A new study from Fractl and SparkToro, released on June 18, 2026, measured audience affinity across 358 media placements in 8 industries and found that the outlets most likely to reach actual business decision-makers attract a small fraction of the traffic that major publishers do - sometimes 130 times less.

The study introduces a concrete number to a tension that has been building in digital marketing for years: traffic figures, the dominant metric in most PR strategies and media placement decisions, may be pointing budgets in the wrong direction. Small and mid-sized businesses spending to reach buyers through high-visibility general outlets are, according to the research, frequently paying to reach audiences that will never become customers.

The methodology: affinity over traffic

Fractl, a content marketing and digital PR agency based in Delray Beach, Florida, partnered with SparkToro to carry out the analysis. SparkToro is an audience intelligence platform that maps where professional audiences concentrate their attention across websites, YouTube channels, podcasts, and communities on Reddit. The collaboration drew on SparkToro's Custom Audience feature, which allows researchers to build a demographic profile - say, SaaS directors of demand generation, or HR and people operations leaders - and then query which media properties over-index with that group.

The dataset covers 8 industries: SaaS (B2B), ecommerce, fintech, healthcare, insurance, lifestyle, travel, and wellness. Across those verticals, Fractl and SparkToro evaluated hidden gem websites, YouTube channels, podcasts, and subreddits, ranking them by affinity score rather than raw traffic volume. The full interactive dataset contains 358 data points, filterable by role and industry. According to Fractl, the methodology involved examining decision-maker cohorts including CMOs and marketing leaders, ecommerce operators and DTC founders, HR and people operations leaders, and technical founders and product leaders.

The critical step was filtering out obvious mega-brands. What remained was a long tail of niche media that rarely appear on standard PR lists but consistently command attention from the specific professionals that B2B and SMB marketers most want to reach.

The core finding: a 1.7x gap, with 130x less traffic

The headline number from the research is stark. According to Fractl, hidden gem publishers - defined as low-traffic niche sites that over-index with specific professional audiences - deliver 1.7x higher audience affinity than major publishers, despite receiving 130 times less traffic.

The contrast is illustrated most clearly by two sites that Fractl uses as case examples. recruitingdaily.com, a SaaS-focused niche property, draws approximately 10,000 monthly visitors. Its affinity score with SaaS decision-makers is 93. investopedia.com, one of the most-trafficked financial and business information sites on the internet, attracts 834,000 monthly visitors. Its affinity score with the same SaaS decision-maker audience is 19.

That is not a small discrepancy. A score of 93 means the audience skews heavily toward SaaS decision-makers. A score of 19 means those same professionals are a negligible fraction of the total readership, despite the volume. The implication for media buying and PR strategy is direct: a placement on investopedia.com reaches eighty-three times more people than recruitingdaily.com, but the people it reaches are roughly five times less likely to be the professionals the advertiser is trying to influence.

The pattern holds across industries. Among the top 50 highest-affinity sites per industry, SaaS leads all verticals with an average affinity score of 91. Lifestyle and travel sites sit at the opposite end, with an average score of 67 despite having the highest average monthly organic traffic of any category measured, at 42,728. Traffic volume and audience precision move in opposite directions in this dataset.

SaaS decision-makers and the YouTube dominance pattern

SaaS audiences stand out in the study across multiple dimensions. The average affinity for niche sites among SaaS decision-makers is 91, the highest of any industry covered. On YouTube, the figure rises further, to 96 - the highest platform affinity score recorded in the entire dataset for any industry.

YouTube's overall performance across the study is notable. According to Fractl, YouTube leads platform affinity for B2B tech audiences in 7 of the 8 industries analyzed. The single exception is insurance, where subreddits narrowly lead (a score of 45 against YouTube's 44). Subreddits are the consistent runner-up across the remaining seven categories.

The gap between platforms varies by industry. In wellness and healthtech, the margin between YouTube and the second-ranked platform is the widest - +15 points in wellness and +14 in healthtech - which Fractl interprets as evidence of especially concentrated YouTube influence in those categories. The data complicates a common assumption in PR and content strategy that an article placement is the primary objective. If affinity concentrates on YouTube rather than editorial websites for most professional categories, strategies that stop at article placements are, as Fractl puts it, missing where the affinity actually lives.

