There’s only one thing Americans love more than watching acts of unbridled sexual depravity on the internet, and that’s watching acts of unbridled sexual depravity on Game of Thrones.
Stats released by smut overlords PornHub – the YouTube of sex, if you’re pretending not to know – reveal that American traffic to the site dropped by four per cent during the season six premiere on HBO on Sunday evening.
If that doesn’t sound like a big dip, just bear in mind that the site receives some 60 million unique users a day, so that four per cent represents hundreds of thousands of people choosing to delay la petite mort for le grand bloodbath on Game of Thrones.
These stats are perhaps more insightful than even PornHub imagined: it took four hours for viewing figures to return to normal after the show, as hordes of televisual pirates pillaged HBO’s coffers (by watching Game of Thrones for free on online streaming sites).
PornHub’s Insights team, who analyse the most popular trends, genres and people in porn, also saw a 370 per cent spike in GoT-related searches on the day of the premiere, mainly in the form of parodies, and specific characters and scenes from the show.
While Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen is predictably the most popular cast member searched for by trouserless men, Lena Headey’s ‘Walk of Shame’ – in which a tearful woman is spat on and abused by thousands of strangers – also worryingly features prominently in the top-10 Thrones search terms.
SPOILER ALERT: men are horrible perverts.
