The sixth season of Game of Thrones came to an end on June 26th, and demand for the show massively increased as a result. We previously discussed the popularity of Game of Thrones in the US, but in the week following the season finale, Game of Thrones became the most in-demand series in over 100 countries around the world.
In these selected markets, Game of Thrones’ home market of the United States does not have the most demand: the UK has nearly 8% more demand, India has 1.7% more demand, and Mexico has just 0.2% more demand. However, the US has more demand than many other markets, including 25% more demand than in China. The fact that Game of Thrones is still the top show in China indicates just how strong demand in the US and other markets was for the finale.
In our previous analysis of Game of Thrones, we predicted the demand for the last three episodes of season 6, writing that “our model predicts that demand for the next episode will be down slightly, then increase to have a finale with over 90 million Demand Expressions™.” Now that the season has ended, we can evaluate these claims.
For episode 8, we predicted that demand would decrease slightly, but in fact it rose slightly from the demand for episode 7. Demand remained steady for episode 9 and was only about 1% different from our prediction. For the finale, we projected that the demand would be over 90 million Demand Expressions™, but it exceeded our expectations to be over 100 million Demand Expressions™. Overall, our predictions were off by an average of about 5% and in most cases, we underestimated how in-demand these action-packed episodes of Game of Thrones would be.
