The Glee Project finale netted 1,2 million viewers for the Oxygen network according to preliminary figures.

The final figures make the series a major success after a shaky start and have led to Bing search engine announcing they will sponsor a follow up

Early shows had far smaller audiences, leading to speculation that there would be no second series.

The co-winner was Northern Ireland native Damian McGinty who will now appear in seven episodes of 'Glee.'

The premiere episode attracted only 455,000 which worried backers.

“We were surprised,” Jason Klarman, president of Oxygen Media, part of the NBC Universal unit of Comcast, told The NY Times“Our expectations were certainly higher.” Still, “even as low as that number was, it wasn’t so low that we were thinking, ‘Oh my God,’ ” Mr. Klarman said. “It always looked like it was going somewhere.”

Eric Hadley, general manager for Bing marketing at Microsoft, told The Times they would be interested in sponsoring again

“We’d want to evolve it so we would not do the same thing” as is the first season, he added.

He stated that Bing is pleased with how “The Glee Project” has turned out and is “really happy” with how the ratings grew each week.