A late-night host whose show is unlike the others has been carving out a strong following in the past year — especially among young male viewers.

“To a certain segment of the population, Scott Van Pelt is a more popular late-night television star than Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert,” the AP reports. “That segment — young men aged 18-to-34 — may be small, but it’s an elusive one for television advertisers and vital to Van Pelt’s bosses at ESPN. He’s one year into an experiment to broaden the appeal of ‘SportsCenter’ at the midnight hour.”

Van Pelt’s take on “SportsCenter” is almost as different from the franchise’s shows airing in other dayparts as it is from his late-night talk competition.

“While Van Pelt doesn’t yuk it up with monologue jokes, the midnight ‘SportsCenter’ he hosts incorporates elements from the late-night comedy shows, including a greater emphasis on interviews and bite-sized pieces of material that can live online independent of the television show,” the AP notes.

The report quotes Van Pelt, who was previously working mainly in radio and as a golf reporter for ESPN, saying of the move to the new show: “I resisted it for quite a while simply because I liked the radio world I was in. I just never thought they’d give me the latitude to be myself. I never believed that they would just give me the easel and say, ‘Paint what you want.'”

We encourage readers to click on the link above to the AP story to read the full report.