HTTPS Results in 7% Google AdX Revenue Drop

change the network.

google is big but not the only one.

>whether to go back to HTTP

If you do this, be careful of the HSTS header. You'll want to remove this from responses for a while before you flip everyone back to HTTP because their browsers will refuse to send HTTP requests during the specified period or until the next time they clear their browsing data.

If you don't have a lot of returning visitors, it matters less, but still something to be aware of.

I've seen the same, when my 2 from 3 sites went HTTPS-only page rank was dropped, from top3 to second page on Google Search, basically eliminating me from the market. In May I did a lot of changes to the sites and it's getting better, but the lie about https improving site rank was destroying.

I don't know a thing about AdSense, but I'm curious as to why the numbers depicted in the graph, while lower, shows a lot less random-looking fluctuations after the switch?

Can't you support both?

> Importantly, they should continue doing this (raising the price of adverts on HTTPS-only pages, due to the increased demand), until the price per click etc. is the same for HTTPS-only and "normal" sites. Why does this not happen?

> iv) Advertisers are turning down free money (highly unlikely).

One explanation: You are modeling advertisers' behavior similar to a control system having integral gain and/or bandwidth higher than the timeframe of the disturbance (HTTPS adoption rate). In practice, it may be that the market's optimization is using only proportional gain and/or lower bandwidth. Such a system merely reduces the impact of differing market sizes for HTTPS support, without eliminating it, or perhaps takes more time to eliminate it.

Isn't it simply a question of competition? If some advertisers can't support HTTPS, that means there are fewer bidders for HTTPS content. That should result in a lower price.

They are also bidding on what's presumably a shrinking pie of HTTP ad space. If the volume available to buy has dropped considerably, that may also be driving up the price of HTTP ad views.

There are no big incentives. Their large customers largely don't care or understand these issues. The few tech sites bugging them about https support aren't a critical mass.

The venn diagram of people caring about web best practices and people running adblockers is a circle, so there's no reason for ad networks to change anything.

Having worked at a large and (within the industry) well known ad agency I think you're vastly overestimating the amount of knowledge the people making those decisions at ad agencies have regarding things like web best practices and security. For larger household name brands the ones doing the purchasing of ad space online are almost exclusively ad agencies. Even if the agency doesn't make the ad unit and the accompanying creative, they're still likely the ones negotiating the price and making sure everything gets trafficked on time. The level of client involvement varies, but it usually hovers between "none" and "too small to measure".

Frankly, the people in the agency world making the kinds of decisions about which ad network to use are not the most tech savvy people. They're typically two or three layers removed from anyone who actually understands the difference between HTTP and HTTPS. Until that changes (hint: not for another 20-30 years when the current crop of middle aged account executives is retired or dead) then ad networks won't receive any major pushback from the people who are their largest most reliable customers.

Even if every person in the agency world understood the harm of poorly made ad units tomorrow it would still take ages for any changes to occur because of existing relationships and contracts.

> can someone explain why ad networks seem to be lagging behind modern web best practices?

Sites that use the ad networks to manage their advertising inventory are probably not going to go with a network that provides a better end-user experience, if it means the network doesn't have enough ads to fill the inventory or they're lower CPM -- if they have a significant interest in quality end-user experience, they're likely going to manage their inventory themselves.

> For example, terrible flash ads, ads that break the site they're displayed on, lack of HTTPS, malware

Advertisers love flash ads, love ads that takeover the whole damn site, don't care about HTTPS, and would like to have every page view counted with about 70 different beacon services -- that's going to be way slower if you have to negotiate a different tls session for each. Advertisers serving malware would like to serve it, clearly. An ad network needs advertisers, so there you go.

Also, an ad network needs to make sure they can show an ad everytime one is requested, so they'll backfill with other ad networks if they have to -- hard to maintain quality in that case. (Although personally, when I was involved in a website making money with ads, I was a lot happier with not showing an ad (and just moving the rest of the content up) when there was no quality ad available -- unseemly ads make my page feel unseemly; not all sites have the luxury to make that decision though)

It mostly comes down to poor engineering talent, different priorities and leadership that isn't interested in UX. Until recently, adblock, privacy, security and many of the performance trends were just not a big deal. Why fix what's broken when they can double the ads on the page instead?

* I've worked in adtech for years and now currently run my own company where we do this right.

>can someone explain why ad networks seem to be lagging behind modern web best practices? For example, terrible flash ads, ads that break the site they're displayed on, lack of HTTPS, malware, etc?

All of these seem like things that while bad, will make them more money. Not like things they don't have the know-how to move over from...

I don't think fraud is a driving cause here.

The real cause is downgrade protection. When your browser loads an HTTPS page, it will refuse to load (or at least warn when loading) any other resources over HTTP: js, css, iframes, etc.

This is to ensure that the icon you see in your URL bar is actually accurate: if a page loads over HTTPS, but consists entirely of a single HTTP iframe, that nice green lock is totally meaningless.

So when the OP switched their site to HTTPS-only, they lost the ability to ever display any from HTTP-only bidders. So the set of people bidding on their ad slots went down, the price went down, and their revenue went down.

I'm convinced that on what I spend, the fraction is way more than 1/3; I think it might be north of 2/3. The clicks on and off the page are just way too quick and consistently so for it to be a human. That said, I'm not sure that's what's happening here.

> We learnt that not all advertisers that place bids through the Google ads system support HTTPS, resulting in fewer ad impression bids and lower overall ad revenue.