SEAN EVANS'S MARKETABLE FEAST

The Hot Ones host and chief creative officer of First We Feast has parlayed 15 million YouTube subscribers into an $80 million company. As the business model for late-night crumbles, does Evans embody a financially viable future for the format?

- DEVIN GORDON

They advise never meeting your heroes, but Sean Evans keeps meeting his, and these late-night icons keep treating him like he's a member of their club-a feeling that must be so brain-melting for him, it should come with its own Scoville rating.

Last year, Seth Meyers moderated an event at the Paley Center for Media featuring Evans and Chris Schonberger, the founder and CEO of First We Feast, the scrappy production company that launched Hot Ones on YouTube a decade ago. In March, Evans did a Hot Ones sketch onstage with Stephen Colbert during Conan O'Brien's Mark Twain Prize ceremony at Kennedy Center. He's been on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and done The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon so many times now that they've practically crossed the threshold into friendship, no desk required.

"The way they've embraced us and what we're doing has been the most rewarding part of all of this," Evans says, leaning forward on a couch next to me, actively listening in host mode even though I'm technically the host here, in a Midtown Manhattan photo studio just a few blocks from First We Feast's sparkling but still-unfinished headquarters. "All I need is just an audience that likes the show and peers who respect it."

He's not just their peer, though. By virtue of what he's created on YouTube with Hot Ones, Evans is more like an heir to the throne, and an equity-holding pioneer of where the form could be headed. Late-night TV has slowly eroded over the past decade, both as a business and a cultural force, losing sway to social media platforms and creators like Evans. Conan has moved on to podcasting. Colbert was canceled amid the Paramount-Skydance merger this summer, with reports that his show was supposedly losing as much as $50 million a year. Meanwhile, First We Feast's YouTube channel has more than 15 million subscribers (