Jack Roberts — YouTube Channel Intelligence Report
Every long-form video on the channel — 162 uploads, 10.49M views — crawled, transcribed and analyzed: performance outliers, complete sponsorship history with verified evidence, the tool ecosystem the audience is buying into, and where the next sponsors come from.
Private report — prepared for Jack Roberts @Itssssss_Jack · 246K subscribersChannel scorecard
The numbers a B2B sponsor asks for first.
Executive summary
Jack Roberts (@Itssssss_Jack) is a 246,000-subscriber channel with 162 long-form videos and 10,486,182 captured views, but the channel that exists in mid-2026 is effectively eight months old. Output went 1 video in 2023, 2 in 2024, 53 in 2025, and 106 in 2026 through 27 July. The audience changed shape along with the volume: the median 2025 video did 7,091 views, the median 2026 video does 55,270 - a 7.8x step-change driven by a hard pivot away from no-code automation (n8n, Make.com, Airtable, Lovable) toward agentic coding and AI infrastructure (Claude Code, Antigravity, Firecrawl, Vercel, OpenRouter, GitHub). Any sponsor evaluating this channel should price against the 2026 catalogue and treat 2023-2025 as a different property.
On the metrics sponsors actually underwrite, the channel is strong and unusually consistent. Overall median is 42,647 views per video and the trailing-20 median is 42,213 - almost identical, which means recent performance is not propped up by an aging back catalogue. Mean views (64,730) sit well above median because of a fat outlier tail: 22 of 162 videos (13.6%) cleared 3x median, topping out at 646,074 views (15.15x) for 'Claude Code + Nano Banana 2 = Insane $10,000 Websites'. Cadence is 17.67 uploads per month across the trailing six months at a 23-minute median runtime, which is roughly four long-form technical builds per week - unusually deep sponsorship inventory for a channel this size. Engagement medians at 2.88% on the strictest possible definition (likes plus comments over views, with no shares or saves in the numerator), with a 2.70% median like rate, a median of 71 comments per video, and 44% of the entire catalogue clearing 3%.
The sponsorship picture is the story: this channel is dramatically under-monetized. Only 12 of 162 videos (7.4%) contain a brand relationship of any kind, and only 5 (3.1%) are confirmed paid placements - Perplexity in March 2026, Vanta twice in June 2026, Clay in June 2026, and MiniMax in June 2026. Every paid deal in the channel's history happened in 2026; 2023 through 2025 produced zero paid sponsorships. Over the same period Jack gave away four videos to brands that asked and did not pay - Higgsfield twice, Arcads once, Apify once - delivering 110,589 views of free product coverage, plus three affiliate-only placements worth another 21,942 views. The crucial counter-intuitive finding: the five paid placements median 46,861 views, ABOVE the 42,647 channel median. Disclosed sponsorship does not cost this channel reach.
The pattern behind those numbers is inbound-driven with no rate card and no pipeline. Six of the eight historical brands approached Jack first - 'Higgsfield reached out to me', 'they reached out. They're friends of the channel' (Apify), 'the team at Perplexity reached out to me', 'when Arcads reached out to me and said, Jack, do you want to do your UGC content using our platform'. Only two placements are documented as Jack-initiated, and both converted to paid on the first ask: 'I emailed MiniMax, and they even agreed to sponsor this video' and, for Clay, 'when I reached out to the team... They graciously agreed to sponsor this part of the video'. That is a two-for-two outbound conversion rate on a sample of two. The binding constraint here is not reach, audience quality, or brand safety - it is the absence of a rate card, a target list, and a weekly outreach habit.
Three opportunities dominate everything else. First, convert the freebies: Higgsfield asked for and received two videos worth 53,188 combined views for no cash, and crossed roughly $500M in annualized revenue in June 2026 - that is the single highest-leverage conversation on the list. Second, renew the warm ones: Vanta already re-ran inside 21 days (9 June and 30 June 2026), and four of eight brands total came back for a second video, a 50% repeat rate against a 25-35% premium-tier benchmark, albeit on a small base. Third, monetize the organic advocacy: Firecrawl (36 videos, 94.4% positive sentiment), Vercel (36 videos), Supabase (30), OpenRouter (29) and Pinecone (25, with an explicit 'I'm not affiliated with these guys in any way' on camera) are already load-bearing infrastructure in his builds and pay nothing. At the $25-40 B2B tech CPM band a single integration against the 2026 median models to roughly $1,380-$2,210, and a disciplined one-paid-integration-per-week cadence models to roughly $72,000-$115,000 a year - against five paid placements in the channel's entire lifetime. Jack has already said it on camera: 'Ad revenue... is actually the lowest leverage way that you make money on YouTube. We have sponsorships, which can be way more.'
