Piers Morgan Clips<\/a> \/ YouTube<\/p>\nBoth are primarily YouTube ventures, but of course they use every social channel going to promote their hosts and their particular approach to content. While Holly\u2019s foray into YouTube is new, Piers has been at it since 2021. He now has 4.45 million subscribers and has made 2,455 videos. That\u2019s more than one new video every single day for nearly five years. The man is working hard.<\/p>\n
And the hard work is paying off. This summer he raised $27 million (around \u20ac23.4 million) from investors at a reported valuation of $145 million (\u20ac125 million) to expand his YouTube empire. He\u2019s clearly enjoying it. \u201cThis is the most fun I\u2019ve ever had,\u201d he recently told the Financial Times, \u201cbecause I own the train set.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the sentence everyone in the media should pay attention to. Owning the train set matters more than driving someone else\u2019s locomotive. Morgan isn\u2019t alone in owning his own vehicle. Gary Lineker has transformed Goalhanger from a podcast company into one of Britain\u2019s fastest-growing media businesses. In America, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Joe Rogan have all built audiences that rival or exceed many television channels.<\/p>\n
These are very different people with different backgrounds. But economically, they\u2019re all doing the same thing. They\u2019re using the online tools of the creator economy to reach the audiences they have garnered over years on traditional media. And they\u2019re making a killing doing it.<\/p>\n
The internet, and YouTube in particular, has removed the barriers to entry to reach an audience. Think about your own habits. If you watch Piers Morgan on YouTube, do you think you\u2019re watching YouTube? Of course not. You\u2019re watching Piers Morgan. You\u2019d never say \u201cI\u2019m spending the evening with Alphabet\u201d because we follow people, not platforms.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why so many familiar media personalities are discovering they don\u2019t need to rent an audience from a broadcaster any more. They can reach their own audience via online tools like YouTube, Substack and Spotify. In doing so, they\u2019re owning their own commercial destinies.<\/p>\n
Oddly enough, audiences are independently moving away from traditional media outlets. The most recent Reuters Digital News Report found that 47% of Irish people now actively avoid the news at least some of the time, the highest figure ever recorded. Trust in news has slipped to 42%, although Ireland still performs better than many comparable countries. At first glance, it sounds like bad news for journalism.<\/p>\n
But another study from Navigator Research in the United States paints a more interesting picture. People aren\u2019t necessarily becoming less informed. They\u2019re becoming less intentional about how they get informed. Many of those who describe themselves as \u201cpassive\u201d news consumers still encounter current affairs every day. But nowadays they\u2019re stumbling across news while thumbing through Instagram or doomscrolling through TikTok. News, it seems, is becoming something we find while we\u2019re doing something else. News is no longer the main event.<\/p>\n
But this isn\u2019t the case when it comes to actively choosing to be informed by the likes of Piers Morgan or Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart. The hosts have become the destinations. And these creators aren\u2019t asking their audience to change their routine and to make an appointment at 6pm to watch the news. They\u2019re available whenever you are in your feed.<\/p>\n
For years legacy media\u2019s biggest fear was how Google and Facebook created far more effective advertising propositions \u2013 and sucked up all the ad spend. But perhaps the bigger risk is that their talent realises they can go it alone. If you already have a reputation, an audience and something worth saying, you no longer need permission from a commissioner or a scheduler. You can build your own business, own your own intellectual property, sell your own advertising, launch subscriptions, stage live events, publish books and licence your content to broadcasters who once employed you.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s exactly what Morgan is doing. After building his audience on YouTube (with the help of Rupert Murdoch\u2019s TalkTV, it should be noted) he\u2019s now selling highlight packages back to television broadcasters in lucrative licensing deals. The broadcasters have become the customers. That would have been unimaginable 20 years ago.<\/p>\n
Ireland is such a small market that it\u2019s unlikely this sort of thing will become common here. But there\u2019s still a valid question about how Irish media retains its best talent when the economics of independence improve every year. Because if the creator economy has taught us anything, it\u2019s that the real value in media is no longer the printing press, the television mast or the radio transmitter. It\u2019s the person talking to you that really matters.<\/p>\n
Steve Dempsey is a media and technology expert and commentator<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Steve Dempsey HAVE YOU SEEN Holly Willoughby Together? Unlike many middle-aged men, I have. It\u2019s like watching TV…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":586397,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[23731,93,247506,12560,145722,61,60,43,25071,4621],"class_list":["post-586396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-content-creators","tag-entertainment","tag-future-of-news","tag-gary-lineker","tag-holly-willoughby","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-piers-morgan","tag-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586396\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/586397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/independent-news-media-steve-dempsey_clipped_rev_1-133x133.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n