Network ad rates have crashed as there is a glut of impression but low demand from advertisers.

Many online publishers will turn to paycuts and layoffs or even go out of business in the next few weeks

The tweet doesn't mention covid-19, but if it's related maybe:

1. A patron's income is more directly affected, so he suddenly withdrew support.

2. Maybe they were teetering at the edge of financial viability and the onrushing recession will kneecap them in some way (maybe no one wants to advertise anymore, or something).

I doubt the two are related. This is just the continuation of the bottom falling out of digital media publishing. Mic.com and a few other companies went bust last year.

This wasn't a sudden change, it was the result of media companies putting their faith in social networks to distribute their content instead of trying to organically build their own audiences through say, email.

Social networks de-emphasized "news" links in their feed algorithms over the past few years, so that impacted the number of impressions those posts would receive. And beyond that, users weren't interested in clicking a link and then having to come back to FB to comment on the article.

Big drops in ad revenue are affecting companies big and small.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/3/24/21192311/coronavirus-pa...

loss of advertising revenue?