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Sean Evans, the host of chicken wing-eating talk show "Hot Ones," said he's "sick of" having to make the case for his popular YouTube series to advertisers who still think of the platform as lesser than TV.
"The hurdle that I think we all want brands to get over is this idea that there's some difference between eyeballs that exist on YouTube versus eyeballs that exist on linear TV," Evans said, speaking on a creator panel presented by YouTube at SXSW.
"It's absolutely worthy of comparison and competition with all of those other shows, and in a lot of ways in those categories, it dunks on those shows," he said. "That's sometimes a hard thing for brands to wrap their heads around, but it's just an observable fact that is plainly obvious, and I'm kind of, like, sick of having to explain that over and over again."
YouTube has become the top TV viewing destination for two years running, according to Nielsen, on the strength of independent creators, increasingly threatening legacy Hollywood players and causing some to play catch up and look for their own creator-fronted shows.
However, some blue-chip advertisers still consider the platform less valuable than traditional TV, owing to its many user-generated videos.
Evans is one of the earliest and most successful YouTubers. Started 10 years ago, "Hot Ones" grew out of Complex Media, which became part of BuzzFeed in 2021. Over the years, it's hosted guests like Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson, and Gordon Ramsey. He and an investor group bought First We Feast, the studio behind "Hot Ones," last year from BuzzFeed in an $82.5 million deal.
During the session, Evans expressed his worry about the show being canceled in its early days.
"It wasn't a big hit at first, and I used to joke with Chris [Schonberger, 'Hot Ones' cocreator] all the time about how we're eating this really spicy food and no one cares at all," he said. "If this were on a network or something like that, we probably would have been canceled before we never got a chance to figure out exactly what the show was and what it meant."
He also talked about his passion for reading viewers' comments, which he uses to stay connected to the audience.
"I always go through the comments," he said. "There's Nielsen ratings or whatever, but you don't have that two-way street. That is kind of a drug to me. It's actually a dopamine hit that I really look forward to every week. "
Evans also explained how he prepares for interviews. Depending on the guest, he listens to their music, watches their movies, or reads their books.
"You just dive into the material as much as you can," he said. "After you have kind of an idea of who this person is, see if you can extract an interview of that, and then do a little armchair psychology sit-down with the person."
He also revealed there's no special sauce to dealing with the aftereffects of consuming all the hot wings.
"I just ride it out, you know. I think about, you know, as painful and miserable as it could be sometimes, as uncomfortable as it is, it's a whole lot better than my life before it," he said.
