If You Can’t Build Trust, Acquire It

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OpenAI made headlines this week with its acquisition of TBPN. Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN) is a daily, live tech talk show and one of the fastest-growing media companies, hosted by entrepreneurs Jordi Hays and John Coogan.

OpenAI isn’t the first SaaS company to actively build a media arm through creator-led media acquisitions. HubSpot has been actively doing this since 2021 with its acquisitions of The Hustle, My First Million, and Starter Story. This week, it announced its fourth: Futurepedia, the largest AI education network on YouTube with 2.1 million subscribers. 

On paper, it seems like a win-win for both the brand and creator: more resources, larger audiences, credibility, and recognition. But there’s something that’s not being talked about: media acquisitions as a means of survival. 

Take HubSpot, for example: Its stock is down ~60% in the last year. Organic traffic has fallen from 24M to 6M page views, and the SEO flywheel that built the entire business is becoming irrelevant as AI reshapes search behavior. Moreover, its product is flanked by AI-native CRMs and vibe-coded alternatives.

On the other hand, OpenAI’s problem isn’t the product itself but the narrative around it, which has created a credibility problem due to recent events: backlash over its DoD affiliation, discontinuing Sora, losing its Disney licensing deal, and now Sam Altman under The New Yorker's microscope, with claims that he’s a “pathlogical liar” and “sociopath.” 

When product erodes, distribution weakens, and credibility takes hits simultaneously, narrative becomes the last defensible position. Building a content team doesn’t fix the problem. You need a third-party source that already has the trust infrastructure in place. 

So, they’ve turned to acquiring niche media.

Niche media is media with a modest yet highly engaged audience. In most cases, it’s 200K-1M—large enough for real influence, but small enough to not be for everyone. These audiences share a language, a worldview, and a specific set of problems. And the creators behind the platforms are influential on that topic. In the case of niche media, influence is built on density, not reach.  

Niche media is nothing new. Condé Nast was famous for pioneering it, with the aim never of having the largest circulation but the right one, targeting a specific reader for each of its publications based on taste and identity. What editors did for them then, creators do now for professional communities, emerging categories, and industry subcultures.

Brands like HubSpot and OpenAI recognize that niche media works because it arrives with trust and credibility already intact. Brands can’t manufacture pre-existing trust; they can only inherit it. 

Audiences trust media more than branded content because it’s perceived as unbiased; internally created brand media always promotes the company’s products or mission rather than offering a third-party editorial perspective. So, if a brand were to create its own show, the audience wouldn’t trust them. Hence, niche media becomes more credible to audiences because it has no incentive to persuade. 

Brands that acquire creator-led media aren’t just buying the content, but the belief of an audience. They can get their story to market and tap into highly engaged audiences with an affinity for their core product, shaping the conversation layer and, in turn, how the category is understood.

AI has commoditized everything at the top of the funnel: product, content, information. What it can’t commoditize, and what niche media solves, is trust and relationships. 

And the root of trust and relationships is narrative. People follow stories, not features. No one cares that you have the same feature as three other products in your industry. They care about why you’re doing what you’re doing and the deeper problem you’re looking to solve. 

The media acquisitions underway are intended to build (or rebuild) trust with an ICP. For a company whose product moat is eroding, the narrative layer isn't a marketing strategy. It's a survival strategy. Media is no longer the wrapper around the business. For some companies, it's the last thing holding the business together.

Where AI can produce competent, plausible content at scale, there’s a premium on human-centric content. 

What makes niche media worth acquiring is precisely what acquisition threatens. Independence, specificity, and audience trust are built on the belief that the voice is genuinely their own. If this erodes, the trust premium disappears, and companies are back to brand messaging wrapped in a podcast.

Brands want narrative control. Narrative control erodes the credibility that made the narrative valuable. You can't buy trust. You can only borrow it. And borrowing has terms.

The companies that extract long-term value from these media acquisitions are those that treat the acquisition as a custodianship problem rather than a content-leverage opportunity. They keep the editorial voice preserved instead of optimizing for message alignment. 

Narrative is no longer a layer on top of the business. For the companies losing ground right now, it is the business. And the ones that understand that aren't building content strategies. They're acquiring the environments where the belief is already there.

Things I’m reading, caught my eye, or I’m testing out this week