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, according to the First We Feast YouTube channel.

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........

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