FoxNews.com Not HTTPs: Losing Out on Lots of Ad Revenue

FoxNews.com is not currently HTTPs. As a result, the media outlet is losing out on what I suspect is a lot of ad revenue because ads are not being shown. Google AdSense ads, for example, are currently showing with an error, and ads are not loading. This is one major reason why, if you’re a website owner, you need to move your website to HTTPs immediately.

Today, I was browsing (and reading) an article on FoxNews.com which was ranking well in Google’s search results for one particular news item I was interested in. It happened to be this article about Martha O’Donovan who posted a tweet and may end up getting 20 years in prison for it. Anyhow, I normally don’t click on or look for Google AdSense ads, but this one happened to catch my eye on the sidebar:

The error is this:

Secure Connection Failed

The connection to ad.doubleclick.net was interrupted while the page was loading.

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.

That Google AdSense ad is not displaying because the ad is generally being served up on HTTPs, and the FoxNews.com web page is NOT being served up over HTTPs. It’s an HTTP URL, which is not secure: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/11/04/american-charged-with-subversion-in-zimbabwe-goes-to-court.html.

Note that the URL begins with HTTP and does not begin with HTTPs.

I’ve written a lot about HTTPs before, including this and this. And, it’s been several years since Google has stated that HTTPs is a search engine ranking factor. The latest version of the Google Chrome web browser shows users warnings when they’re going to submit information in a form that’s not on a secure website.

By being a non-secure website, FoxNews.com is losing out on a lot of potential ad revenue, when ads are not being displayed at all. Here’s another view of the entire page, where Google AdSense refuses to show HTTPs content on a non-HTTPs page: