Running a faucet is fun. Competing to gain loyal users who keep coming back to your faucet is fun. It's more than just plastering a site with ads and hoping you make more than you give out. Find relevant ads that pay per click, for example, and if those ads shown are ads your faucet users want to see, they will click them, and you will get paid. A lot of ad networks pay garbage CPM for faucets, especially when you first start out. Alexa rank means everything. If you use a faucet script that is widely used by other people, that will immediately put a cap on your earnings. You want to be different and unique. Let the faucet be the main gateway to user entry of your website. How can you keep them on there? The longer they stay on your website, the more you will make. The more pages they scroll through, the more banners they see, and the chances of them clicking a banner are higher. There is definitely an art to the whole thing. I love it, personally.
I like your way of thinking, that way I started a bitcoin faucet too! But to tell the truth it is difficult to have a profit nowdays. The price of bitcoin has increased to much and you have to calculate hosting costs and loses from ad networks that don't pay. But still it is a nice game to play with strategies that will give you profit. Practically I think that if you are persistent and have web developing knowledge, you can gain.
