The conversation around websites and how to make money from them is louder than it should be. Consider the facts:

• AI Overviews are here to stay: Google AI Overviews has, in some cases, impacted up to 40% of publishers’ search traffic over the last year, with others purporting the effects as “negligible.” That’s with only an average 7 to 9% keyword trigger rate, a number which most expect to increase in 2025. Until August of this year, AIOs only impacted U.S. searches. Then they expanded to six new countries. In October, they rolled out to 100 more.
• AI search is growing, but it’s still early days: Referrals from AI search engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT are exploding, but on an absolute basis, they’re still a fraction of a fraction of most publishers’ overall traffic mix.
• Social platforms’ walls are only getting taller: Social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn have long deprioritized strategies that let audiences leave their ecosystems, and that’s likely not going to change anytime soon.
• Budgets are tighter than ever: Ad budgets continue to consolidate and shift to big performance channels and ad networks, while programmatic CPMs and fill rates remain anemic, leaving mid- and small-scale publishers to fight over scraps.
• Audiences are prioritizing only essential paid subscriptions: We’re entering the pruning stage of our media diets. We can’t keep up with, or always afford, another paid subscription. We cancel or let lapse what isn’t essential to our existence.

Websites like The New York Times are not going away, nor is the essential editorial they publish. Businesses will always always need a home base — a place that’s theirs, where they have absolute editorial, experiential, and monetary control. But we’re no longer in the halcyon days of bottomless social and search traffic. And websites aren’t where audiences or advertisers are increasingly investing their time or budgets. The patterns in traffic and ad dollars say as much.

In 2025, publishers will learn to love their websites less and ruthlessly prioritize different strategies to maximize audience and monetization potential — strategies that don’t require significant creative or editorial compromises, and provide strong long-term economic upside beyond the date they’re published.

What are some of those strategies?

Video: It’s back. Again. Yes, the video that the industry has been “pivoting” to for the last 15 years. At one point, it was too cost-prohibitive to produce at scale. Social and SVOD companies invested hundreds of millions of dollars into it, and that money dried up. We entered into a dark period of hands-in-pans and text-on-screen videos, which resulted in a lot of thrash for editorial teams and their capital investments.

There’s an understandable stigma when it comes to the media’s relationship with video. But the risk of becoming jaded to the current video opportunity could be fatal. In the hype cycle, we’re now somewhere between the slope of enlightenment and the plateau of productivity. That’s a good place to be. What’s different now?

• Video is the currency of nearly every platform that nearly every connected human on earth is already using: YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Douyin, etc.
• The barrier and economics for producing good long- and short-form video are lower than they’ve ever been.
• Advertisers are now fully bought into the brand and transactional value of video — and are willing to pay premiums for it.
• Video is extremely versatile. It’s highly discoverable, with Google and YouTube being two of the biggest search engines in the world, and it can be reengineered and redistributed a dozen different ways: for shorts, for different platforms, transcribed and repackaged into text or audio. The flywheel keeps spinning.

For HubSpot’s media network, video has become our single fastest-growing content strategy over the last few years and will continue to be one of our largest sources of investment going into 2025. In 2024 alone, we’ve grown views of our long-form content by 47% and increased the return of our video investment through lead generation by 78%. We’re talking 150,000-plus new leads in 2024 from video, and growing.

How? An investment in upleveling what you see on screen, increasing long- and short-form output, improving our insights-to-production motion, localizing to more non-English markets, using AI to automate rote aspects of our monetization and post-production processes, partnering with other YouTube creators and domain experts, launching new channels that address underserved markets, believing that videos from B2B companies don’t have to be boring.

If you’ve seen what we publish on The Hustle or My First Million, you know what I’m talking about. And we’re a B2B media operation. Going into the new year, all traffic and revenue trends considered, video will continue to become a must-have rather than a nice-to-have for publishers of all shapes and sizes.

Creator partnerships: Your editorial and audience extensions. In the old world, there were capital-J journalism and journalists, and then there was the island of misfit YouTubers and influencers and social media managers and other less prestigious categories of content makers. In the new world, influence is shifting to those once-misfits.

In the new world, your distribution is just as, if not more, important as your byline. In 2025, media operators will look to outside, independent creators as extensions of their editorial teams, and as a boon for diversifying audience and revenue.

The most successful creators today are the ones who do three things exceptionally well: They’re experts in their specific crafts (sketch comedy, enterprise sales, Excel speedrunning), they’re creating content in very shareable and interactive formats, and they’re publishing to personal environments (your subscription feed, your inbox) where content and ad engagement, and CPMs, are highest.

The most successful publishers will be the ones building complementary creator programs of external and internal domain experts who wield trust and reach, co-producing original video and audio IP with them and, in some cases, building new media brands together.

Today, HubSpot’s media network collaborates with over 100 creators — mostly across YouTube and newsletters — in categories like marketing, sales, AI, and entrepreneurship. In some scenarios, we’re the sponsor. In others, like My First Million or The Next Wave, we’re co-developing strategic relationships that produce original series and new brands. And some, like The Hustle or Mindstream, we acquire.

Why will this approach be opportunistic for media companies going forward?

• It’s low risk: working with creators is a variable model where partnerships can be as deep or as shallow as you want. Long term, short term. YouTube, LinkedIn. Co-pro, live read. You mix and match to find the right solution for your editorial strategy.
• It’s instant distribution — and in some cases credibility and relevance — to audiences you may not currently reach, in highly contextual and trusted environments, on the largest platforms in the world.

For both of these reasons, it’s a great way to test and learn with emerging talent that you may want to ultimately go deeper with, and to find a model that works best for your own goals.

For HubSpot, here’s what drives our strategic decision-making when working with creators:

• Does the partnership bring us closer to a high-intent audience in a category we care most about?
• Does the creator know anything about our business? Audience trust and believability is critical.
• Do the economics work? For us, lead generation and brand awareness are two key metrics. Not only are we seeing the raw views, on average we’re seeing 60% cost savings on effective lead acquisition when working with creators vs. traditional direct response advertising like Meta, etc.

Like video in 2025, creator partnerships will be an essential strategy for how media companies further hedge against an overreliance on their websites for audience and revenue generation.

What else should we expect more of? Email, for one. At a time when first-party data, direct marketing channels, hyper-engaged audiences, and sponsorship premiums are everything media operators want more of, reprioritizing newsletter strategies — owned and partnered — doesn’t sound so boring or overplayed. While oversaturation and deliverability are two valid concerns, as long as you’re not another news digest and you deliver unique value or solve for an unmet need, then the odds are in your favor.

Websites won’t go away in 2025. They’ll still be a vital channel for essential journalism and revenue generation.

But in 2025, they won’t be the primary focus. Expect a resurgence in video production and creator strategies: two trends that will ensure a sustainable future for B2C and B2B media companies alike.