Last year, I asked whether GB News might turn out to be merely an expensive way to launch a YouTube channel. And the tentative answer, for now, seems to be ‘no.
TalkTV, on the other hand, might well be shaping up to be a very expensive way to launch a YouTube channel.
Despite a much higher budget and an extremely expensive star signing in Piers Morgan, it is currently badly under-performing its rival. And outside Morgan’s ‘tentpole’ show, it isn’t even close.
Although it is too early to conduct a post-mortem, a lot of the early analysis seems to track that of what went wrong with the GB News launch.
There were fewer technical difficulties, but the same broader questions about what exactly the channel is for and who it’s audience is. And whilst GB News was sometimes dismissed as “radio with pictures”, TalkTV’s initial schedule has shows, such as ‘The Independent Republic of Mike Graham’, which are literally already TalkRadio products.
Guido also advances a persuasive case that the British market is simply oversaturated with political content; TalkTV in particular chasing a small segment of that market which has by now had almost a year to get used to GB News.
So much for the explanations. But what’s really bizarre is that Rupert Murdoch watched ‘Britain’s news channel’s’ rocky start, took almost a year to get his house in order, and then made so many of the same mistakes – a far cry from the expectation I encountered before launch that he’d come in with a slicker product and start poaching GB News’ best people.
It need not have been this way. Apparently at least two alternative visions for a right-wing channel were discussed when TalkTV was being set up.
The first would be a full-blown news channel, of the sort Fox News is and GB News is not, with full teams of journalists producing packages and so on. The other would be what one source called “the Al Jazeera option”, which would apparently have involved investing a lot of money in producing high-quality documentary content.
In the end, both were rejected for the talk-show-led alternative.
TalkTV may yet find its feet, and its audience. But if it doesn’t, in itself that probably won’t matter all that much – it has not yet made sufficient impact to be missed. But could it be a spoiler for GB News?
At present, the channel has apparently built a viewer base of around 70,000. As initially reported in the Financial Times, at one point at least it was aiming to have “134,000 paying ‘members'” by its fifth year. Other sources suggests it needs around 100,000 to be viable once the start-up money runs out.
Given how badly it is currently losing the ratings war, TalkTV is unlikely to be causing any lost sleep in Paddington. If anything, perhaps the opposite. According to iNews: “An unintended consequence of TalkTV is that it has encouraged viewers to take a second look at GB News”.
So perhaps Murdoch might actually get a right-wing challenger media channel over the line after all. Just not his own.