Google trends reveals Turkey is a top global audience for Game of Thrones
As Game of Thrones drew to its climactic finale this week (no spoilers, we promise!) we thought it would be interesting to see how global audiences are searching for the series and which families are most popular in each country.
Unsurprisingly Game of Thrones is a global phenomenon with growing audiences worldwide as we can see from the Google trends graph below:
This shows that, unsurprisingly, the interest in the series peaks just before it starts and runs through to just after the finale each year, and that the number of people searching for this each year is growing as more and more people realise winter is coming…
Looking at where people are searching from, we start to see an interesting cross section of countries with large search interests in the phenomenal series.
English speaking markets such as Australia and New Zealand aren’t surprising, neither are markets such as Ireland where some of the series is filmed or the United Kingdom, where a lot of the actors are from. However, perhaps surprisingly there’s significant interest in Turkey.
Looking at how Turkish people have searched for Game of Thrones over time we can see that the curves also peak around the season but that the Turkish market grew to like Game of Thrones later in the day than its English speaking audiences.
This also corresponds to some of the top queries for Turkey as shown below
Altyazi is “subtitles” and Yabanci Dizi refers to foreign TV, so there’s corresponding interest in TV.
Another interesting fan base is Norway which also appears in our list of most interested countries in the series. Looking at Norway’s interest over time we can see that actually the most popular period for the series was in 2014.
Looking at Norwegian popular searches related to Game of Thrones Google Trends is showing us that again there’s a lot of interest in viewing the series with HBO related searches and also again Subtitles.
The data shows that there are two searches showing as currently performing well related to a character – Emilia Clarke and Daenerys (being a character and the actress who plays her).
As with the searchers in Turkey, interest in Emilia Clarke is in line with the series and peaks in the recent months, however some of her other movie work has led to more searches during 2015.
This leads us to look at a comparison between the two markets. Firstly, looking at the top level “game of thrones” search we can see that Turkey is considerably bigger than Norway in terms of the number of searches per month.
Jon Snow is the most popular character in both markets with the next best being Daenerys.
Neither market had any real search volume around Joffery Baratheon, so we’ve clearly moved on from the king we loved to hate.
Other interesting insight from this include that Khal Drogo is still very popular in Turkey as is Ned Stark both of whom (possible spoiler – if you’ve not seen much GoT) weren’t alive in the 2016 series – flashbacks aside.
As the global popularity of GoT waxes and wanes, it will be interesting to see what season seven will bring. Which characters will edge up the search rankings and will Jon Snow continue to reign supreme?