Piers Morgan is planning to create a YouTube empire covering true crime, history and other genres, claiming to have “significant players” already lining up to invest.
Morgan said he was looking to branch out from his Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel and find a series of “mini-mes” to front other shows under the brand. He said his current show was already turning a profit since he broke away from Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in January.
“I see Uncensored as being potentially a really big entity where I will have other people under me who will be also Uncensored, but I’m also going to expand the genres,” he told Semafor Media’s Mixed Signals podcast. “I want to get into Crime Uncensored, to History Uncensored, to Sport Uncensored – and start to build it out like that.”
He added: “I can tell you there are some big players who are very, very keen to get involved in the Uncensored business, so I would watch this space sooner rather than later.”
It appears to be an attempt to replicate the success enjoyed by Gary Lineker, his friend and social media sparring partner, whose Goalhanger podcast has spawned a series of successful shows including The Rest is History, The Rest is Politics and The Rest is Entertainment. Its latest published accounts show it made a profit of £1.4m last year.
Morgan said he was taking inspiration from The Daily Wire, a US conservative media company co-founded in 2015 by the rightwing political commentator Ben Shapiro. It has a series of YouTube shows and podcasts – as well as a profitable sideline in razors.
While Morgan has not released the names of potential investors, his plans are part of a wider trend whereby prominent figures have moved from traditional broadcasters to new media platforms, particularly YouTube.
The trend has been most prominent on the US political right. The former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who was dropped by NBC in 2018 after only one year of her three-year contract, has nearly 3.5 million YouTube subscribers on her pro-Trump channel and recently announced she was starting her own podcast network. Tucker Carlson, another former Fox host, has almost 3.9 million subscribers.
“You’re going to see a lot of people like me who were, perhaps, associated with conventional media, going off and doing their own thing,” Morgan said. “I think some of us are going to be enormously successful.”
He added: “I think you’ll look back in five years’ time and you’ll see that this interview I’ve given you – about the way I see the Uncensored brand developing – will be exactly how it develops. And we’ll have a lot of financial clout behind us and it will be incredibly successful. There will be lots of ‘mini-mes’ running around. I want to go and find the next mes.
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“I want to go and find young, opinionated, feisty people who are not afraid to get stuck in, who’ve got thick skins, who can debate well and who can actually make the news both relatable and entertaining and interesting and challenging and thought provoking.”
Morgan said he had been approached by “significant players who want to invest significant sums of money” since going it alone with his YouTube channel in January. He did so after the expiration of a deal with Murdoch’s News UK that paid him a reported £50m over three years.
While News UK retains a financial interest in Uncensored until 2029, Morgan now owns the brand through his production company, Wake Up Productions. News UK had signed him to be the star of TalkTV, launched in 2022 to take on the rightwing broadcaster GB News. However, the project flopped, with TalkTV shutting its traditional TV channel and going online only last summer.