Sponsor-facing metrics, benchmarked
Channel numbers vs. published creator-sponsorship benchmarks for tech/B2B.
| Metric | Jack’s channel | Industry benchmark | Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median views per video | 42.6K | 10K–50K typical for B2B tech | In range; top-quartile for the niche |
| Median views as % of subscribers | 17.3% | 5–15% solid / 15–25% premium | Premium tier |
| Engagement rate (likes+comments/views) | 2.9% | 3–5% solid / 5–8% premium (tech) | Solid, mid-benchmark |
| Upload cadence | 17.7/month | 4–8/month is strong for long-form | Exceptional — 2×+ the strong band |
| Sponsor renewal evidence | Vanta ×2 in 21 days | 25–35% renewal = premium | Early but positive signal |
Outlier gallery — videos at 3×+ the channel median
22 of 162 videos (14%) beat the 42.6K-view median by 3× or more. Badge = view multiple vs. median. Click any card to open the video.
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3.1×Sponsorship history — every deal, verified against the transcript
Two-pass detection: every transcript read for sponsor language, then each flag re-verified with verbatim evidence. Confirmed = explicit “sponsored” disclosure on camera.
Sponsor master list
All 8 brands that have engaged the channel commercially.
| Brand | Category | Status | Videos | First | Latest | Views | Avg ER | Repeat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vanta | security/compliance SaaS | Confirmed paid | 2 | Jun 9, 2026 | Jun 30, 2026 | 71.1K | 2.3% | ✓ |
| Apify | web scraping/infra | Brand-initiated | 2 | Oct 9, 2025 | Oct 22, 2025 | 62.4K | 3.5% | ✓ |
| Higgsfield | AI video gen | Brand-initiated | 2 | May 7, 2026 | May 17, 2026 | 53.2K | 2.5% | ✓ |
| Hostinger | web hosting | Affiliate only | 2 | Nov 15, 2025 | Nov 29, 2025 | 6.5K | 3.5% | ✓ |
| MiniMax | AI model lab | Confirmed paid | 1 | Jun 23, 2026 | Jun 23, 2026 | 95.6K | 0.7% | |
| Clay | GTM/data enrichment SaaS | Confirmed paid | 1 | Jun 20, 2026 | Jun 20, 2026 | 56.2K | 3.2% | |
| Perplexity | AI search | Confirmed paid | 1 | Mar 14, 2026 | Mar 14, 2026 | 44.7K | 2.0% | |
| Arcads | AI UGC ads | Brand-initiated | 1 | May 28, 2026 | May 28, 2026 | 10.5K | 3.1% |
Across 162 videos Jack has run 12 brand-touched placements involving 8 distinct companies, and the split is stark. Five are confirmed paid, all in 2026 and all disclosed verbally on camera: Perplexity (14 March, 44,717 views, full dedicated review of Perplexity Computer, 0.97 confidence), Clay (20 June, 56,245 views, mid-video integrated segment, 0.95), MiniMax (23 June, 95,608 views - his highest-viewed sponsored placement, 0.97), and Vanta twice (9 June, 24,241 views and 30 June, 46,861 views, 0.93 on both). Four more are brand-initiated but unpaid or unclear: Higgsfield twice in May 2026 (38,882 and 14,306 views), Arcads (28 May, 10,504) and Apify (9 October 2025, 46,897). Three are affiliate-only: Hostinger twice in November 2025 (4,242 and 2,232 views) and Apify (22 October 2025, 15,468). Total sponsored-adjacent reach delivered: 400,203 views, of which only 267,672 was paid for. Separately, a scan of video descriptions surfaces live affiliate rails that never appear in the transcript-derived sponsor list at all - an n8n partner link in 21 descriptions and a Lovable via=jack link - which means the true commercial footprint is slightly wider than eight brands, and slightly more under-monetized than it first looks. The behavioural pattern is unambiguous: this is an inbound-driven, order-taking sponsorship operation. Six of the eight brands initiated contact, and Jack's own transcripts say so plainly - 'Higgsfield reached out to me... they asked if I'd do a video sharing my honest thoughts on it', 'You'll get some really cool discounts from Apify because they reached out. They're friends of the channel', 'the team at Perplexity reached out to me', 'when Arcads reached out to me and said, Jack, do you want to do your UGC content using our platform'. Only two placements originated with Jack, and both closed as paid on the first attempt: 'I emailed MiniMax, and they even agreed to sponsor this video' and 'when I reached out to the team... They graciously agreed to sponsor this part of the video. So, thank you, Clay.' A two-for-two outbound close rate is not statistically meaningful, but it is directionally damning: the two times he asked, he got paid, and he has asked twice in three years. Three things this