Love Island Popularity In Short Form Content
Rise in viewing figures because, and in spite, of TikTok.
Love Island 2025 kicked off its twelfth series on 9th June. The dating reality show sees Islanders in a villa in Mallorca coupling up to try to find love in aid of winning £50,000. Since series eight, featuring the icons Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu, Indiyah Polack, Tasha Ghouri, and of course Davide Sanclimenti, the audience figures had fallen. However, this summer, the iconic programme has regained its prominence.
The reason for this is thanks to the show’s growing presence on social media. While TikTok, X, and Instagram have always been locations of much dramatic discourse regarding the show, a new trend has exploded. Analysis by the BBC found that Love Island’s official accounts gained 1.8m followers since the start of 2025, with 1m of those on TikTok – people are preferring to watch the episodes in shorter form content. In addition to clips of specific dramatic or funny moments, individual content creators are recapping entire episodes in a few minutes, garnering massive viewership. The enormity of this trend is cemented in the fact that there has been more than 87,000 TikTok uploads with a Love Island hashtag so far in 2025 – more than double the amount across the whole of 2024.
The reason for this trend is the accessibility of keeping up to date with the show, rather than the commitment of tuning in nightly for an hour. While this creates an even more edited version, lending opportunity for the islanders to be taken out of context, it allows people to keep up to date.
This growth on socials is outpacing its TV success this year, with the viewership not reaching the heights of Love Island’s heyday. Individual TikToks are often outperforming entire episodes in terms of views. However, this series is still doing significantly better than those over the last few years: the first episode of series twelve was watched by almost double that of the 2023 series premiere.
While it appears that many are substituting watching the show in its TV form for its shortform clips, in actuality the promotion of the programme through its flourishing social media is possibly making people more inclined to tune in nightly.
In addition, the renewed success of the show may be as a result of the overlap with the US version of the show that’s recently finished (starring Amaya Espinal and Bryan Arenales as the winning couple). It also garnered its own fair share of online hype, cumulating in a boost for the original UK version.
As we approach the finale (4th August) Love Island 2025 seems to have successfully reinvented itself for the age of short-form content. With TikTok and Instagram reels playing a pivotal role in this resurgence, the show is not just surviving but evolving. Whether through nightly TV slots or viral one-minute videos, one thing is clear: Love Island still has the nation’s attention.
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