This connects to a shift that has been building throughout 2025 and 2026 in how online audiences are distributed. Website traffic from traditional search has fallen sharply, with open web traffic down 46% over three years according to data cited by Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad of SparkToro in their forthcoming book Zero Click Marketing. Against that backdrop, the finding that YouTube dominates affinity for most B2B industries reinforces what audience understanding research from Brandwatch has been documenting: most marketing teams lack reliable pictures of where their buyers actually spend attention.

Entity authority and the AI dimension

Fractl situates the research within a broader argument about how brand credibility is now constructed online. The concept at the center of their framing is entity authority - a cumulative signal built when a brand appears repeatedly across credible sources in relevant contexts.

According to Fractl, modern discovery systems - including Google, AI assistants, and recommendation feeds - build their understanding of a brand through co-occurrence: which sites mention a company, which professional audiences engage with those sites, and whether the brand surfaces consistently across trusted nodes. High-affinity niche outlets are disproportionately powerful in this system. Even with modest traffic, they are frequently cited and shared by domain experts, act as source material for larger publications, and appear in AI training and retrieval contexts.

This dimension of the argument matters because it connects media placement strategy to a problem that has become central to marketing in 2026. Research published by Semrush in June 2026 found that AI search tools cite sources based on consistency and credibility signals across trusted platforms - not simply based on the authority of a single large publication. A brand that shows up consistently in specialist outlets with high affinity for its buyer persona accumulates the kind of distributed signal that both human readers and algorithmic systems use to assess credibility.

Fractl's report states explicitly that the goal in 2026 extends beyond improving SEO metrics through brand mentions on authoritative sites, with the aim now including strategic engagement with the communities where unique buyer personas are most active. That is a materially different brief from a traditional PR strategy focused on getting mentions in the Wall Street Journal or CNBC. The two objectives are not mutually exclusive, but they require different outreach maps and different targeting logic.

The interactive tool and its 358 data points

The research was translated into a filterable interactive tool, available at frac.tl/sparktoro-earned-media-study. The dataset contains 358 rows and allows filtering by role and industry. Users selecting a combination - for example, Director of Content Marketing in the SaaS vertical - see the top niche websites, YouTube channels, podcasts, and subreddits ranked by affinity for that specific audience.

The data visible in the published study shows sample outputs for the SaaS vertical. For Heads of Product in SaaS, the top hidden gem websites by affinity include tdwi.org (affinity score 82.14, approximately 9,837 linking websites, domain authority 57), dbta.com (79.34 affinity, 5,605 linking websites, domain authority 55), datanami.com (73.73 affinity, 8,701 linking websites, domain authority 60), mindtheproduct.com (72.80 affinity, 6,321 linking websites, domain authority 57), and dataconomy.com (70.93 affinity, 8,142 linking websites, domain authority 59).

For Directors of Content Marketing in SaaS, the leading properties are chiefmartec.com (79.80 affinity, 10,035 linking websites, domain authority 60), martech.org (77.19 affinity, 13,950 linking websites, domain authority 56), demandgenreport.com (75.46 affinity, 8,802 linking websites, domain authority 60), terminus.com (69.39 affinity, 3,218 linking websites, domain authority 48), and gainsight.com (66.78 affinity, 5,429 linking websites, domain authority 57).

For Directors of Demand Generation in SaaS, demandgenreport.com reaches the top of the table with an affinity score of 93 - a notably high figure that illustrates how the same domain can perform differently depending on which professional role is used as the audience filter.

The results can be sorted by audience affinity or estimated traffic, depending on whether the campaign objective is thought leadership, demand generation, product credibility, or building entity authority for AI and search visibility.

What the data says about PR strategy

The research points in three interconnected directions. First, smaller sites dominate trust with senior audiences. Publications with modest traffic often carry the highest affinity with decision-makers in professional categories. Second, format diversity matters in ways that most earned media strategies do not fully account for - YouTube channels, podcasts, and subreddits regularly outrank websites in influence for specific professional roles. Third, industry specificity consistently outperforms broad reach when the objective is to move the right buyers rather than achieve the largest raw impression count.

The implication that Fractl draws is not to abandon top-tier publications. High-performing earned media programs blend a small number of top-tier publishers for general visibility and authority with a larger volume of mid-tier specialist publishers for niche relevance and repetition, combined with cross-channel exposure across articles, podcasts, video, and communities. For ecommerce brands in particular, repeated mentions across trusted niche sources help search engines and AI systems associate the brand with its category more confidently - with downstream effects on rankings and on the brand's presence in AI-generated recommendations.

