I'm not sure what the angle is on so many faucets springing up.  It used to be hard for faucet operators to make much because google would not allow their ads on faucet sites.  However, freebitco.in seems to have over come that and has been in business with fairly stable payouts in USD terms for quite awhile now.  So maybe others have found the same loophole.

As others have pointed out, the faucets give out very little, and there are scripts to minimize the up front programming work, so if you have minimal hosting and domain costs maybe it works out.