pattern tells a prospective sponsor, and Jack. One: the ROI is proven, because brands come back. Four of eight brands ran a second video (50% repeat, against a 25-35% premium-tier benchmark), and Vanta - the most sophisticated buyer in the set, a $4.15B-valued compliance platform with a mature creator programme and real attribution - renewed within 21 days of its first placement. Companies with proper attribution do not re-buy in three weeks unless the first one worked. Two: the audience does not punish disclosure. The five paid placements median 46,861 views against a 42,647 channel median, so ad segments outperform the typical video on reach while giving up only a modest amount of interaction (2.08% median engagement versus 2.88%). Three: he is leaving most of the money on the table. Higgsfield, Arcads and Apify collectively asked for and received 110,589 views of dedicated coverage without paying, and Hostinger got two full VPS walkthroughs on affiliate terms alone. Higgsfield in particular commissioned two videos in ten days while running toward a reported $500M annualized revenue - that is not a company that cannot afford a rate card, it is a company that was never shown one.
Re-engagement candidates
Historical sponsors ranked by renewal potential (status checked mid-2026).
The single largest value leak in the dataset. Higgsfield initiated twice in ten days (7 May and 17 May 2026) and received two full dedicated videos - 38,882 and 14,306 views, 53,188 combined - with no evidence of payment (verdict brand_initiated_unpaid_unclear, confidence 0.35). His own words: 'Hexfield reached out and said, Jack, we want you to do a video on our new MCP.' A company adding roughly $300M of annualized revenue in six months is not budget-constrained; it simply was never asked.
Angle: Direct and unapologetic: 'You commissioned two videos in May, they delivered 53,188 views at 2.48% average engagement, and I ran them for free. Here is the rate card for the next one.' Bundle a three-video launch package tied to their next model or Supercomputer release, priced at the top of the $25-40 B2B CPM band, with a tracked link so they can attribute. Attach the two existing videos as the case study - the proof of concept is already built and Jack already paid for it.
The best-proven relationship on the channel and the only confirmed-paid brand that renewed - two placements 21 days apart (9 June and 30 June 2026, 24,241 and 46,861 views, 0.93 confidence on both). The integration was genuinely native rather than bolted on: Jack tied it to his own startup Glido's GDPR compliance needs and to enterprise Hermes users, and the second placement carried a live '$1,000 off Vanta' offer. The last placement was 30 June - the renewal window is open right now.
Angle: Move from per-video to a quarterly retainer: four integrated segments per quarter at a package rate, each anchored to a genuine compliance moment in the Glido build story so it stays authentic. Ask Vanta for the click and signup numbers from the $1,000-off link first - if they are good, that data becomes the anchor for the price increase and, anonymised, the single most valuable line in the media kit.
Jack-initiated and it closed on the first ask: 'when I reached out to the team... They graciously agreed to sponsor this part of the video.' The result beat the channel on both axes - 56,245 views versus a 42,647 median, and 3.23% engagement versus 2.88% median - and the integration was structurally smart: a mid-video 'level two' segment where the first half of the video stayed organic, so the sponsored half inherited the credibility of the unpaid half.
Angle: Lead with the performance delta, not a media kit: 'Your segment did 56,245 views at 3.23% engagement - both above my median.' Then pitch what almost no other creator can deliver for Clay: Clay-as-MCP inside a working agent stack rather than another spreadsheet enrichment demo. Propose a three-video arc (Clay MCP in an agent, Clay plus a scraping layer, Clay for agency client delivery) with an affiliate tail behind it.
Brand-initiated, confirmed paid at 0.97 confidence, and the entire video was the placement - 44,717 views for a full dedicated review of Perplexity Computer, itself a February 2026 launch. Perplexity ships fast and has a demonstrated appetite for creator-led launch coverage, and Jack has already proven he can turn a launch into a build video rather than a reaction video.
