Piers Morgan is leaving TalkTV after two years to focus on his YouTube channel.
He no longer wants to be a ‘slave to the schedule’ and wants to remove the ‘unnecessary straitjacket’ of TV. He will continue to present his show Uncensored, but it will now be a YouTube exclusive. However, some of the interviews will still be shown on the channel as they find a replacement for the show.
‘It’s clear there’s a huge global demand for the content we’re making, but the commitment to a daily show at a fixed schedule, with all the editing and time sensitivities that involves has been an increasingly unnecessary straitjacket,’ he told The Times.
The show currently airs at 8pm on weekdays, but with the new model, Piers won’t focus on the daily output and instead longer interviews with bigger guests.
The 58-year-old journalist has built up a following on his YouTube channel, which has grown to 2.3 million subscribers since its launch in 2022.
‘People are watching the content on YouTube rather than conventional television and I have no problem with that,’ he commented.
Explaining his decision further, Piers noted his recent interview with Rishi Sunak, which has 400,000 views on YouTube.
‘Had we waited until 8pm to air it first on TalkTV, it would have been overtaken by the huge breaking news of King Charles’s cancer diagnosis,’ he said.
His most popular uploads include a Bassem Youssef interview, which has reached 22 million views and videos with Andrew Tate, Kanye West, and Cristiano Ronaldo all have over five million views. Fewer than 350,000 watched his interview with Ronaldo on TalkTV.
‘I could happily interview Elon Musk for three or four hours tomorrow and the audience would lap it up. But the nightly restriction of having to go into a studio at 8pm when sometimes there is nothing happening and literally fill time? Nobody wants that. The question becomes, why do it?’ Piers asked.
According to a Press Gazette study in October which looked at average number of views, Piers Morgan Uncensored is the sixth biggest English-language news channel on YouTube.
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