OpenAI acquired the daily creator tech show TBPN in April this year. The price wasn’t disclosed but the Financial Times reported a figure in the "low hundreds of millions." That same month, HubSpot acquired AI media platform Futurepedia.

Companies have spent years renting access to creators through sponsorships, affiliate deals and short campaigns. However an acquisition gives the buyer something a campaign never does: a direct relationship with an audience, plus the creative talent and distribution system that built it. HubSpot’s recent deals point to a sensible way to approach this. Use creator partnerships as commercial due diligence, then buy when ownership adds value a contract can't.

HubSpot Tests The Relationship Before Buying

Jonathan Hunt, VP of Media at HubSpot and head of The Hustle, has spent most of his career inside media businesses: Vox Media, National Geographic, Complex. Now he runs a media operation inside a software company.

HubSpot Media owns YouTube channels, newsletters, websites and podcasts and works with a network of around 150 creators, Hunt told me on my podcast. The company's public figures put that network at more than 50 million monthly engagements and tens of thousands of leads. Those are HubSpot's own numbers, and "engagements" isn't the same as unique people. Even with that caveat, the scale explains why media now sits inside the company's customer acquisition operation, not off to the side of it.

Hunt described each expansion as a build-or-buy decision. He estimated HubSpot chooses to build 9 times out of 10, because the economics are usually better.

Building costs less. But time can matter more than cost. Hunt said HubSpot decided it couldn't spend 12 or 24 months trying to establish an AI media brand while the category moved on without it. Buying Mindstream and Futurepedia gave the company established audiences of AI practitioners far sooner than starting from zero.

HubSpot's creator program also doubles as a way to test deals before making them. A creator might work with the company once, then for 3 months, 6 months, a year. HubSpot watches whether the partnership generates qualified demand, and whether those leads turn into recurring software........

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