My read on the negligible positive is that those are mostly lifestyle and entertainment publishers. People already spent a lot of time on those properties naturally. Also community forums are still very active if they were active prior to this.

The thing to watch is who is able to carry their infrastructure through this with the lower ad rates. If you’re big spending on AWS, et al, you might start considering getting a little closer to bare metal.

Note that publishers with lower overhead and can hold out longer usually benefit from the earlier publisher shutdowns, as their ad impressions get soaked up by whoever else remains.

Having watched the publisher world back in 07-08 this is so far feeling very familiar.

I have a cxx role at a startup. We slashed our ad budget for the next 45-60 days until we figure out how deep our economic collapse is going to be; I suspect we're far from the only company.

The other thing about ecpms is most advertisers have a daily frequency cap for cookies. More browsing plus more ad slots does not necessarily equal that much more filled ad slots.

We're going to see a lot more ad-supported content companies fail as we destroy the ability to do cross-site targeting. (I'm not saying increasing privacy is bad; merely that this is an entirely-foreseeable outcome). Some sites will transition to paywalls; others will die.

Premier sites -- NYT, wapo, gawker family, etc -- will be able to do direct deals with advertisers. That takes both a dedicated salesforce, a draw, and frequent users. Mid-market sites like this will almost certainly not be able to do so.

See also Josh at Talking Points Memo's writing about transitioning to a mostly subscriber-supported model.