HTTPS Results in 7% Google AdX Revenue Drop

Re:HTTPS Results in 7% Google AdX Revenue Drop by adsAreAScourge on Tuesday May 31, 2016 @09:22AM (#11806342)

How does this work (economically)? Based on this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11804689 it seems that the mechanism is:

HTTPS site can't load resources over HTTP (due to security) -> only those advertisers who support HTTPS can place bids for HTTPS-only sites (and not all do) -> the smaller number of bids results in lower ad revenue

However, as also noted there, the advertisers who do support HTTPS should preferentially bid for impressions on HTTPS-only sites, since the price per view (or per click etc), is lower. 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?

i) The simple model above is overly simplistic, and I don't actually understand the situation,

ii) The marginal costs of serving HTTPS ads and HTTP ads are not the same (though why would that be — the server overhead for HTTPS is marginal) or the the revenue from HTTPS vs. HTTP ads is lower (but again, why?),

iii) The time-frame is too short(?),

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

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Re:HTTPS Results in 7% Google AdX Revenue Drop by brandmeyer on Tuesday May 31, 2016 @11:29AM (#11807096)

> 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.

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Re:HTTPS Results in 7% Google AdX Revenue Drop by nitwit005 on Tuesday May 31, 2016 @06:05PM (#11810660)

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.

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Re:HTTPS Results in 7% Google AdX Revenue Drop by eru on Wednesday June 01, 2016 @07:16AM (#11813489)

Yes. But this very effect should drive https adoption for the advertisers. The grandparent comment was exactly wondering why this doesn't seem to be happening (enough).

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