AEO's unicorn, Facebook's creator renaissance, and Apple's F1 ecosystem

HubSpot’s in-house media division, HubSpot Media, acquired the creator-led entrepreneurship publication Starter Story. Starter Story was founded in 2017 by software engineer Pat Walls. It 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. Traditional media publishers have signed deals with prominent YouTube creators in recent months, while media startups are increasingly using the platform as their primary base of operations. Video-first content continues to dominate the media landscape, as it's been the biggest medium for capturing and retaining customer attention.

Profound, an 18-month-old startup betting that the future of marketing will be shaped by AI answers, is now officially a unicorn, raising its $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation. According to CEO and co-founder James Cadwallader, Profound is reshaping how we experience “search” by helping brands measure and ultimately influence what systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity say about them. Customers have used its platform to increase AI visibility in weeks, in some cases dramatically improving how often their brands appear in AI-generated recommendations. This reflects how fluid AI-driven discovery remains and its potential to reshape traditional marketing roles.

American Eagle announced serve as the exclusive apparel and denim sponsor of Stagecoach, the world’s largest country music festival. This comes on the heels of announcing two rising country stars—Ella Langley and Bailey Zimmerman—as the faces of recent brand campaigns. Country music is the most-listened-to genre among American Eagle’s customer demographic. For the brand, the sponsorship is more than just a sponsorship; it's a chance to participate in and define culture as country music continues to rise in popularity. 

Facebook’s new content monetization program is booming, and Indonesian creators are leading the charge, giving the platform a much-needed boost to compete with YouTube and TikTok. The program has grown from under 3 million to 12 million participants in just over a year. As of January 2026, there were 12 million monetized accounts across all languages on Facebook. Of those, over 8 million were in English, and the second most popular language was Bahasa Indonesia, with nearly 2 million accounts. While preference for TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, they’ve also started paying attention to Facebook. The platform helps creators build a loyal, paying community, which is especially crucial at a time of declining organic reach on other platforms.

Apple and F1 have built a partnership for the ages: First with F1: The Movie, then with the U.S. streaming rights, and now F1 is coming to every single Apple service and product. From curated playlists on Apple Music to real-time sports news on Apple News to immersive trackside experience in Apple Maps, Apple is threading F1 through its entire ecosystem, bringing a whole new level of media distribution for Liberty Media. This comes on the heels of several other major product and manufacturing updates from Apple. The F1 season hasn’t even started yet, and already there’s an entire infrastructure built for how it’s going to be experienced in the U.S.  

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