Celebrity Love Island Wins Reality Fans’ Hearts Online
Celebrity Love Island is stealing the hearts of reality TV fans, with online searches for ITV’s latest offering shown to have increased 10-fold, according to leading online competitive intelligence service, Hitwise.
Currently the term “Celebrity Love Island” is receiving 0.020% of all online searches, compared with searches for Big Brother only attracting 0.008%.
Traffic to the official Celebrity Love Island website, www.celebrityloveisland.tv, has also rocketed since the show’s debut, with the site ranked at 14 in the Hitwise Entertainment Television category based on daily data.
Internet searches for Abi Titmuss, one of the show’s contestants, have also seen a marked increase since the show began, with the glamour model now the most searched for personality in the UK.
ITV achieved a peak of 5.67 million viewers on Celebrity Love Island’s first night, securing a peak of 2 million amongst 16-34s, trouncing all of its terrestrial rivals who failed to break the one million mark (see 5.7 Million Join ITV For Celebrity Love In).
The return to form for ITV followed the broadcaster’s decision to axe Celebrity Wrestling after just three weeks, citing an ever declining audience share as the reason for its demise (seeITV Drops Wrestling As Ratings Hit The Floor).
The new show is a much more glamorous affair, however, with ten celebrities whisked to a Fijian island, with the fate of their love lives handed to ITV1 viewers via text and phone votes.
Channel 4 launched Big Brother’s sixth series on Friday, which will run for an unprecedented 100 days, overlapping with Celebrity Love Island to provide a summer of unrivalled reality-show broadcasts (see Channel 4 Gears Up For Biggest Ever Brother).
The new series will see Channel 4’s New Media division rekindle its relationship with Real Networks to launch a 24-hour online channel for the programme, as well as a mobile portal, complete with video feeds, operated by mobile content firm, Volantis.
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