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Hello and welcome to the 209th edition of Fresh Salmon.

If you're new here - welcome aboard.
And if you’d like to catch up on past issues, you can explore the archive anytime.

Tech companies aren't buying media as a side hustle.

They're buying audiences as a core strategy.

Let's look at what's actually happened in the last few years:

HubSpot bought The Hustle, My First Million, Starter Story, and Mindstream.

Robinhood bought MarketSnackers and launched Sherwood News.

a16z acquired Turpentine and brought on Erik Torenberg.

Semrush bought Search Engine Land and Backlinko.

Plaid bought This Week in Fintech.

Ahrefs acquired Detailed.com. And now - OpenAI bought TBPN.

That's not a trend. That's a strategy becoming standard practice.

Meet our primary partner for today’s edition: Roku. Check them out 👇

How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more

So what's actually being bought here?

It's not the content. It's not the team.

It's the audience. A trusted, engaged, niche audience that took years to build, and that no amount of paid media budget can replicate overnight.

These tech companies figured out something most B2B marketers are still catching up to:

Distribution is the moat.

When you own the audience, you own the conversation. You control the narrative in your category. You don't have to rent attention from Google or Meta - you already have it.

Here's the part most people miss.

Every single one of these acquisitions happened because someone spent years building a loyal audience in a specific, valuable niche, before they had any idea they'd be acquired.

They weren't building for an exit. They were building because they believed in the audience.

And that's exactly what made them valuable.

Meet our secondary partner for today’s edition: mintlify. Check them out 👇

Are you tracking agent views on your docs?

AI agents already outnumber human visitors to your docs — now you can track them.

See your AI traffic!

What this means for you.

If you are building a newsletter, a podcast, a media property, or a content brand around a specific B2B niche - you are not just creating content.

You are building an asset.

A real, compounding, appreciating asset that sits on your balance sheet whether or not it shows up there today.

The formula is simple: own a niche audience well enough, for long enough, and capital will eventually come looking for you, whether that's acquirers, sponsors, or distribution partners.

Build accordingly.

Meet our secondary partner for today’s edition: Viktor. Check them out 👇

Your ads ran overnight. Nobody was watching. Except Viktor.

One brand built 30+ landing pages through Viktor without a single developer.

Each page mapped to a specific ad group. All deployed within hours. Viktor wrote the code and shipped every one from a Slack message.

That same team has Viktor monitoring ad accounts across the portfolio and posting performance briefs before the day starts. One colleague. Always on. Across every account.

Start free. $100 in credits →

That’s it for this week.

Wishing everyone celebrating a peaceful and joyful Easter this weekend. Hope you get some well-earned rest, good food, and great company. 🐣

If this edition sparked an idea for you, share it with someone building in B2B.

See you next time.

Do what is good for your soul ❤️

Vivek