This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.

By now you have surely heard of Clavicular, the live-streaming looksmaxxer whose internet-addled argot and obsession with physical appearance briefly captured the national spotlight.

Or perhaps you have lately caught wind of TBPN, the live-stream technology podcast whose cohosts have attracted a wave of incredulous press coverage, documenting everything from their eye-popping sponsorship rates to their surprise Super Bowl spot.

If both have escaped your attention, maybe you saw Kai Cenat hosting an unlicensed PlayStation 5 giveaway in Union Square, IShowSpeed challenging Tyreek Hill to a footrace, or Clix in a shootaround earlier this month with Chris Paul?

If none of these names ring a bell, well then congratulations—your daily screen time must still be a single-digit number. 

But for a growing cohort of the terminally online, not to mention a broad swath of younger audiences, live-streamers like the ones above have become household names. 

Unlike TikTok, whose capacity to mint digital superstars came as a result of introducing a new format, i.e. vertical video, live-streaming is by no means a new technology. The home base of the medium, Twitch, launched in 2011 and was acquired three years later, by Amazon, for $970 million.

Pioneers of the form, such as the political pundit Hasan Piker and the gaming phenom Ninja, have built established followings over more than a decade of consistent streaming. And many others, including a crop of ambitious, if premature publishers, have sought to establish themselves in the space—though largely to mixed results.

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But in recent months, the medium seems to have broken containment, morphing from a fringe format into a bona fide kingmaker. A channel that formerly felt like the provenance solely of gamers and its Gen Alpha acolytes has lately crossed into the mainstream.

“The velocity with which streamers are able to build internet fame (TBPN, Clavicular, etc) feels notable right now,” said social media strategist Rachel Karten, on X earlier this month. “TikTok used to have that edge (Charli D’Amelio, Alix Earle, etc.), but the ecosystem of streaming, clipping, and showing up every single day is very hard to beat.”

The logic, at least in theory, is easy enough to follow. The medium has taken off because it appeals to both an emerging set of desires from audiences and an existing set of incentives from algorithms.

For viewers, live-streaming offers a refuge from the growing glut of AI-generated content on their feeds. In a social media landscape where the difference between real and artificial has grown nearly imperceptible, the unmistakable humanity of real-time video is a refreshing draw, according to Karten.

Similarly, part of the appeal of TikTok when it initially emerged was that, compared to Instagram at the time, vertical video felt far less polished. If Instagram offered manicured mood boards, the amateur quality of front-facing video on TikTok promised a more realistic portrayal of life.

But compared to live-streaming, whose real-time nature necessarily involves flubs, technical glitches, and periods of dead air, TikTok practically feels like a Hollywood production. Sure, the video you just scrolled past might appear to have captured an authentic surprise or genuine prank, but who knows how many takes it really took to produce? 

Live-streams also offer consistency in a way that vertical video, controlled as it is by the omnipotent algorithm, could never rival.

The best streamers go live on a routine basis, on a predictable schedule that encourages repeat viewership and builds loyalty. They often, impressively, stream for hours at a time, which gives their channels the feel of television more so than of social media. Creators who produce content explicitly for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts, meanwhile, can only hope that their hard work finds its way onto your feed. 

Indeed, the whims of the algorithm are the other explaining factor behind the rise of the live-stream. 

The arrival of TikTok fundamentally flipped the logic of content creation, as it rewards hits without penalizing misses. The algorithm surfaces the best material while suppressing the rest, meaning creators have found themselves incentivized to aim for quantity rather than quality.

Until recently, that has meant creating hundreds or thousands of discrete videos, each one a standalone product. But the emergence of the video podcast, as well as the repurposing of the live-stream, has changed that equation.

Now, rather than produce 100 individual videos, creators could simply film a podcast or shoot a live-stream, then cut that source material down into 100 clips. The latter requires far fewer resources but offers the same odds of virality. It also turns the process of production—the filming itself, the live-stream—into a product, effectively yielding two deliverables for the price of one. 

The result is a content supply chain with monetization at every link. 

Imagine a podcast creator who hosts a ticketed show, live-streams the event, captures the programming as a video and audio podcast, shares photos of the event on social, transcribes the text into a newsletter, and posts it online. Not only have they translated one moment into five different mediums—they have also monetized each one, each step of the way.

For creators, turning podcasts into live-streams adds another source of monetization, distribution, and discovery upstream of the actual product they set out to produce, a low lift with a potentially large benefit.

