Why Wired is switching to HTTPS

Ricardo Bilton of Nieman Lab writes about Wired magazine’s switch to HTTPS for its website.

Bilton writes, “While some smaller publishers have switched over to HTTPS in recent years, the job is far more difficult for a bigger site like Wired, which has content going back for over 20 years, most of which was initially published on different content management systems. Big news sites are also extremely complex. In the switch over to HTTPS, Wired had to rope in people from its product, engineering, editorial, analytics, and advertising teams. It’s a process that took roughly 160 hours over the course of three months, said Tollman.

“The biggest challenge, however, was advertising. While some ad networks and exchanges support HTTPS, adoption is spotty. This means that publishers that rush to switch to HTTPS risk not being able to work with certain ad partners, which in turn means potentially losing out on revenue. That’s a tough sell for most media organizations already fighting to make ends meet.

“Wired’s strategy to mitigate the risks of the HTTPS hurting its ad deliver is to make the rollout slowly, starting with one section and gradually expanding it to others. ‘We’re only risking ad impressions on that one vertical,’ Tollman said. Wired also hopes readers will tell them if they spot anything wonky with the HTTPS version of the site, which it’s initially offering the feature to its paid users, which it says are its most engaged readers mostly likely to be willing to help.”

Read more here.