Love Island Mallorca producers may have been worried about the weather hampering the launch of the new series on Monday night, but it looks like they should be more concerned about the viewing figures.
The launch episode of the latest season was watched on ITV2 by an average of 1.3 million people, over a million viewers fewer than 2022’s summer launch which reached an average audience of 2.4 million according to industry figures.
The figure for the latest series is a whole two million less than the number that tuned in to watch the premiere episode in 2019 but Love Island has suffered controversy and a decline in popularity since.
But ITV hit back stating that the figure grew to 1.7 million when factoring in streaming numbers from ITVX and that the show was the second most watched in its time slot.
For context, this figure is down on the winter edition held in South Africa, which began airing in January and attracted 1.4 million viewers.
It is also a drop of around one million viewers compared with last year’s summer run, which had almost double the amount of people watching, with 2.4 million tuning in.