'Piers Morgan moving to YouTube proves his TV show has failed'

"This is going to be our final regular broadcast here on television," said Piers Morgan at the end of a recent episode of his show Piers Morgan Uncensored, on the opinionated news network TalkTV. "But Piers Morgan Uncensored is only ever going to get bigger."

Well on television, the ratings for Piers Morgan Uncensored certainly couldn’t have gotten much smaller. Ever since Morgan launched his outspoken talk show back in 2022, aiming to “cancel the cancel culture”, I’ve been keeping an eye on his ratings. Not because I care about him or the content (honestly, can’t be arsed.) It’s more because of what his show, and the channel TalkTV represent – a major investment in opinionated TV and a potential change to the television ecosystem we all watch every day.

For decades, British news and current affairs presenters were usually very straightforward. A presenter would keep their opinions close to their chest. Frothy and controversial opinions by big personalities were usually in newspapers, rather than on the television. And if opinionated guests were invited onto television, they would usually be forced to share the billing with someone who directly opposed their view, or challenged a great deal so that viewers at home could make up their own minds.

The launch of GB News in 2021, followed by TalkTV a year later, changed all that. Opinionated, often right-wing presenters, were at the heart of the broadcasts, bringing on guests to challenge them but also feature people they were sympathetic with to agree with too. Monologues became a mainstay, sharing their own view but not providing much of anyone else’s. If these broadcasts took off, it could potentially change the British broadcasting landscape in a big way, potentially making it feel a lot more like the US, the home of Fox News and MSNBC.

Read more: Piers Morgan challenges Andrew Tate over criticism of Amanda Holden's bikini posts

After a reportedly multi-million dollar signing for Piers and what looked like to be substantial marketing campaign (at one point it looked as if every bus in London was promoting the programme), Uncensored started off rather well enough for a fledgling network: attracting 317,000 viewers for the show’s first outing (featuring an interview with Donald Trump). But then viewers fell away, quickly. In just over a week, ratings had fallen to just over 60,000 viewers, a fall by more than 80%. And by September that year, they had fallen even further still: just 19,000 had tuned in.

Not only that, Uncensored was regularly being beaten by rival GB News, when TalkTV was expected to be the victor. On one evening in July 2023, a show by Conservative minister Jacob Rees Mogg on GB News was being watched by more than 110,000, but Piers was being watched on TalkTV by just a tenth of that, at 14,000 viewers. And in the week that Piers announced that he was moving the show to YouTube to remove the “straightjacket” of TV, an episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored was only watched by 9,000 viewers.

Read more: Piers Morgan complains as Mary Earps wins Sports Personality of the Year

Now, Uncensored has had some cut through on YouTube. An interview with the Egyptian-American comedian Bassem Youssef has had 22 million hits, whilst a recent interview with Andrew Tate has had more than 11 million. Other popular interviews on his channel feature Ronaldo and Ye (Kanye West) and they stretch for well more than an hour on YouTube.

You can’t broadcast these interviews on television easily without altering the schedules in a big way or cutting them short. Yet if you go past the most watched videos, however, things start to look less impressive. Live streams of the same show that was broadcasted on TalkTV have also been airing on YouTube for quite a while, but tend to only reach 40,000 and 60,000 an episode, and that’s global, rather than national viewers.

Piers Morgan’s departure from linear television is now clearly a blow for TalkTV, which for the rest of the schedule mostly consists of a simulcast of their radio station, but with the presenter looking at the camera. With TalkTV without its most well-known host, and with the channel barely making a ripple on linear, you wonder whether the channel is going to step back from broadcasting on television, with the i reporting that the channel could be axed.

And whilst rival GB News has on occasion had higher viewers than the BBC News channel and Sky News, this comes at a time when more and more of us are switching away from live television viewing altogether, and at a time when the BBC has largely cut back on domestic news programming throughout the day. GB News is also currently facing an advertising boycott and more than a dozen Ofcom investigations into standards and impartiality, raising questions about its future.

Could it be, that after all the hot air and loudmouth discussions on television, that viewers don’t really have an appetite for them after all?