This reality has begun infiltrating the podcast landscape. According to Tom Webster, a partner at the podcast trade organization Sounds Profitable, bigger publishers are already starting to test the waters with live-streaming, as it brings engagement to a channel that has historically been one-directional.

“A lot of this stems from how much consumption is now taking place on the living room TV,” Webster said. “Bill Simmons is already doing the live to live-stream to podcast to social pipeline.” 

Of course, on some level this emerging trend simply closes a loop: Just as streaming-service bundles are recreating cable, live-stream video is simply live television with worse unit economics. 

But such a comparison glosses over the key insight at the heart of this transformation, which is that when faced with an abundance of dubious content, audiences will gravitate toward what they can trust.

Talking Heds

Permutive Permutations (Exclusive): The publisher data platform Permutive named Dave Rosner as its first chief marketing officer earlier this month, according to Permutive CEO Joe Root. Rosner was previously the chief marketing officer at Audigent, where he helped pioneer the practice of “programmatic curation,” which effectively enables supply-side platforms and their publisher partners to use their first-party data in private advertising deals. Permutive has lately made curation a major focus of its business, a key factor in bringing Rosner aboard is to help promote those efforts. 

“I’m a strong believer that curation has opened up a new wave of innovation across the industry,” Rosner said. “I saw that at Audigent, and we’re seeing a new chapter open up at Permutive.”

Starter Story Sold (Exclusive): On Monday, the media arm of the enterprise software firm HubSpot acquired the media startup Starter Story, adding the founder-led publisher to its growing stable of YouTube-centric media titles. Financial details were not disclosed, but Starter Story is a profitable three-person outfit with a seven-figure revenue, according to founder Pat Walls. The tie-up is notable because it is another proof point of the growing role of YouTube as a media incubator. Starter Story, which has 800,000 subscribers on the platform, saw its business take off when it began treating YouTube as its home base. For HubSpot Media, the platform has also become a valuable source of customer acquisition: Last year, YouTube-driven lead generation grew 68%, while newsletter-driven leads increased 53%, per its vice president of media and content Jonathan Hunt.

Raptive’s Rapture: The publisher network Raptive, which represents and helps monetize over 6,500 independent websites, passed a heady milestone earlier this week, having paid out more than $4 billion to its partner sites. Together, Raptive reaches 224 million users per month, making it one of the largest digital media companies in the world, as well as an invaluable voice for the massive long-tail of digital content creators. Too many conversations about digital media focus on an exceedingly small number of publishers, when in fact content creators like the ones that make up Raptive are as vital to the digital ecosystem as small businesses are to the broader economy.

The Economist’s Dilemma: Friend of the newsletter Maxwell Tani had an insightful piece on Sunday about the challenges, relatively speaking, facing The Economist. The publisher famously does not byline any of its stories, choosing instead to attribute all of its reporting to the monolithic Economist brand. This strategy, which has served the publisher since its launch in 1843, now puts it directly at odds with some of the influential trends reshaping the digital media landscape—namely, the atomization of media outlets into a collection of journalist-creators. I would argue that The Economist, more so than most publishers, has such a distinct brand, and even such a specific, overt ideology, that it alone might be able to persist in this approach. How the publisher navigates these next few years, however, will be a fascinating litmus test for the durability of editorial institutions.

Social Media Week Returns: In just a few weeks, ADWEEK will once again be hosting Social Media Week, by far the coolest event in our portfolio and one whose insights can legitimately help make or break your brand. I will be on-site, moderating panels and trying not to look washed, and would love to see you there. So join ADWEEK, on April 14 – 16 in New York, to tap into the cutting-edge tactics powering social for the top brands, media outlets, agencies, and creators in the world. Click here to learn more.

Pulled Quotes

“Impartial reporting is out; jestergooning is in.”
Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie, promoting his forthcoming book
READ MORE

“If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.”
Harper’s Magazine writer Sam Kriss, on who succeeds in a world of technological parity
READ MORE

“‘Dad,’ Alice often says at dinner, ‘get off your phone.’”
Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin, on Gen Alpha’s surprising disinterest in screens
READ MORE

“The only reason we’re still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good.”
An anonymous Defense official, on why the Pentagon can’t quit Anthropic
READ MORE

Quote/Unquote

Magdalene Taylor is the senior editor of Playboy and author of the Substack newsletter Many Such Cases, which explores sex and relationships. Under Taylor, Playboy recently launched a Substack, offering a blend of new writing alongside a mix of archival material, fiction, personal essays, and longform content. 

