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In today’s issue: why the biggest media brands you know have lost 70 to 90 percent of their income and still have no plan, five stories from the last 24 hours, and the posts that hit hardest across the NewsBomb index. Let’s get into it.

Major brands lost 70 to 90 percent of their income. They still have no plan.

The biggest names in media are watching their traffic disappear across every channel. The ones that never built distribution in-house are now paying the price.

Major media brands, names you would recognize immediately, have had their website traffic decimated. These are operations that once pulled millions of hits a month from Google search alone. That traffic is now gone. Before that, many of them were getting millions more from Facebook links, and then that disappeared too, because they never adapted. They assumed Facebook was dead rather than evolving, and they moved on instead of learning the new rules.

For others, the loss was direct traffic. Or email newsletter traffic. Or referral traffic from platforms they once took for granted. The common thread across all of them is the same: it was too easy for too long. Traffic came in without much effort, income followed, and nobody felt the pressure to innovate or build real distribution capability inside the organization.

Now the market has completely flipped, and these brands have no in-house ability to respond. They cannot stand up a proper Google Discover strategy. They cannot run a proper Facebook strategy. They have no geo strategy. The internal teams were never built to execute on any of it, because when traffic was flowing freely there was no reason to invest in those muscles.

We see this constantly. We are working with major brands and successful small publishers who are looking to diversify their income, helping them overcome exactly this problem and start thinking like media enterprises, whether that means managing their assets directly or helping their internal teams build out the ability to execute on distribution themselves. In many cases, these operations have seen their income wiped out by 70, 80, or even 90 percent.

When income drops that far, finding the budget to build distribution streams in-house becomes its own problem. That is also why we built the Turnkey Management Program: so publishers that are bleeding revenue right now do not have to wait until they can afford to hire and train a full internal team before they start recovering. The publishers that survive this shift will be the ones that stop treating distribution as someone else’s problem and start owning it, channel by channel, starting now.

Moving the market right now.

Five stories from the last 24 hours that matter if you run pages.