As far as I know, they are one of the few big media outlets to support https. So yes, this should have been done earlier, but kudos to them for pioneering this in their field and for publishing a short instruction manual for whoever else is planning this.
I'm not surprised that they are worried about the financial impact of https on their (very modest) revenue. It's a big investment for an industry struggling financially.
The BBC is in the process of making the switch, and sometimes blog posts are published about progress:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/f6f50d1f-a879-49...
I don't consider a SSL certificate as a big investment? There is no ROI on ssl usage. Nor do they break the bank; There is a 'not running away because you don't' return, which in the end hurt more. NY times SSL capable since 2014, also late, but already 2 years earlier then this website.
RT switched to HTTPS a while back. https://www.rt.com/
> I'm not surprised that they are worried about the financial impact of https on their (very modest) revenue.
I don't see anything to that effect in the article.
The primary reason is SEO:
It also gives us other benefits such as a potential increase in
search results. For the reasons mentioned above Google has
announced that it will favour https content. It is also helping
us decipher traffic from secure and ‘unknown’ referrers.
If they wrote this 5+ years ago, kudos. Now, today... seems a bit like a very bad (and very late) ad campaign or excuse.. And in all fairness, it could have summarized, as 'we cared more about money then serving https to our readers'