How HubSpot Built its Content Arm Into a Media Empire That Reaches 50 Million People a Month

HubSpot's approach to building out its media arm offers a masterclass in scaling an operation that drives both audience growth and customer acquisition.

At Stacker's Cited 2026 summit, I sat down with Jonathan Hunt, VP of Media and Content at HubSpot, to talk about how the company has used content and editorial as a key lever in its business since it first made a splash in 2021 with its acquisition of The Hustle.

Here are the top takeaways from our conversation.

HubSpot Media By the Numbers: What Content Teams Look Like at Scale

HubSpot has grown its content arm into a full-fledged media operation. Here’s a breakdown:

• Team Size: 70 people producing, distributing, and monetizing content
• Content Footprint: 17 owned & operated YouTube channels, 6 newsletters, ~150 creator partnerships, and several websites
• Monthly Content Output: In addition to creator content, they produce 2,000+ pieces of video content (~100 pieces are long-form; the rest are short-form clips), plus text, audio, and daily newsletter content
• Monthly Reach: ~50 million people

The marketing funnel has cinched into an hourglass

Before HubSpot decided to go all-in on its media operation five years ago, Jonathan said its content was "very much blog SEO, reverse-engineered-content-focused, and it worked really well for us until it didn't."

HubSpot was not immune to the changes in search in recent years, as paid media web traffic went down and CPM and CPC went up. As a result, Jonathan said the top of the traditional marketing funnel has widened and fragmented while the middle has contracted — like an hourglass.

HubSpot decided to diversify at the top of the hourglass rather than hedge against a single channel. They looked at media as a lever to grow HubSpot's business and reach as many people as possible, rather than chase rising costs to achieve higher domain ratings. In Jonathan's words, finance and brand teams both want more sustainable strategies that compound over time, like those media offers.

This was the impetus for acquiring The Hustle, which was the beginning of what's now known as HubSpot Media, effectively a media company operating within a software company. Jonathan said that since audiences no longer engage with "voiceless brands that create commodified content," HubSpot invested in subject-matter-expert creators and journalists. They generated higher conversion rates than generic, impersonal content, which made future media acquisitions an easier pitch.

Media is a slow burn — but it's worth the wait

I told Jonathan on stage that I had consumed HubSpot's free newsletters and podcasts for five years before Stacker actually became a customer.

That's par for the course these days as attribution moves further past the click, Jonathan said. This new phase in search requires the finance team and the CEO to have confidence in the diversified, lesser-known aspects of marketing that might be harder to measure. He cited Gartner research showing that B2B software purchases generally involve about 27 customer touch points and the input of six decision-makers.

"If you're not present within people's lives during that 95% of the time when they're not in the market to buy software, then you're pretty much not on their day-one list," he said.

Building vs. buying a media enterprise

It's important to know that you need to up your editorial ante to meet your audience where they are — but you also have to know whether it's better to build your own editorial operation or buy one.

Many of HubSpot's media brands were built in-house, but they do consider acquisitions to strengthen slow or under-resourced aspects of the business.

Brands that are already owning the conversation in their topic area with original data sets and bespoke insights should build out their own content operations — especially if they feel it's table stakes.

"There's no downside to that at all," Jonathan said.

When HubSpot does choose to acquire media businesses, they act as an incubator, building on partnerships with creators over time — sometimes for years.

Jonathan said the process involves identifying new creators who help with videos or newsletters first. Eventually, they start co-creating and watch conversion rates to see if it's time to expand the partnership that may later become an acquisition.

These partnerships "never started from a place of acquisition," Jonathan said. "They always came from a place of mutual respect."

Jonathan said that the team encourages partners to keep doing what they're doing well, while HubSpot brings more resources, capital, and distribution — and stays away from editorial direction.

Turns out the best acquisition strategy might just be: buy the thing you love, then get out of its way.