Putting the Band Back Together: When Digital Media Marries Online Marketplaces
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For much of the last two decades, digital media and digital marketplaces existed in separate silos; one sold attention, the other sold products. But, in a digital economy increasingly shaped by data, intent, and outcomes, those old boundaries are starting to make less sense.
This shift marks a reversal in the 30-year evolution of digital advertising and online commerce.
For traditional publishers, classified advertising was the first domino to fall. Jobs, cars, houses, those high-margin verticals that once funded print newsrooms, were digitised into searchable databases. Suddenly, the ads became the content.
With enough listings, the eyeballs followed. Platforms didn’t need expensive editorial content to draw users, aggregating the ads did the job just fine. The rivers of gold migrated online and away from the traditional media moguls. Then came search. Google didn’t invent it, in fact, it was late to the market – but it popularised the advertising auction model and scaled it so effectively that it built a monopoly. By linking intent-rich queries with behavioural data, Google turned advertising into a data-driven precision tool. Pay-per-click, real-time reporting, and last-click attribution gave marketers what they had long craved: proof of advertising effectiveness at a granular level and a clear way to measure ROI. Budgets quickly followed.
The destruction of value—and the creation of value—were profound.
Thirty years on, digital advertising is still evolving. Broadcast video on demand (BVOD) and streaming video on demand (SVOD) now promise to bring the transparency and accuracy that are standard in internet advertising into the highly lucrative world of television ads.
At the same time, ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon and eBay rewired how consumers discover and purchase products. Amazon became so effective that it quickly overtook Google as the starting point for product searches in the vast U.S. market. Then there’s the TikTok social commerce phenomenon, where people selling on a video platform provide consumers with not only inspiration, but instant gratification (see our analysis from March 2024 here).
Now, Retail Media – all those ads you see on platforms like Amazon, Woolworths, or Walmart while shopping online – has emerged as a massive and fast-growing global category. With Retail Media, retailers are becoming publishers and not only cutting out the middlemen – but competing with them directly, which is a potential threat to digital media and marketplace alike.
As with classifieds, search, and ecommerce, the secret sauce is the blend of algorithms, data, and audience scale.
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Marketplaces Surfing the M&A Wave
M&A has been a key tool for marketplaces to scale in recent years, particularly through acquisitions aimed at deepening audience reach in existing geographies or expanding into new verticals.
Whether in real estate, mobility, fashion, cars, or classifieds, digital marketplaces are increasingly turning to mergers and acquisitions over organic growth. These acquisitions aim to boost relevance, retention, and revenue within target demographics. In a platform-driven economy, the winners are often those who deliver the most seamless, integrated user experience, and M&A has become a key tool.
Rather than launching cold into unfamiliar markets, marketplaces often consolidate their positions by acquiring local champions. For example, Just Eat Takeaway’s 2019 acquisition of Delivery Hero’s German assets consolidated its audience and doubled its order volume in Germany. As did Vinted’s 2020 purchase of United Wardrobe and its 2024 acquisition of Trendsales, which followed the same playbook, buying regional fashion resale leaders in the Netherlands and Denmark. And Adevinta’s $9.2 billion acquisition of eBay Classifieds Group in 2020 gave it a formidable presence in 20 countries, with a billion-person footprint.
Vertical integration is another key theme, where marketplaces acquire businesses that allowed them to control more of the customer journey within their existing domains. OneDome’s 2025 acquisition of Trussle, which folded mortgage services into a real estate portal to offer a “browse-to-buy” experience in UK property. Likewise, Idealista’s 2025 acquisition of Certicalia helped turn the Spanish property portal into a one-stop shop, offering users technical/legal real estate services.
Glovo’s 2021 acquisition of Lola Market added grocery delivery muscle to its fast-commerce ambitions. Etsy’s $1.6 billion acquisition of Depop (2021), was designed to bring Gen Z buyers into Etsy’s ecosystem. BlaBlaCar’s 2023 acquisition of Klaxit allowed the long-distance carpool leader to move into daily commuting—broadening audience usage patterns without venturing into unfamiliar geographies.
eBay’s 2025 purchase of Caramel and Cazoo’s 2020 acquisition of Drover both reflect moves into transaction enablement—digitizing car ownership or subscription, not just listing. OnBuy’s 2025 revival of Comet, a beloved UK electronics brand, expanded its vertical focus into consumer electronics with built-in brand equity.
You get the picture.
But Wait…There’s a New Kid on the Block
It’s back to the future! The new kid on the block is really the old kid on the block—digital media. Yes, folks, the band is being put back together.
The primacy of algorithms, audience, and data is driving a new push to reunite digital media and digital marketplaces, as the line between content and conversion is redrawn once again. What once seemed like two parallel but separate models, where one focused on content and audience, the other on listings and transactions, is now converging. There’s a growing case for a strategic evolution that reflects the real dynamics of digital value creation.
