the profits before the Adsense ban:
Most of the expenses are the payouts you'll give to users. Normally I would make 100% ROI on this site. So if I paid out 1BTC a month ($450) to users, I'd make $900 in Adsense earnings.
That is a profit of about $450 a month - but the site sold in auction for just $2400. Normally sites like this sell for two years earnings, and the ones with low traffic sell for a year's earnings. So we can conclude that the new owner doesn't believe there will be much advertising revenue to be had (and has probably bought it because it has a lot of backlinks and can be repurposed).
All over the bitcoin space you see bitcoin faucets being banned from Adsense - unfortunately the other advertisers don't generate much revenue, and we should start to see these sites either closing down or offering pitiful faucet drops before users abandon them and then they close down.
We are coming to the end of a particular business model that did a lot to support the bitcoin price (because it converted some of the fiat advertising revenue into bitcoin purchases to dispense).
I wonder if there are any plans to eventually add advertising to Steemit? The same model could be used to help support the price of Steem. There are plenty of adds on Facebook after all.
Facebook sells it's own ads. I suppose Steemit could do the same if it got big. If you use an intermediary like Adsense, the income is low and you risk getting banned (though that is offset by the pool of advertisers being vast.