The Scoop
This is an excerpt from an interview with Piers Morgan on the Mixed Signals podcast from Semafor Media. Listen to the latest episode here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Ben Smith: When you talk about being entrepreneurial, one of the things entrepreneurs often care a lot about is revenue. And the thing with, you had one incredible deal at News Corp where they had emptied out the couch cushions at like News Australia and the New York Post and everything they owned to pay you the $50 million over three years, make you the best-compensated journalist in Great Britain.
And the thing with YouTube that I think we all feel is that it’s where people are consuming, it is not a place where creators are getting paid. I was with Ted Sarandos who runs Netflix the other day, and he said, “Oh yeah, YouTube is great. It’s a great farm league. It’s a nice place for people to learn what they want to do, and then they can come monetize on Netflix.” And you must be taking a huge pay cut to do this, no?
Piers Morgan: I don’t look at it like that because I don’t see it as just the YouTube channel. The YouTube channel, I think the way to look at it is more of a mothership. I would much rather look at the comparison as something like The Daily Wire and how they built their business over the last 10 years, where you start with a YouTuber, Ben Shapiro. You bring in other YouTubers, Jordan Peterson, Matt Walsh, Candace when she was there, and so on. But they all have so many other strings to their bow. They all do live shows, big tours. They all do books. Some of them make movies.
One of my favorite stories about The Daily Wire was the Jeremy razorblades story, where they fell out with some advertiser who did razorblades. And rather than go after them and try to woo them back, they launched their own brand Razors. And I think it now makes them $20 million a year. But I think my point, Ben, I think, is that the YouTube channel is almost like it’s the mothership of which a lot of tentacles can flow.
Have you ever read ads before?
No, I haven’t.
How are you feeling about it?
I like it, and I think my British accent goes down very nicely with the American advertisers. They like it. I posh it up massively. I don’t know if you remember Pathé News back in the ’50s when they used to read Pathé News bulletins, and it’d be, “Good evening. This is Piers Morgan for Pathé News.” I give it the full British nine yards, and they seem to like that.
So no, I’ve got no problem doing that. But I think what I see for Uncensored, and I do see it as a proper brand, is that 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. So I want to get into crime uncensored, to history uncensored, to sport uncensored, and start to build it out like that.
So I see it as becoming, I think people like me, Megyn Kelly, Tucker, all those people in the space now, I think we’re beginning to realize you can carry as much weight these days as a network. I mean, look at what’s happened with Newsmax in the stock market. I think people are suddenly woken up to the reality that the traditional legacy media valuation of stuff actually is for the birds, and that the sky is the limit in this area because it’s where young people are consuming their content.
So I wouldn’t look at it as Ted Sarandos would prefer you to, which is, I love Ted. He used to email me a lot about gun control when I was at CNN, cheering me on. So Ted and I go back a long way, and I’m a massive fan of Netflix. But I think that I see this as me running my own network now, and I’m going to be aggressively hiring people who are going to fit the Uncensored brand. And if you’re not too expensive, Ben, I might even come after you.
No, I’m always censored. The deep state takes care of that. Just one follow-up though. We talked to Kara Swisher the other day, and she was very candid about the amount of money she makes, which I think people in our business find very interesting. You must be taking a hit this year though. I mean, are you going to turn a profit this year or are you going to fund this out of pocket for a while?
We’re already significantly profitable.
Is your lifestyle taking any hits from this?
No, not at all. No, listen, I don’t need the money. So as you know, I had a very lucrative deal, which I was very happy about. I wasn’t exactly poorly paid in the previous 30 years. So this for me is not about short-term, how much I’m going to get paid. In fact, I was, in the end, made a very, very generous and big offer to stay, but as a talent. So it wasn’t that they wanted me to leave. And it’s all been very friendly and amicable right to the top of the company. I go back with the Murdochs a very, very long way, and I have enormous respect for them.
But I think they understood that I just have a burning desire to do something on my own, or to at least build a business in which I have a controlling interest, and I’m excited by it. I think it’s, A, it’s fun. B, you’re your own boss. I’ve never got to fire myself, which would be a unique twist on my rollercoaster career. But already what was interesting, I gave some interviews back in January, February to the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and others. And off the back of that, a lot of very, very, I won’t reveal too much about them at this stage, but a lot of very interesting people came forward who want to invest. And I think what you’re going to see is some news on that front very soon.
Oh, so you’re going to raise money, you’re not just...
Oh, yeah, yeah. And these are significant players who want to invest significant sums of money. So I don’t think, Ben, you need to worry too much about how I’m going to finance my next sandwich purchase, if that’s what’s concerning you.
I was a little concerned, yeah. You don’t want to name any of your investors, do you? I feel like Paul Marshall is investing in everything these days.
No, I’m not going to name any at the moment, but I can tell you there are some big players who are very, very keen to get involved in the Uncensored business. And so I would watch this space sooner rather than later. And then I think the scale of it will become a lot clearer, a lot quicker.
But I don’t think it’s a particularly difficult business model to game out. I think it makes perfect sense. I look at places like The Daily Wire, I really admire what they’ve done. I have a lot of their people come on. You went through a kind of YouTube eco space, we all go on each other’s shows all the time. That is all ships rising, if you like, in the ocean. And I really like it. Unlike the British tabloid world where we used to try and kill each other all day long, in this world, everyone helps each other. It’s a really baffling new concept for me, but I really like it.
So we do have, right now, in terms of the numbers we’re getting for the content on the Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel, we are getting numbers right up there with anyone in the news opinion interview space in the world.
Listen to the full interview on the Mixed Signals from Semafor Media podcast.