BuzzFeed just sold the owner of Hot Ones. What they sold it for will SHOCK you!

What’s a successful YouTube channel worth?

Well, if it has more than 14 million subscribers, a hit hot-sauce line, and more than 4 billion views on YouTube... it could be as much as ~$80 million.

Winging it

BuzzFeed, the online purveyor of mind-numbing content such as “16 sassy tweets from the nation’s 16th largest school district,” just sold one of the few properties in its shrinking empire that’s still generating substantial buzz in 2024: the company behind YouTube hit interview show “Hot Ones.” In a statement on Thursday, BuzzFeed announced that it had completed an all-cash sale worth $82.5 million for the First We Feast brand to Soros Fund Management, with host Sean Evans named as one of the investors in the deal.

Though it’s been shopping the First We Feast brand around for months now, the sale going through at this point feels particularly pivotal for BuzzFeed, with the company on the hook for $124 million worth of debt and interest payments that were due this month, per Business Insider. While the deal might have burrowed the digital-media company out of (most) of its debt-shaped hole, it also marks the end of BuzzFeed’s affiliation with one of the buzziest interview platforms on the internet.

There are multiple properties in the First We Feast stable, but “Hot Ones” — a show with “hot questions and even hotter wings” — is undoubtedly the jewel in the FWF YouTube crown. Indeed, the channel has seen its subscriber count soar, as everyone from Gordon Ramsay and Shaquille O’Neal to Tom Holland and Billie Eilish attempt to grin and bear their way through spicy wings and rigorously researched questioning. According to data from Social Blade, the channel counted a little over 550,000 subscribers in 2017. Now, almost eight years later, the figure sits at more than 14.2 million.