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- 🍗 This simple YouTube show just sold for $82.5M
🍗 This simple YouTube show just sold for $82.5M
All because of chicken wings and memes
Dyani Janga
January 08, 2025
If you’ve ever been on YouTube, follow a few public figures and like chicken & hot sauce, you may have come across Hot Ones.
On this show, host Sean Evans asks his celebrity guests spicy questions as they eat progressively hotter chicken wings.
With ultra-famous participants like Shaquille O’Neal, Gordon Ramsay Kevin Hart, Post Malone, and numerous other known sports figures, artists, and entertainers, their show has amassed billions of views on just YouTube itself.
🍗 Monetizing Spicy Content
This show has all the components to virality!
> Storytelling
> Controversy
> Funny Moments
> Well-known Figures
They use their billions of views to sell hot sauces, merchandise, DIY wing kits, subscriptions, etc.
For example, they have their own sauce called The Last Dab, a super-spicy—2,000,000+ Scoville Level hot sauce featured in the final round of the show’s episodes which sells online for around $35/bottle.
Viewers will see their favourite celebrity crying from the spiciness and want to take on the challenge themselves. So they go to the description & buy The Last Dab.
Hot Ones first aired on March 12th, 2015, on the YouTube channel First We Feast. And 9 years later, it’s sold for a whopping $82,500,000! Not bad for a YouTube series…
Now, I’m not telling you to start your very own series on the platform.
Neither am I telling you to get ultra-famous people to promote your business, heck, you probably don’t know any!
But there is a lot you can learn from Hot Ones’ story
🔑 Key takeaways from research:
Start small
The first episodes featured smaller celebrities—they were easier to get to since they most needed the publicity.
As time goes on the snowball effect takes place and they were able to interview bigger & bigger figures.
When launching a new product/business, don’t aim for the big results. Expect small growth over time.
Viral-Hacking
Clips of Gordon Ramsay roasting their chicken wings went viral and got millions of people to engage with their content. Today, Gordon’s episode sits at 129M views.
Shaquille O’Neal’s reactions got turned into memes the internet still posts today:
👞 Today’s Action Step:
Ask: What small steps can I take today to gain traction? Could you collaborate with micro-influencers in your niche or reach out to a smaller audience to build credibility and momentum?
📖 Today’s Book Bit
Russel Brunson
Social media is like a big party where people go to connect, have fun, and share stories.
Book: Traffic Secrets
Make your marketing worth consuming with. It should be fun, entertaining, and rewarding to engage with.
The show we’re discussing today is the perfect example; Be entertaining and tell great stories. That’s what people are attracted to, so give it to them. You’ll figure out a way to monetise from there.
🚿 Today’s Shower Thought
The first person to eat a child pepper probably thought they were going to die by fiery mouth. The second person to eat a child was probably pranked by the first.
Source
P.S. Here is an example of one of these viral Hot Ones clips.
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