Why Celebrities Are Chasing Creator Shows Over Late-Night TV

YouTube Hosts FYC Event for Sean Evans and "Hot Ones"

Ad spending on traditional late-night TV dropped to $209 million in 2025. That’s an 85% decline from eight years earlier, with about 20% of that lost money going to YouTube shows, according to data reported by The Wrap.

Meanwhile "Hot Ones," the show where celebrities answer questions while eating progressively spicier chicken wings, has racked up more than 5.8 billion views and 3,000 videos.

The math on a celebrity press tour has flipped. One stop on a creator-led show can now beat an entire circuit of legacy TV bookings. I've spent more than a decade working in the creator economy and I still find that stat startling every time I see it written down.

Creator-Led Shows Have Flipped Talent Booking Patterns

Sean Evans co-created "Hot Ones" and became co-owner and chief creative officer of its parent studio, First We Feast, in December 2024. He put the math plainly in an interview: if Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are doing a full press tour, "how is their appearance on Hot Ones going to match up to other shows that they've been on? Chances are like the biggest splash, the deepest cultural penetration that they're going to get with a single press stop is going to be them eating the wings of death."

Even Evans, 11 years in, still sounds a bit thrown by his own reach. "I can be walking through LA and I’ll see how it runs billboard and I’ll walk into Pink Dot and I’ll see the Hot Ones Pringles and see the Hot Ones sauce and walk past the Jack in the Box and see a Hot Ones meal and then turn on the TV and the comeback is on HBO and there’s a Hot Ones scene in it," he told me. "I'm like, wow, this sort of shooting star in the constellation of pop culture has become kind of omnipresent."

I talk to a lot of creators for a living. Most of them chase that kind of ubiquity for years and never get it. Evans stumbled into it and is still visibly working out what to do with it.

The numbers back him up. Alex Cooper’s "Call Her Daddy" averaged 148 million watch minutes a month on YouTube between April 2025 and April 2026, per Tubular Labs data, also reported by The Wrap. That’s more than Jimmy Fallon’s audience but pretty close to Seth Meyers’ 166 million. A creator-hosted podcast competing with network late night at all is the real story here.

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Family and Peer Pressure Have Become A Bookable Asset

What makes "Hot Ones" work isn't just reach, Evans said. It's what the discomfort produces. "There's a value proposition there that's appealing," he told me, describing how a guest's reaction to the hot sauce becomes "a gift that has sort of second life in the meme economy of the internet." A wince, a hasty gulp of milk, gets clipped and re-watched long after a talk-show segment would've been forgotten.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - MAY 18: Sean Evans attends the YouTube FYC event at Pacific Design Center on May 18, 2025 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Araya Doheny/Getty Images for YouTube)

Getty Images for YouTube

He also pointed to a booking dynamic that has nothing to do with a star's own career math. "A lot of times when we get big guests, the thing that's motivating them to come in will be like, 'My kids have been begging me to be on the show.'" Family pressure is now part of the pitch a publicist makes to talent. I didn't expect that answer, and it's the kind of detail that tells you more about how bookings actually happen than any press release would.

Evans framed the trade-off in blunt terms too. "Yes, there's a price you're going to have to pay. You're going to have to eat these scorching hot chicken wings. But this isn't going to be a press stop that you do and no one sees it," he said. "Whatever suffering you go through will not be in vain." That guarantee is exactly what a traditional 15th stop on a press tour can't offer anymore.

Why The Format Feels Both New And Familiar

Evans doesn't think the show's pull is pure novelty. He traces it back to television's oldest trick. "The interview is the oldest construct in the history of media," he said. "I grew up as a Howard Stern, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien obsessed kid. And when I look at the influences and all of the things, they're all from the classics."

What he built, in his words, is "a classic foundation, but then a new build on the house above it." A hybrid that looks unfamiliar on the surface and feels familiar the second you hit play. That's a smarter description of the creator economy than most of the trend decks I read.

"We're also a show that kind of straddles the mainstream and the internet," Evans said. "And that's been very exciting too, to see the ways in which a show like Hot Ones is celebrated and in the conversation in comparison and competition with these shows that have traditionally defined this category." Few YouTube shows compete for the same guests, the same cultural real estate and the same Emmy category as the hosts he grew up watching.

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"Chicken Shop Date" Tells The Same Story

"Chicken Shop Date," the British YouTube series where host Amelia Dimoldenberg interviews celebrities over fried chicken framed as a first date, backs up the pattern with a second data point. The first video pulled roughly a thousand views in 2014. Now the show is a fixture on A-list press tours, with guests including Jennifer Lawrence, Bella Hadid and Sabrina Carpenter.

There's a practical reason creator shows have gotten easier to book, too. They're pre-taped, so agents and managers get more say over which cuts actually air and nervous talent doesn't have to perform live. Pair that with a younger audience linear TV can't reach and these shows carry leverage late night has lost.

What Publicists Are Actually Buying

Evans described the deeper appeal from the guest's side. The format, he said, "takes the idea of celebrity, people on a pedestal, a lifestyle that by definition is unobtainable and then it knocks them down to a level that we all understand, which is dying on hot sauce." That vulnerability turns a promotional obligation into something that reads as genuine, "kind of like a warm hug kind of sentimental watch experience," despite the premise being what he calls "a violent sauce gauntlet."

He's cautious about taking too much credit for the strategy. "Not that we're so prescient. These are things that we figured out along the way, not things that we planned for," he said. "But I think it's all of those things working together that have turned it into what it is today." I like him more for admitting that than I would if he'd pitched it as a masterplan.

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The Bottom Line

Late night isn't finished. Evans, a self-described "Letterman guy," still wants to build something bigger and more theatrical someday, and points to Letterman walking onto the Ed Sullivan stage as the kind of ambition he hasn't let go of. "I kind of bemoan the fact that what is the top of the mountain now, like the number one podcast on Spotify," he said. "There's a part of me that feels this responsibility to try to continue the tradition of aspirational talk shows in some way."

But the booking hierarchy has shifted enough that a publicist mapping a film's press tour now asks a different question than they did a decade ago. Not which show reaches the most people, which fifteen minutes will actually travel. Increasingly, the answer isn't a late-night couch. It's a chicken shop or a plate of wings.