Don’t believe the spin, just 2 years into his 3 year deal with Rupert Murdoch and with no sign of it working, Piers is out of TalkTV. Spin from him that he is shifting the show to YouTube to escape the “unnecessary straitjacket” and no longer having to be a “slave to the schedule” are face-saving lines. He had a prime-time slot and he failed to win an audience despite all the hype from the Sun and Times plus the unprecedented promotional marketing budget. Guido has it on good authority that in New York it was Rupert Murdoch himself that pulled the trigger on Morgan.
TalkTV is being pared back, the single biggest budget line item was Piers and he wasn’t delivering an audience to match his ego. The dream of a global Piers show broadcast in London, going out in Australia and the US simply didn’t work. Fox News didn’t want to touch Piers. Australian viewers didn’t care for the frequent British Z-list guests. The big name interviews that would pull audiences in all those markets were too few and far between. The show was at first downsized and after 2 years of mostly losing to Nigel Farage on GB News, dropped.
Piers is putting the best spin on it that he can, that he is excited for his YouTube “start-up”, however the economics of YouTube will not work for his show. He boasts about his 2.3 million YouTube subscribers and that his interview with Ronaldo was watched six million times. Take a look at how his last 5 shows performed on YouTube:
Piers Morgan Uncensored most nights gets only tens of thousands of online views for his show, some extracted short clips are more likely to get hundreds of thousands of views if they go viral on social media – which doesn’t really translate into revenue. Guido can remember getting hundreds of thousands of views when our clip of Gordon Brown picking his nose went viral. To get those short clips he first needs an expensive hour long show from which to extract a short “money shot” that might go viral. The fact of the matter is that the economics of YouTube won’t support the show budgets he is used to working with. YouTube pays between $1 to $10 per thousand views. Ali Abdaal, one of the most successful British YouTubers with 5 million subscribers, says last year he made $596,460 averaging at about $8 per thousand views. Which would mean Piers, with half as many subscribers, could look to make from his most successful interview ever some $48,000. Not enough to cover the costs of production for that interview alone.
In reality Piers will likely do some sporadic interviews, maybe he’ll get someone like Zelensky on his YouTube channel. Morgan will eventually lose interest without the bumper pay packet, the News UK staff will disappear and the online channel will gather pixel dust. As for TalkTV, expect his crony Richard Wallace to go, Sun TV will get an outing and the station will go back to something more like its Talk Radio roots. As entertaining as Piers is, he’ll be back somewhere, like a bad penny.
Reacting to the news of Jenrick’s sacking at a press conference in Fife, Nigel Farage said:
“I’ll give him a ring this afternoon. Might even buy him a pint.”
