I had always wondered how they were profitable and have been researching it more as of late. I just came across this post now and have been recently using a lot of the faucets on https://faucethub.io and was wondering about the faucet creation side and then after researching it more I'm realizing some sites are also using the www.coinhive.com Java Miner to allow users to mine and give them more of a kick back. The coinhive.com mining makes me think of how much that'll be integrated into everything down the road as a form of micropayment, while you watch a 10 min video online you allow part of your cpu to be used for the curator as a form of micropayment and then can skip ads. I think this will be what happens down the road with most streaming media.