The study frames this as an evergreen resource rather than a one-time snapshot. Audience behavior in professional categories changes slowly even as media ecosystems shift. By anchoring the dataset to roles and industries rather than trending topics, Fractl positions the tool as something organizations can revisit as their strategy develops. That framing is consistent with the broader direction of audience intelligence platforms like SparkToro, which have been arguing that the relevant question for marketers is not where the most people are, but where the right people are.

Why this matters for SMB advertising

The marketing community's concern about SMB media efficiency is not new. PPC Land has documented the structural split in the advertising market extensively, including analysis by media and capital markets analyst Ian Whittaker published in May 2026 arguing that most industry forecasts measure only the visible, agency-mediated advertising layer while missing the faster-growing SMB layer operating through self-serve interfaces. SMBs running their own campaigns through platforms like Google, Meta, and emerging self-serve tools tend to optimize for the metrics those platforms surface - reach, impressions, clicks - rather than for the underlying question of whether the audience being reached matches the actual buyer profile.

The Fractl-SparkToro study introduces a concrete alternative metric: affinity score. Rather than asking how many people a placement reached, the affinity framework asks what proportion of the audience reading or watching a given outlet matches the professional profile of the intended buyer. That reframing has practical consequences for budget allocation, particularly for B2B brands in defined professional categories where buyers are concentrated in a relatively small pool of roles.

Research from Criteo published in April 2026 noted that the self-service performance advertising market has long been dominated by Google and Meta, with their automated campaign formats pulling the majority of SMB digital ad budgets. The Fractl dataset offers a counterweight: a map of where SMB budgets might reach more of the right people by focusing on earned media channels that major platforms do not own or optimize toward.

The measurement confidence problem that TransUnion and EMARKETER documented in late 2025 - 54% of marketers reporting no improvement in measurement confidence despite access to more data - connects directly to what the Fractl study is measuring. Affinity is a different signal from reach, and building it into media planning requires a different data infrastructure than the one most SMB marketing teams currently use.

Timeline

  • 2025 (throughout): Fractl's Digital PR team uses SparkToro's audience research platform to map where professional buyer personas concentrate their attention, covering hidden gem websites, YouTube channels, podcasts, and subreddits across multiple industry categories
  • June 17, 2026: Fractl publishes a related Generative Engine Optimization study examining brand visibility across 22,000+ domains in AI search environments
  • June 18, 2026: Fractl releases the main Hidden PR Goldmine study, authored by cofounder Kelsey Libert and Head of Data Journalism Aditya Sachdeva, covering 358 data points across 8 industries; the report is accompanied by an interactive tool at frac.tl/sparktoro-earned-media-study
  • June 18, 2026: Fractl publishes two additional companion pieces: "What AI Citation Research Means for Your Digital PR Strategy" and "Content Discoverability in 2026: How To Build Visibility Across Search, AI, and Social"
  • June 20, 2026: Fractl publishes "Digital PR Pricing: Models, Costs, and What You're Really Paying For (2026 Guide)" and "9 Client Reviews on What Fractl's Digital PR Actually Delivers"

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Summary

Who: Fractl, a content marketing and digital PR agency based in Delray Beach, Florida, in partnership with SparkToro, an audience intelligence platform. The study was authored by Kelsey Libert, cofounder of Fractl, and Aditya Sachdeva, Head of Data Journalism at Fractl.

What: A research study and interactive dataset covering 358 media placements - including hidden gem websites, YouTube channels, podcasts, and subreddits - across 8 industries. The study measures audience affinity scores for each property against professional decision-maker cohorts and compares the results to traditional metrics such as domain authority, organic traffic, and referring domains. Key findings include a 1.7x higher audience affinity for low-traffic niche publishers compared to major outlets, a 130x traffic gap between the two groups, and YouTube leading platform affinity in 7 of 8 industries.

When: The study was released on June 18, 2026. The research was conducted throughout 2025 using SparkToro's Custom Audience feature.

Where: The research covers audiences and media properties across the United States and applies to eight industry verticals: SaaS, ecommerce, fintech, healthcare, insurance, lifestyle, travel, and wellness. The interactive tool is available at frac.tl/sparktoro-earned-media-study.

Why: The study addresses a structural mismatch in how SMB marketing budgets are allocated toward media placements. Traffic volume - the conventional metric for evaluating a media property's value - is a weak proxy for whether a given outlet reaches the actual buyer personas that a campaign is designed to influence. The research is designed to give marketing teams, particularly at SMBs without large research departments, a data foundation for identifying which specific outlets, channels, and communities their buyers are actually using.