• Sean Evans criticized advertisers for undervaluing YouTube's 'Hot Ones' compared to shows on TV.
• YouTube is challenging traditional TV, yet some advertisers still ignore it.
• He said 'Hot Ones' success highlights YouTube's influence, despite initial fears of cancellation.

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.

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Just over two months ago, MLB star Juan Soto signed a historic contract. A couple of weeks ago, he joined the New York Mets in Florida for spring training.

The 15-year, $765 million deal he signed was the most lucrative contract in professional sports history. 

In mid-February, Soto still seemed to be processing the life-changing contact. 

"I'm still thinking about it and everything. It's unbelievable," he said at the time. "I'm really happy for that. I'm really happy to know where I'm going to be for the next 15 years."

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But Soto revealed he received offers from other teams that exceeded the eye-popping amount the Mets presented.

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"The Mets didn’t offer the most money," Soto said, speaking in Spanish. "Some teams offered more." 

Soto later said the Mets' culture was one of the reasons he decided to leave the Bronx in favor of Queens.

SNY reported "multiple teams, including Boston, had a willingness to exceed the high offer if they knew Soto would agree."

Soto will wear his coveted No. 22 jersey with the Mets. Third baseman Brett Baty wore that number the past three seasons. But Soto gave him a brand new SUV during spring training to convince the infielder to switch to No. 7.

"No, you didn’t," Baty said as he smiled and walked outside the team’s spring training complex to see Soto near a Chevrolet Tahoe that had "Thanks for #22" scrawled on the back window.

Baty, the 12th overall pick by the Mets in the 2019 draft, was still driving the same 2016 Toyota 4Runner he had in high school.

"I really appreciate the number," Soto told him. "It’s the first one I ever wore."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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• Scott Galloway, host of The Prof G Pod, ripped into tech CEOs during his SXSW talk on Saturday.
• Galloway said tech leaders are playing "dominos of cowardice," each one following the other.
• He said he refused to normalize actions taken by Elon Musk.

Since Donald Trump's victory, tech CEOs have graced the President's inauguration, Jeff Bezos overhauled The Washington Post's op-ed section, and X CEO Linda Yaccarino reportedly pressed one of the world's biggest ad groups to increase spending on Elon Musk's X.

What do these seemingly disparate events have in common?

Scott Galloway, NYU Stern marketing professor and host of The Prof G Pod, said business leaders — particularly tech CEOs — are complacently participating in America's "slow road to fascism."

During his SXSW talk on Saturday in Austin, Galloway said tech leaders enormously influence society and that their "character matters."

But so far, Galloway said, "We have seen an extraordinary kind of what I call 'cowardice domino,'" displaying a slide image of prominent tech leaders represented as said dominos, including Jeff Bezos, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Musk, Tim Cook, and Yaccarino.

Spokespeople for The Washington Post, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, and Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Galloway said examples of the "dominos of cowardice" included business leaders texting his co-host on the tech podcast Pivot, Kara Swisher, that they "hate to be at the inauguration, but I'm doing it for shareholders."

He continued: "And this effectively emboldens the CEO of X to then demand that IPG advertise on her platform; otherwise, she will get her boss to block the merger. Which leads to one of the world's wealthiest men, who owns one of the most important newspapers, to say, 'We're no longer going to talk about opinion.' There is one kind of fascist domino following one after the other."

Galloway appeared to be referring to a recent Wall Street Journal report that said Yaccarino and her associates had pushed Interpublic Group, a large advertising company, to advertise on X. The pressure comes as IPG seeks a deal to sell itself to its competitor Omnicom. The deal could need regulatory approval from the Trump administration, with which Musk works closely.

Musk and a spokesperson for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Galloway took a moment to single out Musk and his recent gesture at Trump's inauguration, which some have interpreted as a fascist salute.

"I had a running loop of Musk doing the Nazi salute, and I thought, 'I refuse to normalize this bullshit,'" he said. "Think about what money has done to us."