Comment by Guest98123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Guest98123 | Hacker News Reader

I saw an instant 30% drop in revenue when switching my site to HTTPS in April. The implementation was done right, A+ rating from ssllabs, Google reindexed my main pages as HTTPS within a matter of hours, search traffic and overall traffic remained unchanged.

I poked around on my AdSense account to see where I was losing the revenue, since AdSense was still displaying the same number of impressions. It turned out I was seeing a 75% drop in CPC impressions, and AdSense was running low paying CPM impressions instead.

http://i.imgur.com/acy2k0u.png

That's a graph of daily CPC impressions on my account. It's obvious when I switched to HTTPS. That was over a month and a half ago. It hasn't bounced back.

I'm faced with a difficult decision now; whether to go back to HTTP and inform the community we're going to a less secure system for increased ad revenues, or I need to accept a 30% drop in my yearly income, and hope the situation improves as more networks switch to HTTPS.

>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.

Thanks for the reminder, I know I'll need to keep this in mind if I make the switch back. I'm fairly certain I'll stay with HTTPS though, since the situation will only improve. It also helps to encourage the ad networks to make the change, and encourages other developers to use HTTPS on their projects as well.

Removing the HSTS header won't help, as your browser will store this data, and IIRC it's not stored in cache, so clearing won't help.

You can however send the HSTS header with max-age=0 which will start clearing it for existing users

Good tip about max-age=0! I didn't realize you could do that.

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?

change the network.

google is big but not the only one.

there is a significant gap in typical earnings between adsense and a highly optimized display service.

the only way to bridge that gap really is expertise or consulting, typical website owners will have neither unless they are very large (think alexa top 1000).

Oh, trust me, I've tried all the major networks, along with every network dedicated to my niche, but they were all far worse, in both earnings and ad quality. There's a reason almost everyone is using AdSense when they're not selling ads direct.

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