In this paper we refer to the Open Web to the set of services offered freely to Internet users, representing a pillar of modern societies. Despite its importance for society, it is unknown how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the Open Web. In this paper, we address this issue, focusing our analysis on Spain, one of the countries which have been most impacted by the pandemic.

On the one hand, we study the impact of the pandemic in the financial backbone of the Open Web, the online advertising business. To this end, we leverage concepts from Supply–Demand economic theory to perform a careful analysis of the elasticity in the supply of ad-spaces to the financial shortage of the online advertising business and its subsequent reduction in ad spaces’ price. On the other hand, we analyze the distribution of the Open Web composition across business categories and its evolution during the COVID-19 pandemic. These analyses are conducted between Jan 1st and Dec 31st, 2020, using a reference dataset comprising information from more than 18 billion ad spaces.

Our results indicate that the Open Web has experienced a moderate shift in its composition across business categories. However, this change is not produced by the financial shortage of the online advertising business, because as our analysis shows, the Open Web’s supply of ad spaces is inelastic (i.e., insensitive) to the sustained low-price of ad spaces during the pandemic. Instead, existing evidence suggests that the reported shift in the Open Web composition is likely due to the change in the users’ online behavior (e.g., browsing and mobile apps utilization patterns).

在本文中，我们将开放网络称为免费提供给互联网用户的一组服务，代表现代社会的支柱。尽管它对社会很重要，但尚不清楚 COVID-19 大流行如何影响开放网络。在本文中，我们将着重分析这个问题，重点分析西班牙，这是受大流行影响最严重的国家之一。

一方面，我们研究了大流行病对在线广告业务 Open Web 的财务支柱的影响。为此，我们利用供需经济理论的概念，对广告空间供应的弹性与在线广告业务的资金短缺及其随后的广告空间价格下降进行了仔细分析。另一方面，我们分析了 Open Web 组成在 COVID-19 大流行期间跨业务类别的分布及其演变。这些分析是在 2020 年 1 月 1 日至 12 月 31 日之间进行的，使用的参考数据集包含来自超过 180 亿个广告空间的信息。

我们的结果表明，开放网络在其跨业务类别的构成方面经历了适度的转变。然而，这种变化并不是由在线广告业务的资金短缺造成的，因为正如我们的分析所示，开放网络的广告空间供应对大流行期间广告空间的持续低价缺乏弹性（即不敏感）。相反，现有证据表明，所报告的开放网络构成的转变可能是由于用户在线行为的变化（例如，浏览和移动应用程序使用模式）。