This interview has been edited.

Mark Stenberg: Why did Playboy launch a Substack?

Magdalene Taylor: We want to reintroduce Playboy as a literary publication to an audience of people who read. I see what we’re doing as very much in the tradition of what Playboy has historically done. We wanted it to be as contemporary and fun and sexy as makes sense, but also have a lot of respect and a bit of nostalgia.

Mark: Is this part of a broader shift at the publisher? The writing has felt very contemporary.

Magdalene: Since I joined in April, we have focused on what it means for Playboy to exist in an editorial capacity. We have released two print issues, something on hiatus since 2020, and revitalized the website. We are on TikTok, on Reddit, and now on Substack. Really though, Playboy has always been a place that publishes really good writing, alongside sexy pictures.

Mark: It feels like we are living through a particularly fraught moment for sex and romance. What makes Playboy qualified to try and make sense of it?

Magdalene: I’ve been trying to dissect this moment for years, to untangle what has happened with gender. I feel aligned with Playboy in that mission. On the one hand there is gooning, and on the other there are people afraid of sex scenes in movies. There is a polarity between hypersexuality and puritanism. Playboy is a vision of sexuality that can be fun and playful and unashamed without being excessive.

Mark: I had heard the jokes about how good the writing was but never actually read any of it before. I was surprised to see an interview with the Reverend Jesse Jackson that you resurfaced after his death.

Magdalene: If somebody was a significant figure from 1955 onward, there’s a good chance that they were interviewed for Playboy, wrote for Playboy, or posed for Playboy. It has a long tradition of publishing both erotic content and stories that were the first of their kind to defend civil liberties and articulate political stances that people now see as a given. Playboy has always been a particular voice of sexuality’s place in a civilized world.

Mark: Did you reach out to Substack before launching, just to make sure you were in the clear? 

Magdalene: We did talk with Substack ahead of the launch, mostly to see what they thought would be best practices. We wanted to make sure that we wouldn’t be shadow-banned or get in any trouble for having nudity—we don’t have any sort of exception, that’s just their policy.

Mark: Do you have a dream interview or story you would like to see written? Magdalene: My dream would be to interview Camille Paglia.

The Numbers

$847 million: Revenue for Q4 2025, up 14% year-over-year. Growth slowed compared to 22% YoY in Q4 2024.

$2.9B: Revenue for 2025, up 18% YoY, down from 26% in 2024.

$2.9B: Revenue for 2025, up 18% YoY

$678 million: Revenue guidance for Q1 2026.

Almost 100%: The number of clients using its core platform Kokai. The Trade Desk has previously stated it plans to move all clients to Kokai by end of 2025.

Watercooler Talk

CEO Jeff Green pointed to weakness among consumer packaged goods and automotive advertisers—two sectors that together account for more than a quarter of The Trade Desk’s business—as a key factor weighing down growth. He said some brands in those categories have pulled back on advertising and shifted toward cost-cutting amid macroeconomic pressures, including inflation and tariff uncertainty, trends that began in the second half of 2025 and have continued into this year.

On the AI front, Green said every engineer at The Trade Desk is using AI tools to write or test code and drive productivity. The company plans to launch an agentic AI framework for partners in 2026, though he stopped short of sharing specifics. 

When an analyst pressed Green if The Trade Desk has the scale when it comes to deploying AI to compete with Amazon or Google’s DV360, Green responded saying “this is a game of winning trust. It’s over a trillion-dollar TAM—there’s plenty to focus on, and you don’t make it a part-time job. All of those companies—their DSPs are part-time jobs. Their AI efforts and cloud products are at odds with them owning the DSP.”

The Trade Desk reorganized its go-to-market approach around a “brand-first” model, Green said, with “unified teams” now responsible for both business development and spend activation. Green added that the move increases the number of advertisers it works with directly while eliminating overlapping coverage between agency and advertiser teams.

These changes come as agency giants including Dentsu and WPP pulled the plug on OpenPath–The Trade Desk’s most closely watched technology initiatives–over control and transparency concerns, ADWEEK previously reported.

The technology was a key topic on today’s investor call, with an analyst asking about its future. Green defended OpenPath, saying: “When there is a supply chain that is inefficient and opaque, having a more efficient one next to it proves in an A/B test that B is less efficient. OpenPath is meant to be competitive. At a moment where many agencies are focused on principle-based buying—not doing as good of a job representing their clients—and SSPs are convoluting the ecosystem, spending much of their time trying to exploit it.”

