Love Island USA has undeniably elevated its profile since last year’s bombshell of a season.
The series returned with Season 7 on June 3 and by the end of the following week it was the second most-watched streaming show on television. From June 6 to 12, the season racked up 1.2B minutes viewed across nine available episodes, per Luminate’s streaming data.
That’s a 244% increase over the week prior, when the first few episodes drew about 335M minutes viewed. However, the most impressive gains are season-over-season.
Season 6 outperformed every prior season of the show by a mile, but it wasn’t until around the second week of July (which was about a month into the season’s six-week run) that it really took off.
In fact, Luminate reported that Season 6 had tallied 500.7M minutes viewed the week of June 21. Since Season 6 premiered on June 11, the timing is a bit off, but that’s about 15 available episodes drawing half the weekly viewership that Season 7 has with nine. Season 6 didn’t crack a billion minutes viewed until the week of July 8.
Things have been heating up very quickly on Season 7 of Love Island USA, which airs nearly in real time. So, it is likely that the viewership will keep increasing, especially given that some of the series’ signature and highly anticipated twists like Casa Amor and Movie Night have yet to happen. It will be interesting to see how far the show will go and whether it’ll completely surpass Season 6’s viewership high.
Also, Love Island UK has also launched in the week since this data was recorded, which could affect Love Island USA viewership as well, since there is a bit of overlap in the audiences. Whether the impact will be positive or negative remains to be seen. The two could encourage increased engagement given that overlap, or it could end up fueling a bit of fatigue, since both shows air new episodes six days a week.
The one thing that is clear is that Season 6 definitely catapulted the U.S. iteration of the reality dating series to unprecedented levels of popularity. That explains why Peacock has granted a whole new reality series to that cast, setting Love Island: Beyond the Villa to debut in July.
Love Island USA is produced by ITV America. The series is based on a format owned by Lifted Entertainment and GroupM Motion Entertainment and distributed by ITV Studios.
Luminate is owned by Deadline’s parent company, Penske Media Corporation.