Angle: Pitch a standing launch-partner arrangement rather than one-off deals: every major Perplexity release gets a same-week build video, sold as an annual package with a per-launch trigger. Their revenue growth is being driven by exactly the agentic product surface (Computer) that his 2026 audience is built around, so the audience-product fit is the strongest of any brand on this list.
Cold outbound that worked - 'I emailed MiniMax, and they even agreed to sponsor this video' - and it produced his highest-viewed sponsored placement at 95,608 views. The caveat is real and should be handled openly rather than hidden: that video posted a 0.70% engagement rate, the lowest of all 162 videos in the dataset, almost certainly because launch-news content pulls a large non-subscriber, low-intent audience. Reach was exceptional; interaction was not.
Angle: Position as a recurring model-launch partner (M3 successors, agent tooling, pricing changes), and pre-empt the engagement question by pricing on reach and tracked signups rather than engagement rate. Note the structural risk honestly: Chinese lab budgets for Western creators can be lumpy and relationship-dependent, and the contact who said yes to a cold email may not survive an IPO-scale reorg - so re-establish the relationship early rather than assuming it persists.
Brand-initiated and unpaid - 'when Arcads reached out to me and said, Jack, do you want to do your UGC content using our platform' - and the resulting 28 May 2026 video did 10,504 views, well below his median, though at a healthy 3.11% engagement. The strategic point in their favour: creator marketing is literally their product category, so the internal argument for a creator budget writes itself, and their ICP (performance marketers and agencies) overlaps directly with Jack's audience.
Angle: A modest flat fee plus a genuine revenue-share affiliate, not a premium flat rate - at roughly $15M ARR they cannot absorb a top-of-band CPM. Frame the ask inside their own category: 'You sell AI UGC to agencies; I teach agencies. Let's make the economics match.' Best paired with an agency-workflow video rather than another tool review, since the tool-review format already underperformed for them.
The most under-compensated organic relationship in the dataset. Apify appears in 18 videos with 66.7% positive sentiment (6 as the primary tool) and has been featured continuously from March 2025 to May 2026, yet the arrangement never went beyond a discount code and $5 of free credits - 'They're friends of the channel, and they love what we do here.' Jack even lists Apify among the tools he explicitly disclaims affiliation with in one video, so the audience does not read the coverage as bought. Combined 2025 placements: 62,365 views.
Angle: Convert 'friends of the channel' into an annual 'official scraping partner' package at a small flat fee plus improved affiliate terms - modest ceiling, very high probability of a yes, and it locks in a relationship that is already delivering them 18 videos of coverage for nothing. Lead with the volume: 'You have been in 18 of my videos over 14 months. Let's formalise it.'
Do not spend outreach cycles here, for two data-backed reasons. First, the two Hostinger placements are the worst-performing sponsored videos on the channel - 4,242 and 2,232 views against a 42,647 median - and they sit in his weakest theme, 'Automation platforms (n8n/Make)', which medians 5,620 views with zero outliers. Second, Jack has publicly moved off the position: one of his 21 disclaimers is 'I'm not sponsored to sell you some kind of VPS. I tell you what I do. I run it locally.' Pitching VPS hosting now would cost credibility worth more than the commission.
Angle: Leave the affiliate link live as passive income and take no active action. If a hosting sponsor is ever wanted again, the better fit for his 2026 content is a deployment or app-hosting platform (Vercel, Railway) rather than shared VPS, and it should ride inside a website-build video where his median is 74,770 rather than inside a self-hosting tutorial.
New sponsor targets — tools the channel already sells for free
Featured organically across the catalog with positive sentiment and zero payment — the warmest possible outreach list.
Pitch: The strongest single case study on the channel: a video whose title is literally the sponsor's product did 214,308 views organically and unpaid. Lead with that screenshot. OpenRouter raised a $113M Series B at a $1.3B valuation in May 2026 (CapitalG) on roughly $50M annualized revenue and 25 trillion weekly tokens, so budget exists and developer acquisition is the entire growth motion. Pitch a recurring 'model routing layer' segment inside his agent and coding builds - his audience is already installing OpenRouter keys because he told them to.
Pitch: Near-perfect organic advocacy with zero commercial relationship. Firecrawl raised a $14.5M Series A in August 2025 (Nexus Venture Partners, with Shopify's Tobias Lutke participating) and reports 1.25M+ developers across 150,000+ companies by July 2026 - a developer-acquisition-led company where creator spend is directly attributable. Pitch the role it already plays: Firecrawl is how his audience grounds every client website build in real competitor data. Offer a tracked link and a dedicated 'scrape-to-site' build video.
