Karl Stefanovic is free, uncensored and pulling a bigger audience than the Today Show

The scoreboard has delivered its verdict on the Karl Stefanovic saga, and it belongs to Karl. His sit down with British broadcaster Piers Morgan has passed 320,000 views since going up on Wednesday night, while Today, the program Nine removed him from, drew 268,000 viewers on television the same day. Weeks after being shown the door over his Tommy Robinson interview, the man himself is out drawing the network that dropped him.

TV ratings and online views measure different audiences, but the direction of travel is plain. His YouTube channel has built to about 172,000 subscribers, several interviews have pulled audiences well into six figures, and the numbers keep climbing while Today keeps falling. Sunrise averaged 449,000 viewers this week against Today's 252,000, a gap of almost 200,000 every single morning.

What the fallout cost him at home

The Morgan episode, recorded from France, was also the first time Stefanovic has spoken about his exit, and he made no apology for the interview that triggered it.

"I thought Tommy Robinson was a legitimate interview for us to pick up what's happening on the right, what's happening on the streets, and you know, (Robinson) came in, and we did it. I put it up on air, and then a couple of days later, boom."

He became emotional about the toll on his wife Jasmine.

"Just my wife, because she puts up with a lot," he said. "Her finding out this stuff and having to deal with me, because I'm a lot, and I'm in the public a lot. I really do work hard, and I'm away a bit, and she knows what I'm trying to do with this podcast."

The comeback is gathering pace

Stefanovic has real skin in the game, with sources saying he's the only member of the team to have put his own money into the venture, and the momentum around it is building fast. The Daily Telegraph reports future guests will be more mainstream as the show broadens its appeal to advertisers, publishers are circling a potential memoir, and long time manager Sharon Finnigan remains in his corner.

The registered Kyle and Karl domains continue to fuel talk of a venture with Kyle Sandilands, though sources say Stefanovic had no hand in registering them. Nine paid him millions to sit behind the Today desk. Free of the network, answering to nobody, he brought the audience with him, and it's still growing.

The bookings got bigger while Nine got smaller

The weeks since have gone the same way. Karl Stefanovic has teased an interview with Ben Roberts-Smith, calling it the interview of the decade, a booking no Australian network has managed to land. In the same period Nine announced it was axing 30 jobs of its own.

That is the part the ratings numbers only half capture. A television network carries studios, crews, sales teams and a board. A man with a camera, a microphone and an audience carries none of it, and can book a guest on Tuesday and publish on Wednesday without anyone upstairs deciding whether the interview is acceptable. The economics now favour the second model, which is why Kyle Sandilands is building a subscription show of his own.

For viewers the shift is already showing up in what gets asked. The interview that ended Stefanovic's Nine career would almost certainly not have run on Today. It ran on his podcast, and 320,000 people watched it.