That's ridiculous, I'm sure there is overlap, but not that much. I am sitting near many people that care about web best practices but have never run an adblocker. And I know many people that run adblockers and don't give 2 cents about web best practices. Besides it would be very easy to get the ad networks to change, it's call money.

> 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.

More likely concentric circles.

I would not be surprised if sites running https have lower conversion rates per click.

Why? I can't see any way the protocol used to deliver the content would determine the amount of end users who click a link.

Sites targeting tech-savvy users are more likely to use HTTPS because they know their users will notice it, tech-savvy users are more likely to use ad blockers. More of a correlation than a causation. At least, I assume that's the theory. Seems like the effect would be small at this point though.

HTTPS requires 2 extra round trips, if your servers aren't close to the users, or the users are on a high latency connection anyway, https adds a real delay. HTTP/2 multiplexing and push /may/ help get some of that back, but I don't know if there's anything that does HTTP/2 push well in a non-custom server way yet?

If you configure your server to use TLS resumption and False Start there should only be one extra roundtrip, which can make a significant difference.

https://istlsfastyet.com

Apart for the other reasons provided by others, there is also the issue that sites using https are more likely to have savvier users and so may be less likely to purchase after clicking on a link. An advertiser is charged per click, but their return is the conversion rate on those clicks to sales.

To be fair, this ignores the thousands of software engineers in ad tech.

Having worked in ad tech, I didn't know anybody who wasn't running an adblocker in their primary browser.

I heard that Google had to rename some CSS names on their ad management portal (that understandably had names that began with "ad") to unbreak it when Google customers using adblockers were trying to manage their own ad accounts.

Whose bread is buttered by dark patterns.

Most of those engineers don't care much for privacy so I don't think they are to concerned with https.