Love Island season 10 premiered on Monday, June 5, against the backdrop of a lot of social media fanfare. However, that social media noise hasn’t translated to excellent ratings for the famous British reality TV dating series. On the contrary, the Monday night premiere of Love Island season 10 drew only 1.3 million viewers, nearly half of the 2.4 million viewers who tuned in for the 2022 summer edition.
Even though the season is in full swing and a lot of drama is already going on in the villa, the ratings for the show have continued to drop — with only 779,000 viewers tuning in for the third episode. Compared to the previous episode, Love Island 2023 featured a dip of over 100,000 viewers between the two nights. However, these figures do not include viewers who tuned in on ITVX or joined the show later.
Although the producers are downplaying the numbers, the rating dip is fast becoming a worrying trend. Even the influence and social media clout of new host Maya Jama didn’t do much to stem the decline. The 2023 Winter Love Island also saw a decline in ratings — with just 1.4 million viewers tuning in for the premiere episode. This is a far cry from Love Island‘s peak years from 2017 to 2019, when each episode pulled as many as 3.3 million viewers. Despite producers trying some new features, it hasn’t added much intrigue to the season. However, to solve a problem, you first need to understand the source.
Winter Love Island Took Away The Summer Excitement
The 2023 Winter Love Island season ended on March 13 after eight weeks of drama and crazy love triangles. Away from all of the drama, the show introduced fans to several interesting contestants. Winter Love Island 2023 also produced many successful relationships that are still strong today. Although Winter Love Island 2023 didn’t enjoy good ratings like previous years, it still featured many memorable moments. It was an excellent watch for most viewers who dedicatedly followed each episode. Asking fans to hop on a new train after the recent winter series ended is unrealistic and overwhelming.
Most Love Island fans are still busy keeping up with some of their faves from the previous season. Usually, it takes several months before fans start to get tired of following the lives of Love Island alums, especially the ones who come out of the villa as an official couple. Fans are still fixated on the Winter Love Island 2023 stars. This has undoubtedly played a significant role in the abysmal ratings of the ongoing summer edition.
Love Island 2023 Received Less Promotion
Season 10 of Love Island premiered so close to the Winter Love Island finale that the producers also made a mess of promoting the summer edition. Previous seasons of Love Island earned so much promotion from showrunners for several months before the premiere. However, this year’s summer edition only started getting promoted a few weeks beforehand.
Anyone in entertainment knows how big a role promotion plays in the success of any project. The right publicity is necessary to build enough hype around a show. This will drive the fans’ interest before the show’s release date. And in the earlier years of Love Island, promotion was one area the producers never joked with. But that hasn’t been the case in recent years. On Reddit, fans talked about the show’s poor ratings while reacting to a thread from u/Fresh_Olive_6812. In a very precise summary of what almost all the fans felt, one user u/putinception said,
“Winter season didn’t do it any favors, and also I saw next to no promos for this summer season. How do you expect people to get hype without promoting it at least a little bit more than you did?”
The producers’ refusal to invest more into promoting the recent seasons is strange. Whether it is laziness or just plain complacency, they would be doing the show a world of good if they snapped out of it fast, or risk more poor ratings.
Love Island Has Refused To Evolve
Love Island is arguably one of the biggest British reality TV shows, and it has enjoyed great patronage from fans since it first debuted on ITV2 in 2015. Unlike the fans of other reality TV shows, Love Island fans are very passionate. They follow every aspect of the series very dedicatedly. The cult following of the fans became apparent when over 3.5 million viewers tuned in for the 2019 season premiere. Although this has guaranteed the show’s meteoric rise, it also has a downside. After 10 seasons, which doesn’t even include the Winter editions, the fans have virtually seen everything the show offers.
The viewers know what to expect before each season begins. Sadly, the producers have been very slow in introducing new changes to spice things up. The only significant difference made to the series recently is allowing the public to decide on the couples, which was introduced in the current season. As the drought of exciting new features has persisted for many years, some fans have opted to miss the earlier parts of each season and only tune in during Casa Amor to get some drama. After Casa Amor, they revert to watching the show only when they feel like it.
Fans Find The Cast Unrelatable
Another reason why the Love Island ratings are plummeting is because the fans can’t seem to relate with the cast. Fans are more engaged when the series features a mature cast; this preference is not a secret. This is a prevalent trend in reality TV dating series as fans feel mature contestants are more likely to be serious about finding love than younger contestants.
The show usually produces more genuine connections when the cast line-up features an older age bracket. Fans enjoy the show more when this happens. Unfortunately, this season’s cast features very young contestants. For now, none of the Islanders is older than 26, and there are two 21-year-olds as well as two other contestants who are 22. While commenting on the Reddit thread, one user, u/emmaja_ne, wrote,
“I’m in my 30s now and have watched since the earlier series. I just feel like I don’t relate with the people on love island anymore! I’m looking forward to the middle-aged one coming out with Davina now!”
Previous seasons that have featured a more mature cast line-up generally enjoy more patronage from fans. then it’s not such a big surprise that the current season’s ratings have been poor. However, the arrival of 25-year-old sexy new bombshell Whitney Adebayo has generated some buzz, and producers hope the show will catch on.
