Reality TV program’s on-screen ratings are one thing; 142 million views online is quite another
IT was the big-budget, low-brow reality show written off as trashy telly for Millennials — but Love Island Australia is now being hailed as the future of TV. POLL: DID SHOW GET RIGHT WINNERS?
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IT was the big-budget, low-brow reality show written off as trashy telly for Millennials — but Love Island Australia is now being hailed as the future of TV.
Industry experts and TV executives say that the reality dating show’s multi-platform, digital-first format will change the game for commercial networks, with almost as many people tuning in on digital devices as watching live in their loungeroom.
Filled with contestants flaunting fake tans, plucked eyebrows and perfect hair (and that was just the boys), Love Island Australia was a perve-fest of six-packs, bikinis and boob jobs.
Performing sexy strip teases, rating each other’s pashing techniques, naming their favourite sex positions and feeling each other up to find “the best body in the villa” was all in a day’s work for the twenty-something so-called “islanders”.
When they weren’t hooking up, they were throwing punches and drinks — and viewers couldn’t get enough.
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With early viewing figures barely cracking 200,000 and a chorus of psychologists, viewers and even reality TV stars slamming the content, the youth-focused show copped an intense amount of criticism before it had barely got off the ground.
Former The Bachelorette star Georgia Love — herself no stranger to the reality TV dating world — called the show “absolutely abhorrent” while child psychologist Michael Carr Gregg slammed the show as an “oestrogen buffet” for “over-sexed meat-heads with six packs”.
But six weeks later, with the first season now wrapped up and the king and queen of Love Island Australia crowned last night, Nine is already championing the multi-platform success of the show as “unprecedented in the Australian TV landscape”.
And that’s not necessarily because of the number of people who watched the show but “how” the mainly 16- to 39-year-old target audience watched it — with just as many watching live on their devices or catching up with the show on demand.
Total consolidated figures for linear TV, live streaming on 9Now and on demand (catch-up) viewing reveal an average 492,000 viewers for each episode.
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Add to that the show’s 177,000 YouTube subscribers and a whopping 142 million views of the show’s juiciest clips, and it’s clear the show’s reach goes well beyond just the 9Go audience.
Some individual clips such as “the boys treat the girls to a sexy strip tease” has been watched 1.9 million times, while “the great bikini war of Love Island Australia” was played 1.7 million times and “the guys rank the girls’ pashing technique” was viewed more than 1.6 million times.
While only 15 per cent of those YouTube views came from Australia, Nine was able to take advantage of the remaining 85 per cent, mainly from the UK, via advertising.
Nine programming chief Hamish Turner said that the show’s performance has been unlike anything ever seen on free-to-air TV.
“The results have been fantastic and have provided us with a bit of a blueprint for what the future has in store,” he said.
“The performance of Love Island is unprecedented in the Australian TV landscape and that’s because it is a fully integrated, cross-platform venture and I don’t think anyone has done it properly before.”
Mr Turner said that Love Island has been credited with redefining the measure of TV success in a multi-platform world.
“Editorially, we are really happy with the show, creatively it delivered in spades and digitally, it outperformed where our projections were.”
More than 200,000 people also downloaded the Love Island Australia app to be able to vote on the show. Mr Turner said Nine was already talking about season two.