Mailwatch(ed) Forum

To paraphrase a certain newspaper from nearly 30 years ago, "Will the last person watching Piers Morgan please turn out the lights"!

What I don't understand about Morgan is that he claims to have 7 million followers on Twitter yet when he left GMB a bout 200,000 of his fans could be arsed to sign a petition to get him his job back and now he is at TalkTV less than 50,000 of his followers can be bothered to tune in. Anybody would think that most of his Twitter followers have been recruited via some dodgy site on the dark web.

I follow a lot of folks on Twitter out of inertia. It's the nature of the beast, you click once and can promptly forget your ever did.

He's noticeably coy about his actual engagement numbers or the obligatory "ratio".

I follow a lot of folks on Twitter out of inertia. It's the nature of the beast, you click once and can promptly forget your ever did.

7.9m though? Jon Stewart has 1.3m

Follow =/= like. Morbid curiosity accounts for a fair few, I'd guess.

He was on the old Apprentice and America’s got talent, probably drove some of his fan count

MisterMuncher wrote: ↑Thu May 12, 2022 9:56 pm I follow a lot of folks on Twitter out of inertia. It's the nature of the beast, you click once and can promptly forget your ever did.

He's noticeably coy about his actual engagement numbers or the obligatory "ratio".

I believe that engagement is the money driver on YouTube. Sponsors and advertisers look at the proportion of likes and comments in relation to a channel's subscribers. This is why you'll often hear " Let me know what you think in the comments". I know the amount of comments particularly was a massive factor for potential sponsors on Instagram a few years ago (not from direct personal experience), it probably still is.

On another level, it's the most reliable metric. You don't know why any particular person is following you, but you can track the numbers. X million people can't all be wrong etc.

Variety magazine has an article on how the Americanised style of blow-hard news pundits giving their opinions isn't exactly a ratings success in the UK...

Who Cares About Your Opinion? Why the Foxification of British News Isn’t Working (Column)

https://variety.com/2022/tv/global/pier ... 235266461/

Some nice bits from it...

“Piers Morgan Uncensored” has consistently shed viewers, from 317,000 overnight viewers on launch day, to less than 60,000 just over two weeks later. Wednesday’s episode received an average of 44,000 viewers, according to ratings body BARB. In comparison, a repeat of digital channel Quest’s “Salvage Hunters,” where people discover rusty old objects, received on average three times more viewers.

Piers has downplayed the importance of these ratings, saying that “linear TV is increasingly irrelevant to the total eyeball potential for a global show like this.” His show is also distributed far and wide, simulcast on its sister radio station talkRADIO and also broadcast on Sky News Australia. It is also available on the streaming network FOX Nation in the U.S., which means that the show’s true success (or failure) is relatively opaque like many shows on streaming services. Yet, you only need to head to the show’s YouTube to see that clips and entire episodes rarely rise above 10,000 viewers. He’s got an uphill battle to climb.

Oh, and KGB News gets a mention...

GB News has since widened its reach to a radio station and on-demand. It has relied on clips being spliced up to be shared on social media and has touted “billions” of digital views. In an interview with Press Gazette, the news network claimed that TikTok was one of their most popular platforms, where it has more than 200,000 followers. Yet in comparison, a TikTok account of a British man feeding his pet seagull currently has 3.2 million. You can’t help but wonder whether, as the channel is reaching its first anniversary, it is matching its expectations.

News is off limits to pundits on LBC and these presenter are expected to conduct interviews with journalistic rigour. That’s as far as the rules on impartiality should be stretched. GB News and Talk TV are in RT territory.

But over time, there was an understanding that these rules were actually looser than initially thought. Broadcasters realized that you could have different hosts with different political opinions on at different times to achieve balance, such as talk radio station LBC having the politically left-leaning James O’Brien on in the morning, followed by the more right-leaning Iain Dale later on in the evening.

You'd need a heart of reinforced concrete ...

I foresee a vacant slot on a mux soon...

Meanwhile, from https://rxtvinfo.com/2022/neil-bbc-news ... -by-rivals

Goodbye to the age of rage: why Piers Morgan’s outrage journalism is flopping

The “legacy” media have long since been infected by the same virus. The best news broadcasting, it seems to me, is necessarily based around reporting. Its polar opposite is exemplified by the insane levels of attention paid by orthodox news outlets to such people as Farage and Laurence Fox, and the comically mouthy pundits – from both left and right – who endlessly appear on TV news channels, and aim to sooner or later make it on to BBC One’s Question Time. The first demands resources, time, care and attention; punditry and polemic, by contrast, require little more than cab fares and paltry appearance fees. Herein lies one overlooked danger in the government’s hostility to the BBC and its plans to privatise Channel 4: if broadcasting is left to the market, the reduction of news to “talk” will only accelerate.

But the best example is surely Boris Johnson and his colleagues’ increasingly tedious “war on woke”, whereby ministers sound off about the evils of working from home, the sanctity of statues and whatever else, and their words dissolve into the same white noise that emanates from the mouths of Morgan et al. Herein lies a model of government copied from Donald Trump, whereby leaders are not there to actually do anything, but to endlessly orchestrate outrage and division to their advantage.

Apparently Piers Morgan is taking a six week sabbatical from Talk TV. In the words of Cyril Smith 'Why can't he just piss off on holiday like anybody else?'

Already? He's barely been there five minutes.

Boiler wrote: ↑Fri May 27, 2022 11:10 pm Already? He's barely been there five minutes.

"Two Brillos" - in TV news figurehead terms.

satnav wrote: ↑Fri May 27, 2022 10:33 pm Apparently Piers Morgan is taking a six week sabbatical from Talk TV. In the words of Cyril Smith 'Why can't he just piss off on holiday like anybody else?'

It'll be a good laugh if the ratings on his regular weekday evening slot actually go up while he's gone.

Well they certainly can't get any lower!