Pitch: Every website Jack builds ends up deployed on Vercel, and website building is his highest-median theme by a wide margin (74,770 versus a 42,647 channel median). A Vercel integration therefore rides the best-performing content on the channel without needing its own format. Vercel runs one of the largest DevRel and creator budgets in developer tools. Pitch a package attached to the website-build series plus deeper Vercel MCP coverage, which he already demonstrates unpaid.
Pitch: Eight primary-tool appearances means Supabase has already carried entire videos on its own without payment. Well-funded, developer-acquisition-led, with an active creator and hackathon programme. Pitch the format that already works: a full RAG or agent-memory masterclass with Supabase as the backbone. Honest caveat to handle in the pitch - the last recorded mention is May 2026, so re-establishing current usage should be part of the deal rather than an afterthought.
Pitch: The purest advocacy signal in the entire dataset - Jack built an entire infinite-memory RAG system on Pinecone and went out of his way to tell the audience nobody paid him for it. That on-camera disclaimer is worth more to Pinecone than most sponsored reads and can be quoted verbatim in the pitch. Vector-database competition is intense and developer mindshare is the battleground; pitch a paid deep-dive plus a standing slot in his agent-memory content, where he already has nine primary-tool videos of proven format.
Pitch: An existing relationship that was never monetized at scale: 31 videos where n8n was the primary subject and a partner link already sitting in 21 descriptions. n8n reached a $5.2B valuation in May 2026 with SAP taking a stake, past $100M ARR and 1.7M monthly active builders, so a flat-fee creator budget is trivially affordable. Be honest about the format risk in the pitch: n8n-themed videos now median only 5,620 views since the audience moved to code-level agents. The right ask is an integrated n8n segment inside a high-performing agentic or website build, priced on that video's reach - not a standalone n8n tutorial.
Pitch: A second live affiliate rail that has never been converted into a flat-fee integration despite nine primary-tool videos. Lovable sits inside the website-building theme, his 74,770-median category. Pitch the hybrid workflow he already demonstrates unpaid - design in Lovable, then move the code into Antigravity or Claude Code - which is a far more credible story than 'Lovable does everything' and differentiates them from the pure vibe-coding pitch. Same caveat as Supabase: last recorded mention is May 2026, so usage needs refreshing.
Pitch: Three and a half years of continuous unpaid usage is a credibility asset no media kit can manufacture. The strategic fit is sharp: ElevenLabs sells agents, and Jack's audience sells websites and automations to local businesses - a voice agent is the highest-margin upsell in that motion. Pitch an agency-oriented build video ('add a voice agent to any client site and charge for it') rather than a capabilities demo, with a tracked link into their agent platform.
Pitch: Four separate on-camera denials of any relationship is the strongest possible trust signal, and it means his audience is already signing up on price and quality alone. Kie is a smaller company, so expect a small budget - price accordingly and weight toward affiliate. The pitch writes itself: 'I have told my audience four times that you are not paying me. Imagine what happens when you do and I build a whole workflow on it.' Best paired with his image and thumbnail generation content.
Pitch: A contested category with well-funded competitors is exactly where creator budgets get spent, and Jack is currently giving three of them free airtime. He genuinely uses Granola and connects it to his agent workflows, so the integration is real rather than staged. Pitch the differentiated angle only he can do: notetaker as a data source for an autonomous agent, not as a standalone meetings tool. Run the same pitch to Fireflies and Fathom in parallel and let the category compete for the slot.
Pitch: Treat this as a partnership conversation, not a sponsorship pitch - first-party labs rarely buy paid creator integrations and the money is not the point. Realistic, valuable asks: early or preview access to releases, inclusion in launch-day creator programmes, co-marketing or amplification of his masterclass content, conference and event slots, and case-study placement. He has produced 83 videos of high-quality Claude Code education without a cent from Anthropic; that is a relationship worth formalising for reasons that compound well beyond a single invoice.
Pitch: Same special-case logic as Anthropic but with a stronger quantitative claim: Jack is plausibly the largest independent Antigravity educator on YouTube, and Antigravity-titled videos account for a disproportionate share of his breakout performance. Ask Google DevRel for early access, launch-day inclusion, official skill or template collaboration, and speaking or event opportunities rather than cash. This is the relationship most likely to produce durable strategic value and least likely to produce an invoice - pursue it in parallel with, not instead of, the paid pipeline.
