9/11/2023 0 Comments Beat hot ones![]() It is on, right now, if you want it.If you’ve never seen Hot Ones you’re missing out. Millions of people do this, enough that it’s made the public care about an interview show that’s not Terry Gross’, which is a hard thing to do. That’s the nature of web video, too, and one of the reasons YouTube exists: when there’s nothing left to do, you have to set your browser to autoplay. It’s something to consume because it’s there, and it’s better than whatever else you might otherwise be doing. “And I guess I’ve always wanted to fill that void.” Which is the hole late-night television plugs - when you’re up at an odd hour on a weeknight and everything fun is closed, a good variety show can fill that restless gap in your heart, or your schedule. “I know what it’s like to be in your apartment kind of bored, smoking weed, looking for something to watch,” he says. Hot Ones remains the best thing to watch when you’re not sure what you feel like watching it rewards passive consumption just as much as it rewards active love. ![]() (In our interview, Schonberger told me the hot sauces make around $15 million a year in revenue, but after publication, the company said he misspoke in fact, a company representative said, the sauces made $7 million in 2018.) That’s given Hot Ones a steady flow of money that doesn’t rely on ads or sponsored posts to make the budgets work, which makes the show wildly different - and steadier - than its peers. The Hot Ones-branded sauces, which are sold exclusively through Heatonist and partially developed by Chaimberg and his team, sell like gangbusters: The Last Dab became the fastest-selling hot sauce in history, Chaimberg says, after it moved more than 10,000 bottles on its first full day on sale. “We’re sitting there, crying, taking notes,” Chaimberg says. It’s an exhaustive process each meeting takes between one and two hours, and there are many meetings. (Sometimes Chaimberg tweaks the recipes with the makers.) Then, Schonberger and Chaimberg meet again to do the final test. They test 20 to 30 sauces on spoons first, each chosen by Chaimberg, and then after many rounds of taste-testing, he whittles the list down to 10 or 15. There are 10 each season, chosen by Schonberger and Noah Chaimberg, founder of the hot sauce boutique Heatonist. (In New York, the wings come from My Belly’s Playlist on 35th street.) In addition to doing normal producer stuff, like helping set up shoots and working with the guest’s team, Burroughs also sauces the wings, something she’s been doing since season 2. The wings are generally sourced where the shoots take place by production manager Domonique Burroughs, who travels with Evans to shoots. One consequence of Hot Ones starting during the era of cheap web videos is that they had a tiny budget to develop the show (typical for 2015 web video), which is why the set is one table and ten wings on a black background - and it makes it cheap to move wherever a guest is. The Idris Elba shoot, for example, took place in London because that’s where Elba was promoting Hobbs and Shaw. About half the shoots take place in New York City, 40 percent are in LA, and the remaining 10 percent are random places around the world. Those big apples aren’t always able to come to the team. Digital upstarts like Vice (where, full disclosure, I used to work) and Mic were hiring tons of young people to create the content to feed a perceived collective hunger. Goosed largely by Facebook’s exaggerated video metrics, news publishers had begun to change their editorial strategies to boost their user engagement, which they could then use to sell advertisers on higher ad rates. In 2015, however, the news industry had begun its disastrous pivot to video in earnest. Prior to that, the business of news had gone through a series of catastrophes - Craig Newmark had killed classifieds, the lifeblood of newspaper funding the pre-paywall transition from print to digital had largely been completed, which meant subscription numbers were dropping in both arenas and Google and Facebook had captured and cannibalized the digital advertising market, which would soon overtake its traditional counterparts. ![]() Hot Ones was born during a tumultuous time for digital media: the year 2015. The business of making videos is like the business of making any other high-volume food product the processing machines can’t stop, because the public’s hunger is never satisfied. ![]()
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