Sam Thompson: King of the (content) jungle

Sam Thompson has spent years being the familiar face in other people’s formats. Reality TV made him famous, radio gave him a regular slot, podcasts widened the audience, and now he’s trying to do something a lot less glamorous but potentially a lot more useful: build a marketplace for creative work.

In 2025, he co-founded Content Jungle, a curated platform and app built to connect brands and agencies with verified creative talent, especially photographers, videographers and editors. Thompson says the idea came from a very practical problem. He kept running into the same frustration: good freelancers were hard to find, the best people were often booked, and there wasn’t a premium, trusted place to hire with confidence.

That trust piece is the whole pitch. Thompson says Content Jungle approves only 22% of talent applicants, and he frames that as a filter, not a flex. The first wave of hires came through his network and his co-founder Ben Hacker’s direct outreach, which led to word-of-mouth growth. In the first nine months, the company says 65% of bookings were repeat bookings, which Thompson sees as proof that the service experience matters more than chasing volume too early.

The company also made an early call to stay narrow. Thompson says they were pushed to widen the platform to animators, hair and makeup artists, and other production roles, but he now thinks that would have diluted the business. For now, the focus is on videographers and editors, where he says the market is large and underserved.

There’s also a clear editorial line running through the business: human work first. Thompson says Content Jungle is not anti-AI, but that AI makes average content easier while raising the value of strong human creativity. He argues audiences can tell the difference, and that authenticity now matters more than ever. That view fits the wider creator economy mood right now, which is half excitement, half exhaustion, and a lot of people quietly wishing someone would just make the hiring less chaotic.

Thompson’s public profile helps, of course. He has 4.5 million social media followers, is a Sunday Times best-selling author, co-hosts the Staying Relevant podcast, and has spent time on Hits Radio, Love Island: Aftersun, and I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!, which he won. But the business is being run day to day by Hacker, while Thompson brings the network and the credibility. That may be the smartest part of it: he is not pretending fame is a business model. He is trying to turn access into infrastructure.