Tool & platform ecosystem
Top 20 third-party tools by prominence-weighted mentions across all 162 transcripts.
What performs — content themes by median views
Theme assigned per video from transcript topics.
The theme data draws a hard line through the channel, and it is a 16.7x line. 'Website building with AI' (33 videos) medians 74,770 views with a 2.563 average outlier multiplier and 7 of the channel's 22 breakout videos - it is both the biggest and the most reliably viral category, topped by 'Claude Code + Nano Banana 2 = Insane $10,000 Websites' at 646,074 views. Below it, 'Tool comparisons & model news' (19 videos, 50,362 median, 5 outliers) and 'AI agents & agentic OS' (53 videos, 47,470 median, 6 outliers) both perform above the 42,647 channel median, with agents being the largest category by volume. 'Courses & masterclasses' (11 videos, 41,044 median, 3 outliers) sits right at the median while being by far the most expensive content to produce - one entry is a 3+ hour free course that still did 215,115 views. Then the floor drops out: 'Content & marketing systems' (14 videos) medians 29,742, 'Automation platforms (n8n/Make)' (15 videos) medians 5,620 with zero outliers, and 'Business/agency growth' (17 videos) medians 4,485 with zero outliers and an average outlier multiplier of 0.165. The bottom two themes account for 32 videos - 20% of the entire catalogue - and return about 2% of the reach. For sponsor targeting this resolves three questions at once. First, which slots to sell at premium: infrastructure and dev-tool brands - deployment, scraping, vector databases, model routing, design-to-code - belong inside the website-building and agentic themes, where a placement is underwritten at 47,000-75,000 views rather than 4,500. Second, which brands to steer away from their category-native format: the two Hostinger placements failed (4,242 and 2,232 views) precisely because they were buried inside self-hosting and agency-growth content, so any hosting, VPS, CRM or agency-services sponsor should be routed into a build video instead. Third, what to do about the underperforming 20%: business-growth and no-code-automation content is where Jack's own community and course offers naturally live, so rather than cutting it, he should price it out of the sponsor inventory entirely and reserve it for owned monetization. The clean framing for a media kit is that sponsored slots are sold only inside the three themes that median above 47,000 views - which lets Jack quote a higher effective rate honestly instead of averaging his weakest categories into the headline number.
The 2025–2026 ecosystem
The channel is young: 1 video in 2023, 2 in 2024, 53 in 2025, 106 in 2026 — the ecosystem picture below reflects 2025–2026, where 98% of the catalog lives.
State plainly up front: the brief's framing of 2024 as a reference year does not hold for this channel. Jack published exactly 2 videos in 2024 and 1 in 2023. The entire meaningful corpus is 2025 (53 videos, 1,068,925 views, 7,091 median) and 2026 (106 videos, 8,702,909 views, 55,270 median), and 2026 alone accounts for 83% of all captured views. The 2024 tool set that does exist - Make.com, ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, RSS.app, Google Docs, Instagram - describes a creator building RSS-to-Instagram content pipelines and has no bearing on what a 2026 sponsor would be buying. Any year-over-year analysis on this channel should run 2025 against 2026 and disregard everything before. The 2025-to-2026 shift is the most commercially important fact in this report. 2025's top tools by weighted score were n8n (102), Skool (55), Make.com (50), ChatGPT (44), Lovable (40), Claude (36), Claude Code (32), Google AI Studio (28), Airtable (27) and Apify (26) - a no-code automation ecosystem where visual orchestrators did the work. 2026's are Claude Code (186), Antigravity (161), GitHub (74), Firecrawl (64), Glido (58), Claude (57), OpenRouter (56), Vercel (55), NotebookLM (47) and Notion (42) - a code-level agentic ecosystem where the model writes and ships the software. n8n does not appear in the 2026 top ten at all. Jack narrates the transition himself: 'These platforms are amazing... they are integrators. They basically connect things to other things... but then you have Claude and Gemini, right? Which are executors at the code level', and 'A year ago when I was building on n8n and Make.com, this would have been an hour-plus tutorial by itself.' The commercial consequence is that a brand buying Jack in 2026 is buying a developer-tooling and AI-infrastructure audience, not a no-code automation audience - which is why the highest-value untapped targets are OpenRouter, Firecrawl, Vercel, Supabase and Pinecone rather than another workflow platform, and why the theme that carried his 2025 content now medians just 5,620 views.
