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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

It is counterproductive, as many ad networks are not fully HTTPS-compliant yet. So you'll literally lose money by switching to HTTPS. It's why many big media sites still haven't done it yet.

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It's a chicken-and-egg problem, but it's starting to improve.

Honestly if google really wanted to push this, they would do something to penalize http only ads. That would really pressure advertisers to upgrade or lose.

Chrome 51 changelog:

* Images served over unencrypted connections will have 50% of their pixels randomly scrambled.

Why don't ad networks care about HTTPS? It would increase the number of potential sites that can show their ads, make it more difficult for ISPs to block their ads, and allow browsers to load their ads over HTTP/2.

HTTPS requires additional round trips, so slows things down and tends to reduce revenue by a non-trivial amount.

Really? We added HTTPS to a number of ad-ridden sites and found no noticeable impact to end user page load times, page views or ad revenue.

If slow ads were a problem, why are ad networks so damn slow? I frequently see ads taking 10–20 seconds to load on major news sites. Serving fast ads would mean more viewing time, yet that doesn't seem to be a priority for anyone.

"On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10 KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL/TLS takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the preceding numbers will help to dispel that."

https://istlsfastyet.com/

It's your privacy not theirs. And they have to pay the increased costs for HTTPS including complexity (key management, etc).

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