Who will win Love Island 2018?

It’s the hottest show of the summer and it’s kept the nation glued to their TV’s for 8 solid weeks – but now the time has come to announce who will win Love Island 2018.

Every summer, Love Island is the series that keeps the nation at home, on the sofa, glued to their TV screens and 2018’s been no different. From Sam calling out Adam on the show’s very first day, Jack and Dani in the supermarket and Hayley’s thoughts on Brexit, Love Island 2018 has been a smash. The show’s ratings have doubled this year and it’s firmly established itself as the jewel in ITV 2’s crown.

But the question that everyone wants answered is who will win this year? We’ve had a good look through all of the online data in an attempt to come up with a prediction.

So, if you don’t want to know the result – look away now.

The available data

For this prediction, we’ve only used data that’s fully and publicly available, so we’re not claiming to have access to ITV’s analytics or anything like that. We’ve just reviewed data that is free and open before applying a bit of thought to it and seeing what we can learn. Thanks need to go to the major social networks, search engines, newspapers and anyone else who’s compiled data about this year’s series. This was all compiled after the 11th eviction.

Let’s start by going old-school and look at the bookie’s odds.

The bookies remain a good indicator of the likely outcome of Love Island in the first instance, because they already have smart people who are using the data available to calculate the most likely result. Also, the changes in the couples’ odds will be influenced by the bets placed as the show progresses.

All of the bookmakers are placing Jack and Dani firm favourites in this year’s race, offering odds as short as 2/11 on them being crowned winners and they’ve held this view for a long time. Dark horses are appearing in the form Paul and Laura. While they’re still a distant 33/1 with bookmakers, the odds on them winning have been shortening in the last couple of days and their popularity should not be ignored. 888Sport had them at 40/1 on Wednesday night and 12/1 by the time Thursday’s show aired. Jack and Dani’s trend is moving decidedly in the other direction.

We’ll still call this round to Jack and Dani.

Now, everybody’s favourite, social media
Twitter is the obvious place to start. We found over 100,000 tweets relating to #LoveIsland and the couples, when everything is analysed together. If we picked the winners based solely on the number of mentions that a couple receives, then Jack and Dani are way out in front. Just short of 2/3rds of the tweets we found mentioned them and about 60% of those tweets were positive. Megan and Wes are performing well on social media though. They account for around 12.5% of tweets and around 65% of these were positive. Also, they are featured in tweets more and more in recent days so the love for them is growing.

When it comes to Instagram, Jack and Dani once again deliver the best numbers. Their combined Instagram accounts now total close to 3m followers with Megan and Wes in a distant second with something approach 1.75m who are closely followed by Alex and Alexandra with around 1.4m combined followers.

There are some factors at play with this data though – Jack and Dani have had the longest relationship on the island and that will boost their follower counts and the fact that Dani’s father is himself a celebrity will have helped to boost her follower and mention numbers considerably.

With all of that in mind, the social media winners have to be Jack and Dani.

Search Data

One of the best indicators we have of the popularity of the couples is search data. We plugged the final five couples in to Google Trends and guess what – when it comes to searches, Jack and Dani find themselves in a strong first place.

So it’s a foregone conclusion, right?

Well maybe not. When we started to look outside search and in to YouTube views then it’s Wes and Megan who are attracting the most attention. Also, when we broke the girls out to their first names and attached ‘Love Island’ it was Megan then Laura who took the top spots, leaving Dani a distant third. When it comes to the boys, Jack does appear to be in the lead, but there was more than one Jack until lately and searches for Paul, Josh and Dr Alex have all been high in recent days.

This round, we’re saying is too close to call.

Online polls
No election would be complete without opinion polls and the public crowing of the Love Island winners is no different. Any publication worth its salts is asking ‘Who do you think will win Love Island?’ so we had a look through and aggregated the poll data. We looked at 14 online polls, mainly carried out by large publications and Jack and Dani seem to be romping home with a massive 75% of the vote. Laura and Paul are a dim and distant second with 10% and the rest are fighting over scraps.

The online poll winners – Jack and Dani.

So, what’s the prediction?

Looking at all of the available data, we have to say that Jack and Dani are looking strong favourites to win Love Island this year, but Wes and Megan look like strong contenders for the crown too. So, who knows – with a couple of days to go and Jack and Dani having had ‘a blazing row’ it’s more open a race than you might think.