Brand-safety asset: on-camera transparency
Across the corpus Jack makes 21 explicit, unprompted 'not sponsored' or 'not affiliated' statements covering 18 distinct named tools - Pinecone ('I'm not affiliated with these guys in any way'), Granola, ClickUp, Fathom, Fireflies, Tavily, CodePen, 21st.dev, HitFilm, Unipile, Apify, AnyVan, UI UX Pro Max, and Kie.ai four separate times. He disclaims even where a commission would be trivially easy to take: recommending Anthropic's Max plan he states on camera that he is not affiliated with or on commission from Anthropic, and on hosting he says flatly 'I'm not sponsored to sell you some kind of VPS. I tell you what I do. I run it locally.' The mirror image is equally clean: all five paid placements are disclosed verbally inside the video itself, at 0.93-0.97 detection confidence, in plain language - 'They agreed to sponsor this section of the video. So, big thanks Vanta for that', 'a big thank you to Perplexity for sponsoring the video', 'I emailed MiniMax, and they even agreed to sponsor this video.' The ratio is roughly four unpaid disclaimers for every paid disclosure. For a B2B SaaS sponsor this is a hard commercial asset rather than a soft brand-safety note: the audience has been trained over three years to believe that when Jack does not say 'sponsored', nobody paid him - which is precisely what makes the 3.1% of videos that are paid land with the conversion weight of an earned recommendation rather than an ad. It also means FTC and ASA disclosure exposure is effectively nil, there is no history of undisclosed paid placement for a brand's legal team to find, and the compliance review will be short. This belongs on page one of the media kit, not in the appendix.
Known gaps & how to close them
- No CTR, average view duration, average percentage viewed, or retention curves. These are the first numbers a sophisticated B2B sponsor will ask for - and with a 23-minute median runtime, retention is the single most persuasive metric Jack could add. They exist only inside his YouTube Studio (Advanced Mode, last 365 days).
- No audience demographics: no country split, age or gender breakdown, subscriber-versus-non-subscriber ratio, returning-versus-new-viewer split, or traffic-source mix. The decision-maker-density argument in this report is therefore inferred from content themes, tool mix and Jack's own monetization behaviour. It is a strong inference but it is not measured, and YouTube Studio can close the gap in ten minutes.
- No compensation figures anywhere in the dataset. 'confirmed_paid' is derived purely from Jack's on-camera disclosure language, never from invoices, contracts or amounts. Every dollar figure in this report is a model built on the supplied $25-40 B2B tech CPM benchmark, not on what any brand actually paid. Jack must supply historical rates before a rate card can be properly anchored.
- Data source is anonymous yt-dlp with no YouTube Data API credential. Total views (10,486,182) is the sum of view counts across the 162 captured long-form videos, not YouTube's lifetime channel view total. Shorts and anything under 180 seconds are excluded entirely, so any Shorts audience is invisible here.
- Comment counts were retrieved for all 162 of 162 videos in this pull, contrary to the usual yt-dlp caveat - but they are a point-in-time snapshot as of 28 July 2026 and yt-dlp counts can lag YouTube's live figures. All view, like and comment numbers are cumulative-to-date, so older videos have had longer to accumulate; views_per_day is the fairer basis for comparing recent uploads.
- Engagement rate throughout is defined as (likes + comments) / views. Many published benchmarks, including the 3-5% tech and education band used here, are computed on looser definitions that include shares and saves. The comparison in this report is therefore conservative and understates Jack's relative position by an unknown margin.
- The three 'brand_initiated_unpaid_unclear' verdicts are low confidence and must be checked with Jack before appearing in any media kit or outreach email: Higgsfield 0.35, Arcads 0.40, Apify 0.55. Payment may have occurred off-transcript. The two Hostinger placements are likewise inferred as affiliate-only at 0.30 and 0.40 confidence.
- Sponsorship detection ran on transcripts only, so description-only commercial relationships were missed by the 8-brand list. A separate description scan surfaced at least three live affiliate rails absent from that list: n8n (partner link in 21 descriptions), Lovable (via=jack) and Anymailfinder (via=jack), plus a Skool referral link. There may be more; a full description-level audit is worth an hour.
- No owned-audience numbers. Skool community (AI Automation Vault) member count, email or newsletter list size (ideaswithjack.com), Glido user count, and LinkedIn/X following are all absent from this dataset - and they are exactly what a B2B sponsor uses to value a creator beyond YouTube reach. Jack must supply these.
