The real winners of Loot Island
...no, not the stars who sell their souls for just £1.48 per hour for a shot at stardom (and the chance of millions in spin-offs.) It’s the TV masterminds behind tawdry reality show Love Island rolling in it
S UCK in that six-pack and plump up that pout, the most hyped TV show of the summer is back.
Love Island, which started on ITV2 on Monday, has locked 12 more Instagram-perfect attention seekers in a house in Majorca and invited them to ‘couple up’.
Now in its fifth series, the pop culture phenomenon has broken TV ratings records, won a Bafta, and launched the (probably short) careers of a whole new category of ‘stars’.
More than that, it has made an awful lot of money. It is about to launch on CBS in America in a deal worth millions to ITV, which has already sold versions of the show to Germany, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. Advertising on the UK version alone is said to be worth around £25 million, while sponsorship revenue brings in another £5 million.
In a bid to counter negative publicity following the suicides of two former contestants, the broadcaster announced improved counselling for islanders and axed some of the more combative elements, such as the so-called lie detectors.
So who are the biggest winners — and losers — on Loot Island?
WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO?
Love Island was originally called Celebrity Love Island and devised by ITV executives Claudia Rosencrantz and Natalka Znak in 2005 to counter Big Brother’s success on Channel 4. It flopped and was axed after series two, but returned in 2015, renamed Love Island and aimed at 16 to 34-year-olds.
This time, ITV executive Richard Cowles — also one of the originators of I’m A Celebrity . . . — is responsible for the format. Which makes him one of the biggest earners in entertainment, right?
Wrong! As an ITV staff member, the programme rights belong to his employers. And, as the show’s executive producer and creative director of ITV studios entertainment, he is understood to be on a deal worth around £300,000 a year.
Married with a teenage son, Cowles admitted last year: ‘Sadly I’m on a salary, so I just get the warm feeling of success.’ He added: ‘ We didn’t expect series three to be so big. When it launched in 2015 it wasn’t an immediate hit.
‘Production is expensive, it took quite a bit of vision to get people to stay with it — but each year it doubled its ratings. It’s unifying — it’s attracted a young audience in a way people didn’t think was possible any more.’
Last year, it was the mostwatched show on any channel at 9pm, and the most followed on Instagram, with 1.7 million followers. ITV doesn’t wholly own the rights. Co-producer Motion Content Group has a chunk and the company is itself owned by ad giant WPP. The makers won’t say how much the show earns, but according to the last filed accounts for Motion Content Group, the company has a revenue of just over £43 million — much of it generated by Love Island.
A BONANZA FOR THE AD MEN . . .
A slot during the ITV2 show is thought to cost advertisers more than £100,000, and Love Island’s engagement with young viewers with high disposable incomes makes it an ad man’s dream. Network boss Carolyn McCall said last year: ‘Love Island is a phenomena which has got legs that will be commercially fantastic for ITV.’
Last summer, following Love Island, ITV reported an 8 per cent rise in total revenue to £1.8 billion. Total advertising revenues rose 2 per cent to total £890 million.
Dame Carolyn said the World Cup and Love Island had made ‘outstanding contributions’ to that increase. A TV source suggests the show may earn as much as £25 million in advertising revenue, though ITV sources say that the figure ‘ sounds high’. It all rather makes the £50,000 of prize money sound like absolute chicken feed.
… AND SPONSORS
A new sponsor is in place this year, and paying more than double what was