Piers Morgan is closing in on roughly $30m (£22.5m) in new funding to expand his YouTube venture, Uncensored, into a fully fledged global media business.
The deal would value the operation at about $130m (£97m).
Sky News revealed that the new investors include US merchant bank The Raine Group, whose co-founder Joe Ravitch, a key adviser on the attempted sales of Manchester United and Chelsea, is set to join Uncensored’s board.
Greek media mogul Theo Kyriakou, whose Antenna Group owns a stake in The News Movement, is also backing the round, alongside a cluster of international family offices.
Veteran media executive Michael Kassan is advising on commercial strategy and may invest personally.
The investment comes less than a year after Morgan struck a deal to walk away from Rupert Murdoch’s empire and take full ownership of the Uncensored channel.
The agreement sees News UK continue to receive a slice of YouTube advertising revenue until 2029, but leaves Morgan free to expand the brand independently.
A digital first media group
Morgan’s team is now drawing up plans to build Uncensored far beyond its flagship channel, with new verticals in sport, history and technology under consideration and talks already underway with prominent on-air figures to front them.
Sky News reported that a chief executive is expected to be hired to oversee the expansion.
The bullish growth plan has been fuelled by the audience Morgan has attracted on YouTube.
Uncensored now has 4.3 million subscribers, roughly half of them in the US, with significant reach across the Middle East, South Africa and Asia.
Interviews with Cristiano Ronaldo and Novak Djokovic have generated hundreds of millions of views across social media after the athletes shared clips themselves.
Morgan’s shift points to a wider industry breakaway from legacy structures as individual journalists increasingly build their own digital networks.
He claims there is room for a global, personality-led challenger with lower overheads than traditional media.
“Owning the brand allows my team and me the freedom to focus exclusively on building Uncensored into a standalone business,” he said earlier this year.
This weekend, he added: “Some of the most experienced players in global media share my ambitious vision. This is the future of modern media.”
This comes at a time where the sector is in flux, with Netflix striking an $83bn deal to acquire Warner Bros.
Meanwgile, in the UK Sky is in talks to buy ITV’s broadcasting business and the Telegraph could soon sit alongside the Daily Mail.
What’s more Reach, owner of the Mirror, Morgan’s former paper. now carries a market valuation of just £176m, barely double Uncensored’s implied worth.
Morgan has already begun moving Uncensored into more traditional formats.
Channel 5 will broadcast a weekly 90-minute round-up show built from the YouTube channel’s interviews and debates, in a deal described by commissioning editor Federico Ruiz as “a cross-cultural handshake that marks where the industry is heading”.
After leaving TalkTV, which has now been wound down by News UK, Morgan has made clear he is betting on what he calls “the disintermediation of modern media”.
With tens of millions in new funding and major US names on board, the broadcaster is preparing to test that thesis on a far larger stage.