Meanwhile, CTV remains central to The Trade Desk’s strategy, with the company highlighting premium inventory, live-event opportunities such as NBCUniversal’s 2026 Winter Olympics. 

Key quote 

“In Q2 2025 CPG and auto companies began navigating a mix of category headwinds such as tariff uncertainty and uneven volumes. In addition to persistent inflationary pressures as more consumers deal with cost of living challenges–and those trends have continued into the beginning of this year. Several global brands have talked about pulling back on the advertising budgets, driven by the month to month volatility, caused by these macro forces.”

The numbers

$31 per share: Paramount’s updated bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, raised from $30 per share.

10%—DTC growth for Paramount year over year, led by Paramount+.

-5%—Losses at TV networks to $4.7 billion, compared to $4.98 billion the previous year.

$30 billion—Paramount’s expected revenue for 2026.

The watercooler talk

During Paramount Skydance’s Q4 earnings call on Wednesday, CEO David Ellison noted that Paramount’s new all-cash bid for WBD is $31 per share, up from $30 per share. The Paramount CEO said the company looks forward to continuing to engage with WBD’s board but wouldn’t comment further during the call.

Though Ellison skirted analyst questions about a potential merger, he did note the company’s strategy moving forward was focused on endeavors that create long-term value.

“We really approach everything through the lens of how do we create long-term shareholder value, which really means we’re long-term investors. We’re long-term owner-operators. And we really have a long-term horizon in terms of how we’re approaching this,” Ellison said.

Following Paramount’s improved bid on Monday, Warner Bros. Discovery said the bid could “reasonably be expected” to lead to a superior proposal. Paramount’s bid also reportedly includes a 25-cent-per-share-per-quarter ticking fee, effective after Sept. 30, as well as a $7 billion termination fee. Paramount also reaffirmed that it will pay the $2.8 billion termination fee that WBD would be required to pay if the Netflix deal didn’t go through.

Though it continues to engage with Paramount, WBD is still recommending Netflix’s bid, which was revised in January to an all-cash offer of $72 billion, or $27.75 per WBD share.

The key quote

“I’ll briefly address our proposal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. On Monday, we submitted a revised bid of $31 per share, all cash, and we look forward to continuing to engage with their leadership team and board. While we appreciate that this is obviously something you all have questions about, we won’t be commenting further during today’s call.” — David Ellison, Paramount Skydance CEO

Outfront Media, the company behind approximately 500,000 billboards and commercial out-of-home (OOH) displays across the U.S., is leveling up its sales operations through a new partnership with AdQuick, a digital marketplace for buying OOH inventory. In exchange for access to AdQuick’s platform, Outfront has agreed to invest up to $20 million in the company. 

Through the deal, Outfront will get access to AdQuick’s sales cloud platform for at least three years, including a limited exclusivity period. With this integration, advertisers will be able to plan and secure Outfront displays through one consolidated, standardized system, rather than dealing in spreadsheets, emails, and phone exchanges. They’ll also gain access to clearer performance data to measure the impact of their campaigns. 

For Outfront, the integration means a more seamless selling process and enhanced, data-driven workflows that simplify how the company packages, offers, and transacts inventory. 

“We expect that advertisers and agencies will gain a more efficient, technology-enabled way to plan and buy premium OOH with clearer workflows, faster proposal turnaround, and better visibility into options and outcomes,” said Outfront’s chief technology officer Premesh Purayil in a statement shared with ADWEEK. He added that the tie-in will “[help] teams on both sides spend less time on manual steps and more time on planning and performance.” 

As part of the agreement, Outfront will invest in AdQuick at set “milestones,” which may include adoption benchmarks or key outcomes, per AdQuick. Contractually, no minimum investment is required from Outfront, but AdQuick is confident that the company will commit the full $20 million, an AdQuick spokesperson said.

“Beyond the strategic investment, the integration with Outfront gives us a scaled deployment partner to prove the platform at the highest levels of the industry,” said Chris Gadek, AdQuick’s CEO. “Outfront works with many of the largest advertisers in the country, and the reality is that a lot of that media is still being planned and bought using legacy tools—or no technology at all. This partnership puts AdQuick’s platform in front of those buyers and gives them a meaningfully better way to transact.”

