Piers Morgan has announced he is leaving his TalkTV daily evening show, less than two years after its launch, to focus on his YouTube channel.
The Piers Morgan Uncensored channel has grown to 2.3 million subscribers since 2022.
He described the channel as having a “startup mentality” and said the change would allow for longer interviews with bigger guests supported by more clips. Some of the interviews will be shown on TalkTV.
Tom Harrington, head of television for Enders Analysis, the media research company, told the Times: “There is such a disparity between the figures that he generates online and what he gets on TalkTV.
“It is just out of kilter with his profile, the high production values and all the money spent promoting the show.
“Most of the exposure to his interviews is from the two-minute clips, which work much better than burying him down the TV guide with a hundred channels above it which make it difficult to find.”
Morgan, 58, said: “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 added: “People are watching the content on YouTube rather than conventional television and I have no problem with that.
“You can’t defy audiences or tell them how they should be consuming.
“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?”
