Fifty million impressions a month. Seventy people. Seventeen YouTube channels. A network of 150 creators. These are the numbers Jonathan Hunt, VP of Media and Content at HubSpot, casually drops when describing what he calls "a media company inside a software company."
And yet, the most interesting thing Hunt said in a recent Exit Five interview wasn't about scale. It was about the question every content marketer dreads: "How do I explain this to my CFO?"
Here's the thing about that question. It keeps coming up not because we don't know how to measure content, but because the rest of the organization doesn't know how to think about content unless it drives direct sales. And let's be real: nobody watches a YouTube video and immediately decides to spend $175,000 on enterprise software. That's not how B2B works. That's not how humans work.
The Three-Bucket Framework
Hunt's approach to making the CFO conversation winnable is deceptively simple. He frames content around three jobs, and each one speaks a different language to finance.
Demand is the non-negotiable. Content still has to do short-term business for the business. HubSpot creates content informed by search trends across YouTube, Google, and AI, with a clear monetization motion attached. Leads, pipeline, new customers. This is the bucket where traditional attribution models actually work, and it's the one that keeps the lights on.
Influence is where things get interesting. As Hunt explained to ADWEEK, the B2B buying cycle involves 29 steps and six to seven decision makers, according to Gartner research. Most of the people who will eventually buy from you aren't in-market yet. Content's job here isn't clicks or conversions. It's presence. It's being part of the conversation when someone finally does start evaluating vendors. This is the bucket that makes CFOs nervous because it doesn't fit neatly into a spreadsheet.
Earned media value is where the CFO conversation becomes winnable. If you went out and bought 50 million impressions every month through paid media, that would cost a fortune. Hunt's team generates that organically. The math suddenly becomes very concrete: here's what we would have spent, here's what we actually spent, here's the delta.
Why "Owning Distribution" Isn't Just a Buzzword
Simon Owens's deep dive into HubSpot's media transformation captures something crucial about their strategy. For years, HubSpot's approach was built around a simple premise: instead of renting attention through advertising, own attention by creating useful content. The blog posts, the Academy courses, the YouTube tutorials. Classic inbound marketing.
But the internet ecosystem that powered that original strategy has shifted dramatically. Search traffic became less predictable. Social platforms fragmented audience attention. AI threatened to change how people discover information entirely.
So HubSpot asked a bigger question: What if they stopped thinking like a company that publishes content and started operating like a modern media network?
The answer led them to newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, creator partnerships, and acquisitions. The 2021 acquisition of The Hustle for roughly $27 million was the first major move. More recently, they acquired Starter Story, a founder-focused media platform reaching 100 million people per year. The pattern is clear: buy audiences that look like your customers, then convert attention into software revenue over time.
Hunt's background makes this strategy make sense. He came from Vice, Vox Media, National Geographic, and Complex. He thinks like a media executive, not a traditional marketing leader. And that perspective shift is exactly what makes HubSpot's content operation different from the typical corporate blog that publishes three posts a week and calls it a strategy.
The Measurement Problem Nobody Wants to Admit
Here's where I'll get a little uncomfortable with my fellow marketing leaders. Only 21% of marketers can accurately tie content to revenue. That's not a content quality problem. That's an attribution infrastructure problem.
The gap between what marketers measure and what CFOs need to know has put marketing budgets under sustained pressure. According to Gartner's 2025 survey, CMO budgets remained flat at 7.7% of overall company revenue. When marketing can't demonstrate clear connections to business outcomes, it struggles to secure the investment needed to scale.
Hunt's three-bucket framework works because it acknowledges this reality without pretending the measurement problem doesn't exist. Demand is measurable. Influence is harder to measure but possibly more important. Earned media value translates the unmeasurable into financial terms the CFO already understands.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
Not everyone has 70 people and the budget to acquire media companies. But the principles scale down.
First, stop trying to make all content do the same job. Some content drives leads. Some content builds presence. Some content creates value you would otherwise have to buy. Mixing these up in your reporting is why the CFO conversation goes sideways.
Second, think about owned distribution as a strategic asset, not a marketing tactic. HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing Report makes this point explicitly: "With traditional paid media, as soon as you spend it, it goes away. With content, oftentimes we're seeing videos that we published six months, two years ago getting a ton of viewership randomly two years later." That's compounding value. That's an asset, not an expense.
Third, consider the "quality of impression" framework Hunt describes. Not all impressions are created equal. A thousand impressions from people who will never buy your product are worth less than a hundred impressions from people actively evaluating solutions in your category. The shift from CPM thinking to intent-driven measurement is where sophisticated content operations are heading.
The AI Wrinkle
Hunt's team is also navigating the AI disruption in real time. The shift from traditional SEO to what he calls "Answer Engine Optimization" is already underway. When ChatGPT and similar tools start answering the questions your content used to rank for, the game changes.
His take: use AI as a creative multiplier, not a replacement. The teams that figure out how to preserve human judgment, originality, and trust while leveraging AI for efficiency will win. The teams that outsource everything to AI will produce content that sounds like everyone else's content, which is to say, content that doesn't build brand or trust.
The Real Lesson
HubSpot's 50 million monthly impressions are impressive. But the real story isn't the scale. It's the strategic clarity.
Hunt knows exactly what each piece of content is supposed to do. He can explain it in terms finance understands. He's built an operation that treats content as a business asset, not a marketing cost center.
That's the conversation most of us need to be having with our CFOs. Not "here's how many blog posts we published" but "here's the three jobs our content does, here's how we measure each one, and here's why the investment makes financial sense."
Marketing is like dating, as I like to say. You don't propose on the first ad impression. But you do need to be able to explain to your CFO why all those dinners and conversations eventually lead somewhere.