As a result of the overhaul, Outfront may be better poised to compete with the tech-savvy OOH players of today, like Clear Channel and Lamar Advertising—and the swath of programmatic software companies like Broadsign and Vistar whose tech undergirds the OOH ecosystem. 

This year, U.S. investment in OOH and DOOH is expected to swell; DOOH spend will reach nearly $3.6 billion, a 6.1% lift from 2025, according to recent figures from Emarketer. That spike is driven in part by programmatic and AI advancements that are making it easier for advertisers to plan, buy, and measure their campaigns in these environments.

Shares of Outfront, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker $OUT, are up 44% year over year. The company will report fourth-quarter earnings after the bell today.

It’s been two weeks since the Super Bowl, but the most important data from advertising’s biggest night lands now, after the noise has died and the industry has moved on to arguing about something else.

That’s the problem.

Every year, the game becomes a weeklong festival of hot takes, rankings, and creative commentary. The game itself produces a clear winner, but in the industry, we speak too generally about Super Bowl advertising as if it’s all the same. But the game produces winners and losers in advertising as well.

Which is why Ipsos deserves more attention this week than anything written during the frenzied days in the run up or immediately after the Super Bowl.

The research firm tracked spontaneous brand recall among Super Bowl viewers: the simplest and most demanding test in advertising. Just a survey asking consumers which brands they remembered being advertised during the game. 

Ipsos measured it the next morning. And again, a week later. 

The results make for deeply uncomfortable reading for many of the brands that committed their budget and teams to a 30- or 60-second spot.

Budweiser was the Seahawks of the evening. 

Its “American Icons” spot—a foal and a newly-hatched bald eagle growing up together over the years to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’—achieved spontaneous recall of nearly twenty million viewers the morning after the game. 

A week later, that number had climbed to twenty-three million. Perhaps a signature of a campaign that made it into actual memory rather than mere social feeds.

Pepsi came second, 12 million viewers still able to recall the brand the next day. Their polar bear blind taste test—Coca-Cola’s own mascot choosing Pepsi over Coke—landed because it was built on decades of competitive positioning and the oldest tactic from the cola wars: the challenge. 

Dunkin finished third at 11 million, Ben Affleck’s star spangled sitcom parody was exactly what all good advertising should be: emotionally engaging, distinctively coded, impossible to misattribute.

These three brands make a compelling case that the Super Bowl advertising works. Spend well, follow your strategy, and put your name into millions of minds and leave it there for a week. Factor in a hundred million viewers, the additional coverage, social amplification, and the required $8 million investment looks seriously worth it—particularly in the fragmented, chaotic media landscape we now inhabit.

Then there is the Patriots’ side of the chart.

More than half the brands in the Ipsos data effectively wasted their investment, gaining less than a percentage point of recall a day after their ad ran. Each spent what most companies deploy as an entire year’s marketing budget. Each one has very little to show for it.

Ring managed 26th place with less than one million viewers recalling the brand the next day—a 20th of Budweiser’s number. Recall numbers picked up in the subsequent days, likely from the outcry surrounding the unwelcome AI narrative contained in its message. 

Michelob Ultra came 44th out of 45 brands, after running a glossy, star-studded spot featuring Kurt Russell, Chloe Kim, and T.J. Oshie. It cost a packet to produce, north of $8 million to air, and was instantly forgotten by almost every viewer of the big game. While recall picked up a week later that was most likely from “ghost recall” from its other significant ad spend around the Olympics.

It’s perhaps unfair to single out these two brands when almost two thirds of those advertising during the Super Bowl failed so miserably to reach even the lowest bar in the persuasion hierarchy. 

So what separates the winners from the losers? It’s mostly a story of consistency.

Michelob Ultra and Ring made special Super Bowl ads. Budweiser and Pepsi didn’t. They extended long-running campaigns into the Super Bowl opportunity. It’s not a small distinction.

This was the 48th time the Clydesdales appeared during the game. Forty-eight years of the same visual assets and the same emotional territory. Think of it the other way: decades of ignoring hot agencies and ambitious new CMOs wanting to “put their stamp on things.” Either way, the sight of a horse trotting across a field now makes 20 million people think of one beer and one beer only. 

These kinds of long-running campaigns outperform short, opportunistic ones by margins that should embarrass every creative director who has ever pitched a “fresh direction.” Binet and Field at the IPA. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. System1. All of them show that the longer you run a campaign, the more effective it becomes. The more distinctive your assets, the faster your brand registers in memory and bypasses the analytical mind entirely.

