Game of Thrones Season Six Has Come

For fans of the HBO series Game of Thrones, Sunday April 24th saw the arrival of the highly anticipated Season 6, so the folks at Cinema Blend asked our statisticians to look for all data relating to Game of Thrones, and the results – especially those immediately after the premiere – were surprising. We discovered that Game of Thrones has remained a popular search on Pornhub due in part to various porn parodies and also from fans hoping to find a glimpse of the nudity and sex that the series is known for.

Throughout April, searches containing Game of Thrones were slightly above average, but shot up in the days before the season premiere, peaking at 370% on Sunday the 24th.

During the hour that the premiere episode aired, Pornhub saw traffic across the United States drop 4%. That’s a considerable amount of traffic considering that Pornhub has over 60 million daily visitors, and the United States ranks as the number one market. Hundreds of thousands of people from House America put their usual Sunday night porn watching on hold to tune in. The following chart is adjusted for time-zones across the U.S. to illustrate traffic in the hours before and after the episode aired.

Searches During the Previous Season 5

In our 2015 Year in Review we looked at complete data for Season 5 of Game of Thrones and found that searches not only increased +200% for the Premiere and Finale episodes, but every Sunday night in between also saw an average 80% increase in Game of Thrones related searches.

When people are searching for Game of Thrones, the number one term used is “Sex Scene” followed by “Parody” and “Porn”. More specific searches include “Walk of Shame”, referring to a scene in which the character “Cersei” was forced to walk naked through the town. Many character names appear in the searches, but others make it pretty clear what Pornhub users are in search of, such as “boobs”, “nude” and “hottie”.

Performer and Character Searches

We further broke down the data to find searches containing the names of actors, actresses and their characters on the show. Emilia Clarke (playing Daenerys Targaryen) easily came out on top, followed by a near-tie between Natalie Dormer (playing Margaery Tyrell) and Sibel Kekilli (playing Shae). Although there were too few searches for male performers to rank in comparison to females, “Jon Snow” did some close.

Preceeding Searches

The average person visiting Pornhub views around 8 pages before finding the right video to get the job done. It’s a process of refining results to find the video that fits their current mood. To find out what other types of porn that Game of Thrones searchers might be looking for, our statisticians looked up the most common searches immediately preceding a search for Game of Thrones. The top terms are “gamer girl”, “medieval”, “cleopatra” and “spartacus”. Other television series searched before Game of Thrones include “Walking Dead” and “True Blood”. So next time if zombies and vampires aren’t doing it for you, why not check out some historical fantasy videos?

Comparing Parody Popularity

To see where Game of Thrones fell into the realm of popular parodies, our statisticians looked up all terms commonly combined with “parody” and ranked them. “Avengers” remains the #1 parody search, followed by “American Dad” and “Star Wars”.  “Game of Thrones” falls into 7th place, just behind “Family Guy” and “Batman”.

It’s often interesting to see what type of people are most likely to search for certain terms. Our statisticians dug a little deeper using the anonymized “affinity” interest groups collected by Google Analytics, and we were able to see what type of people were most likely to search for Game of Thrones on Pornhub.

People that Google has tagged as ‘Music lovers’ were the biggest GOT searches, followed by ‘Gamers’, ‘TV Lovers’ and ‘Movie Lovers’. It’s perhaps no surprise to find that ‘Avid Readers’ are also interested in Game of Thrones, with the book series being nearly as popular as the HBO series.

UPDATE

Our statisticians continued to monitor search and traffic results in the weeks following the premiere of Season 6. Comparing to average traffic on a Sunday before the season began, we found that traffic did continue to drop for subsequent episodes, including nearly a 5% drop for episode 4. We also found that searches for Game of Thrones increased over the 24 hour period surrounding the air date of each episode.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of Pornhub Insights. For similar porn parody stats, be sure to check out our Insights posts on Minecraft, Star Wars and Fallout 4 and let us know what you think in the comments!