ad views aren't important. Look at dollars in. Over time, net dollars in must exceed net dollars paid to publishers.

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.