Piers Morgan, the broadcaster and journalist, is raising tens of millions of dollars of funding from heavyweight investors as he seeks to turn Uncensored, his YouTube-based venture, into a broad-based global media business.
Sky News can exclusively reveal that Mr Morgan is in the process of finalising a roughly $30m (£22.5m) fundraising for Uncensored that will give it a pre-money valuation of about $130m (£97m).
The new investors are understood to include The Raine Group, the New York-based merchant bank, and Theo Kyriakou, the media mogul behind Greece’s Antenna Group, owner of a stake in London-based digital venture The News Movement.
Michael Kassan, a marketing veteran, is understood to be advising the business on advertising-related matters and may also invest in a personal capacity, according to insiders.
A number of family offices from around the world are also said to be in talks to become shareholders in Uncensored.
Joe Ravitch, the prominent American banker and Raine co-founder who has advised in recent years on the sale of Chelsea and Manchester United football clubs, is said to be joining the Uncensored board as part of the capital-raising.
The move comes nearly a year after Mr Morgan announced his departure from Rupert Murdoch’s British empire through a deal which handed him full control and ownership of his Uncensored YouTube channel.
Allies of Mr Morgan said this weekend that some details of the fundraising were likely to be confirmed publicly in the coming days.
While the size of his personal stake in the business was unclear this weekend, insiders said the crystallisation of a $130m valuation would mean that Mr Morgan’s economic interest was, on paper, worth tens of millions of pounds.
“The ambition is to grow this into a billion dollar company within a few years,” said one person close to the discussions with investors.
“With the scale of audiences now being driven to digital channels and the commercial opportunities there, that is definitely achievable.”
The former Mirror editor, whose career has also encompassed stints at ITV, with CNN in the US and Mr Murdoch’s global media conglomerates News Corporation and Fox, is now drawing up plans to transform Uncensored into a more diverse digital media group.
This is expected to include the launch of a series of ‘verticals’ attached to the Uncensored brand, including channels dedicated to subjects such as history, sport and technology.
Mr Morgan is already said to be in talks with prominent figures to spearhead some of these new strands, with a chief executive also expected to be recruited to drive the growth of the overall Uncensored business.
His appetite to establish a YouTube-based global media network has been driven by the scale of the global audiences he has drawn to some of his recent work, including interviews with the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and the former world tennis number one Novak Djokovic.
Piers Morgan interviewed Ronaldo. Pic: Reuters
Both of those athletes have collaborated with Mr Morgan by posting parts of their exchanges on social media platforms, attracting hundreds of millions of views.
Mr Morgan’s access to President Donald Trump, whom he has interviewed on several occasions, is also likely to be a factor in the timing of Uncensored’s expansion strategy.
While many ‘legacy’ news and media networks remain hamstrung by inflated cost bases, Mr Morgan’s decision to go it alone and focus on developing the Uncensored brand reflects his belief that the news and media industries are ripe for disintermediation by channels tied to prominent, and sometimes controversial, individual journalists and presenters.
The Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel has 4.3 million subscribers, roughly half of whom are from the US.
Of the remaining 50%, however, only a minority are British, with a significant number based in the Middle East, South Africa and parts of Asia.
Novak Djokovic at Flushing Meadows. Pic: AP
This has fuelled Mr Morgan’s view that there is journalistic and commercial mileage in creating content on issues which historically might have struggled to generate a significant international audience – such as ongoing military and political tension between India and Pakistan, and the white farmer ‘genocide’ furore in South Africa.
Under the deal he struck with Mr Murdoch in January this year, Mr Morgan has a four-year revenue-sharing agreement that involves News UK receiving a slice of the advertising revenue generated by Piers Morgan Uncensored until 2029.
Mr Morgan had returned to Mr Murdoch’s media empire in January 2022 with a three-year agreement that included writing regular columns for The Sun and New York Post, as well as presenting shows on the company’s now-folded television channel, Talk TV.
He also recently released a book, Woke Is Dead, which was published by Mr Murdoch’s books subsidiary, Harper Collins.
As part of his new arrangements, Mr Morgan also signed a deal with Red Seat Ventures, a US-based agency which partners with prominent media figures and influencers to help them exploit commercial opportunities through sponsorship and other revenue streams.
Among those Red Seat has worked with are Megyn Kelly, the American commentator, and Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News presenter.
While many well-known American news media figures are followed because of their partisanship and affiliations to either the political left or right, Mr Morgan has positioned himself as a ‘ringmaster’ who is not ideologically hidebound.
His plans come at a time of continuing upheaval in the global media industry, with Netflix agreeing a landmark $83bn deal this week to buy the Hollywood studio Warner Bros.
In the UK, Sky, the Comcast-owned immediate parent company of Sky News, is in talks to acquire ITV’s broadcasting business, while the Daily Telegraph newspaper could soon find itself as a stablemate of the Daily Mail if a proposed £500m deal is successful.
Meanwhile, Reach, the London-listed newspaper publisher which owns the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, now has a market valuation of just £176m – less than double that of Mr Morgan’s new standalone digital media company.
When Sky News revealed Mr Morgan’s move to separate from News UK earlier this year, he said: “Owning the [Uncensored] brand allows my team and I the freedom to focus exclusively on building Uncensored into a standalone business, editorially and commercially, and in time, widening it from just me and my content.
“It’s clear from the… US election that YouTube is an increasingly powerful and influential media platform, and Uncensored is one of the fastest-growing shows on it in the world.
“I’m very excited about the potential for Uncensored.”
This weekend, he added: “I am very excited that some of the most experienced and successful players in the global media industry, like Joe, Michael and Theo, share my ambitious vision for Uncensored.
“This is the future of modern media.”