That convergence is being driven by necessity. At its core, the integration of media and marketplaces reflects how digital value is now created and captured in modern commerce. Media builds audiences and sparks discovery. Marketplaces capture intent and close the loop. Separately, they tell a fragmented story and often chase different goals. Media excels at brand-building at the top of the funnel. Marketplaces dominate performance budgets at the point of conversion.
But research by marketing experts like Les Binet and Peter Field makes it clear: the best return on ad spend (ROAS) comes from striking the right balance between the two.
End-to-end Narrative
A model that combines digital marketplaces with digital media creates a continuous narrative, one that starts with attention, moves through consideration, and ends with conversion.
In this emerging approach, the user journey is no longer fragmented - read here, click there, buy somewhere else. Instead, content and commerce coexist in a unified experience, compressing the sales cycle, removing friction, and maximising the commercial moments where data, relevance, and trust align.
For customers, it’s all about a purchasing journey that’s simple, fast, and easy. For brands, it’s about efficiency and maximising lifetime customer value. And for intermediaries, it’s about capturing attention at scale and clipping the ticket along the way.
That alone makes the model compelling. But the economic headwinds facing both media and marketplace businesses make it even more urgent.
The decay of third-party cookies, and tightening digital privacy regulations eroded the foundations of the old advertising model. And with third-party data in decline, reach is no longer enough. Today, businesses need precision, context, intent, and identity, all in one place.
That’s exactly what the integrated model delivers.
Combine the audience insights of a media business with the transactional data of a marketplace, and you get a first-party data graph that’s not just larger, it is also far more meaningful. A unified media-marketplace model can personalise with confidence, attribute with accuracy, and, most importantly, offer advertisers more than just eyeballs. It can deliver outcomes. And as data ownership resides under unified ownership, it also buttresses them against the kinds of privacy and other regulatory hurdles that the data clean room industry is starting to encounter.
The more a platform intersects with the full length of a customer’s purchasing journey, the stronger its targeting, measurement, and attribution capabilities become. Amazon’s advertising growth from $US19.7bn in 2020 to $US56bn last year reflects its data-driven success across its ecommerce storefronts, retail media network, Prime subscription service, and even its control over distribution.
Early Deals
We are already starting to see some early deals in the media / marketplace space. In 2023, THG – the UK-based internet retail group – picked up London financial newspaper City A.M., a small but telling deal, possibly driven more by the publisher’s distressed state than strategic scale. A year earlier, Indonesian ecommerce giant Tokopedia acquired AdaDiskon, a shopping promotions news site, aiming to deepen engagement with deal-hunting consumers. And back in 2021, CRM platform HubSpot snapped up The Hustle, a popular newsletter for entrepreneurs, signalling early recognition of the value in owning attention, not just renting it.
Closer to home, last month’s deal in New Zealand between Stuff and Trade Me, where Trade Me acquired 50% of Stuff Digital, offers a model for how the combination of digital media and marketplaces could play out nationally or even regionally*.
The deal fuses Trade Me’s heavyweight position in classifieds and ecommerce with Stuff’s deep media footprint, all while keeping less scalable legacy assets, like print and events, out of the equation.
Stuff’s property vertical is being rebranded to Trade Me, combining listings with editorial to create a single, high-value user journey. More importantly, the venture aligns two of New Zealand’s most valuable first-party datasets with their respective content consumption and transactional behaviour into a single ecosystem.
As Stuff’s CEO Sinead Boucher told us, “Our competitive strengths are that we are both scale audience businesses that have a deep relevance to New Zealanders in their everyday lives. We are trusted and have brands that are very Kiwi. We can harness all of this to deliver products and services of real value to Kiwis. We are both committed to having a positive impact on New Zealanders’ lives, and this is important as we look to what we can build together.”
It’s more than a merger; it’s a reimagination of media, marketing, and commerce.
And it’s one that others, especially in similarly pressured markets, will be watching closely. In a digital economy where content alone isn’t enough and commerce without context becomes commoditised, the next frontier is integration.
But merging media and marketplaces isn’t a simple plug-and-play. These are fundamentally different operations, with unique cultures, revenue models, and working rhythms. One revolves around stories and audiences; the other around SKUs and conversions. The challenge is aligning them without one cannibalising the other.
Still, the logic is compelling, particularly for independent players trying to compete in a landscape where global platforms have already adopted this model.
Done well, integration delivers more than operational efficiency. Through shared infrastructure, unified data governance, and smarter capital allocation, it also creates strategic flexibility. It enables the development of new products, entry into adjacent categories, and vertical scaling into services. It’s both a hedge against dependency and a lever for growth.
The best integrations will be intentional. They’ll likely exclude legacy anchors like print and focus on scalable, digital-first assets. Rather than simply merging two businesses, they’ll re-architect the user experience to maximise engagement and monetisation.
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*Disclosure: North Ridge Partners acted as financial advisor to Stuff on the sale of Stuff Digital to Trade Me