It’s my understanding that Kenzie (in white, hugging that guy) was one of the main characters on Love Island USA this season.
Photo by Ben Symons/Peacock
While a crap-ton of people were watching the early knockout rounds of the World Cup, another crap-ton of people were also watching Love Island USA. And in quite a few cases, the same people: As part of its World Cup victory lap, Telemundo noted that 40 percent of Love Island USA viewers also watched some World Cup programming on Peacock.
In what has become an annual thing now, the show arrives in June and becomes one of the biggest shows on any streaming platform for the next couple of months. Having daily episodes is absolutely a factor — Love Island is putting out 30-plus episodes per season, as opposed to eight or 10 for most other streaming shows. Still, it doesn’t routinely post more than a billion minutes of viewing time — often closer to 2 billion — without a sizable number of people streaming those episodes each night.
Nielsen counts all available episodes of a show toward its viewing time total each week, but it has said that 90 percent or more of all the time spent with Love Island this year has been for the current season (which wrapped on July 12; a reunion show is coming in late August). A given week’s new episodes account for between 60 percent and 70 percent of the total.
In short, it’s a big ol’ hit, particularly with young women. Nielsen says women 18-34 make up about 40 percent of the audience, a very high concentration for any streaming show. For the week of June 29-July 5, the show had 1.94 billion minutes of watch time, just off its all-time high of 1.97 billion a week earlier. It was No. 1 overall for the third time in five weeks this summer and has rolled up 8.73 billion minutes of viewing time since season 8 premiered. That’s up 28 percent from the same time last season.
Onto the weekly charts, which also include a bump for The Bear and a couple notable movie premieres …
Overall top 10, June 29-July 5
Show/Movie | Streamer(s) | Minutes viewed in millions | Episode count |
Love Island USA | Peacock/Disney+/Paramount+ | 1,944 | 277 |
I Will Find You* | Netflix | 1,101 | 8 |
Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024) | Netflix | 1,098 | 15 |
Worst Neighbor Ever | Netflix | 1,027 | 4 |
The Last Ship | Netflix | 942 | 59 |
Bluey | Disney+ | 916 | 154 |
House of the Dragon | HBO Max | 912 | 21 |
Project Hail Mary** | Prime Video | 860 | 1 |
Dutton Ranch*** | Paramount+ | 827 | 9 |
Grey's Anatomy | Hulu/Netflix | 818 | 467 |
*This is the third week on the U.S.-only Nielsen charts for I Will Find You. On Netflix’s worldwide rankings, the show entered its all-time top 10 among English-language series and will probably end up a few spots higher by the 91-day cutoff Netflix uses. I talked with showrunner Robert Hull and author Harlan Coben about the milestone at THR.
**The excellent Project Hail Mary put up pretty big numbers for its first week on Prime.
***Dutton Ranch ends its first season with a near-high (it had 840 million viewing minutes in mid-June) and a total of a little more than 6 billion minutes for the time while new episodes were rolling out. I suspect it will hang around another week or two.