- No sponsor-side conversion data: no clicks, signups, trial starts, code redemptions or revenue attribution for any of the 12 placements. Vanta (the $1,000-off link), MiniMax (the 12%-off link), Clay, Apify (discount code) and Hostinger (affiliate dashboard) can all report this. A single real conversion number would outweigh every reach metric in this report for pricing purposes.
- Theme assignment is single-label per video, so a video that is both a website build and an agent tutorial lands in only one bucket. Theme medians should be read as directional rather than exact, though the 16.7x gap between the top and bottom themes is far too large to be a labelling artefact.
- Small-sample warning on the headline sponsorship stats: the 50% repeat rate rests on 8 brands, the 25% confirmed-paid repeat rate on 4 brands, and the 'two-for-two outbound conversion' on 2 attempts. These are real and directionally useful but not statistically robust, and should be presented to sponsors as evidence rather than as rates.
- Company status checks in the re-engagement section come from public web sources as of late July 2026 and were not independently verified. Funding, ARR and valuation figures reported by third-party trackers frequently disagree with each other; treat them as directional context for prioritisation, not as facts to quote back to the brand.
Recommended next steps
- Build the rate card before contacting anyone. Anchor on the 2026 median of 55,270 views, not on 246,000 subscribers, and price only the three themes that median above 47,000 views. Four tiers: integrated mid-roll segment, full dedicated build video, multi-video package (3-4 videos), and launch-day partner retainer. Use the $25-40 B2B tech CPM band as the floor - roughly $1,380-$2,210 per integration at the 2026 median - and argue above it on decision-maker density, 23-minute median dwell time, and the 4:1 unpaid-disclaimer-to-paid-disclosure trust ratio.
- Stand up the sponsorship CRM this week with 20 seed records: the 8 historical brands plus the 12 outreach targets in this report. Minimum fields - brand, verdict (paid / brand-initiated unpaid / affiliate / prospect), contact name and email, date of last placement, views and engagement delivered, rate quoted, rate paid, renewal date, next action, next action date. Seed data already exists in 02_sponsorship_database.csv, 03_sponsor_master_list.csv and 04_tools_companies_database.csv.
- Run the three warm conversions in week one, in this order: Higgsfield (two free videos, 53,188 views delivered, now at roughly $500M annualized revenue - convert to paid), Vanta (last placement 30 June 2026, renewal window open right now - move from per-video to a quarterly retainer), and Clay (56,245 views at 3.23% engagement, both above median - pitch a three-video arc). These three have the shortest path from conversation to invoice because the performance proof is already delivered.
- Request conversion data from every past sponsor before quoting new rates. Vanta, MiniMax, Clay, Apify and Hostinger can each report clicks, signups or code redemptions from links that are already live. One anonymised real conversion figure - 'drove N signups from a single 46,861-view placement' - is worth more in a pitch than every reach metric in this report combined, and it is the only credible way to price above the standard CPM band.
- Export the YouTube Studio numbers this dataset cannot see and fold them into the media kit: CTR, average view duration and average percentage viewed, subscriber versus non-subscriber split, returning versus new viewers, top countries, and traffic sources. For a 23-minute median runtime, retention is the single most persuasive number Jack has and it is currently missing from every argument in this report.
- Work the cold pipeline in weeks two to four in priority order - OpenRouter, Firecrawl, Vercel, Supabase, Pinecone - and lead every email with the specific organic evidence rather than a generic media kit. The 214,308-view OpenRouter-titled outlier, Firecrawl's 94.4% positive sentiment across 36 videos, and Pinecone's on-camera 'I'm not affiliated with these guys in any way' are each stronger openers than any deck. Two to three outbound emails per week, logged in the CRM, is enough - he has closed two for two historically.
- Convert the two dormant affiliate rails into flat-fee conversations: n8n (partner link already in 21 descriptions; now $5.2B valuation, $100M+ ARR, SAP investor) and Lovable (via=jack link, 25 videos, 9 as primary tool). They already pay commission, so the relationship and the contact both exist - the ask is a flat integration fee on top, placed inside a high-performing build video rather than in the low-median automation format.
- Protect the transparency asset deliberately as volume increases. Keep the roughly 4:1 ratio of unpaid disclaimers to paid disclosures, keep disclosing verbally on camera in plain language, cap paid integrations at one to two of the roughly four weekly uploads, and add a short 'what I will and will not promote' section to the media kit. The trust position is what makes his 3.1% paid placements convert like earned recommendations - it is a pricing lever, not a constraint.
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