Most marketers know this. But very few act on it, because patience is not rewarded in quarterly business cycles and it certainly won’t win any industry awards. 

Our industry is structurally biased toward newness. Marketers want to make new ads, and their agencies, who get paid handsomely to create new work and nothing to run the old, aren’t incentivized to argue with them.

Some brands used the biggest advertising night of the year to launch something bespoke, something special, something that will live nowhere after this column runs. 

Budweiser used it to add one more chapter to something it started building before most of the CMOs were born. The Clydesdales are not a campaign. They are forty-eight years of compound creativity, a lesson in holding the wheel and staying the course.

It’s not a complicated lesson. It’s just one that the industry has no financial incentive to learn or any institutional capacity to retain.

On Monday, HubSpot Media, the in-house media division of the enterprise software firm HubSpot, acquired the creator-led entrepreneurship publication Starter Story, Jonathan Hunt, vice president of media and content at HubSpot, confirmed to ADWEEK. Hunt did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Starter Story, which was founded in 2017 by software engineer Pat Walls, has evolved into a video-first media brand with more than 800,000 YouTube subscribers, a 275,000-person newsletter, and a total audience of roughly 1.6 million across platforms. It is profitable and generates a “seven-figure” revenue, according to founder Patrick Walls.

The business is run by a team of three full-time staff: Walls, his sister and chief operating officer Sam, and producer Gus Tiffer. Under the deal, all three will join HubSpot Media, which includes brands such as The Hustle, My First Million, and Mindstream.

The deal is the latest sign of the surging interest from media companies in popular YouTube channels. 

Publishers including Vox Media and ESPN have signed deals with prominent YouTube creators in recent months, while media startups, like Dynamo and NewPress, increasingly use the platform, rather than a traditional website, as their base of operations. The trend comes as interest in video products, including podcasts and short-form video, continue to grab larger swaths of consumer attention.

A demand-generation media engine

The acquisition is part of HubSpot’s broader bet that media can drive customers to its core software business.

HubSpot Media currently drives more than 50 million monthly engagements and tens of thousands of leads per month, according to Hunt. Over the past year, YouTube-driven lead generation has grown 68% year over year, while newsletter-driven leads have increased 53%.

With the addition of Starter Story, HubSpot’s YouTube network will reach a combined 2.9 million subscribers, larger than the YouTube footprint of Morning Brew and more than double that of Salesforce, per Hunt. 

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Starter Story brings an audience that aligns closely with HubSpot’s core customer base: early-stage founders and small businesses looking to grow. It also builds on its strategy of acquiring creator-led media brands, as both My First Million and Mindstream are anchored by small, founder-centric teams.

With the tie-up, HubSpot is betting that the path to software adoption increasingly begins not with a search query or an ad, but with a YouTube video.

“Small business is a core audience for us,” Hunt said. “Starter Story is one of the largest non-traditional media brands speaking to founders who are gaining momentum and need tools to accelerate that growth.”

The logic behind the strategy reflects broader shifts in how buyers discover software. 

As search traffic declines and social advertising costs rise, potential customers are increasingly gathering information across fragmented environments, from Reddit and ChatGPT to YouTube and newsletters. Owning niche media brands, according to Hunt, creates a defensible channel for reaching those audiences earlier in their journey.

A creator business built on video

Starter Story’s growth in recent years has been driven largely by its pivot to YouTube, where long-form founder interviews now generate between 1.5 million and 2 million monthly views, according to Walls.

“We saw the attention shifting toward video and jumped on that wave,” Walls said.

That trajectory mirrors a broader industry trend. YouTube has become the primary incubator for a new generation of media businesses, offering both discovery and monetization at a time when traffic to traditional websites is under pressure.

Starter Story’s revenue model has also evolved alongside its audience. Prior to the acquisition, roughly 75% of its revenue came from its own products—including subscriptions, courses, and a paid community of more than 10,000 members—rather than advertising.

For HubSpot, the deal is less about advertising revenue than about building a media ecosystem that feeds its sales pipeline.

The division already reaches millions of business professionals each month, and future monetization for Starter Story will lean more heavily into demand generation and community-driven products tied to HubSpot’s broader network.

The acquisition also comes as lower barriers to entry, driven in part by AI tools, are enabling more people to launch businesses, expanding the pool of potential customers.

“We’re seeing more founders being able to build than ever before,” Walls said.