Google Trends: More People Want To Cancel HBO Subscription After 'Game Of Thrones' Ended

22/05/2019

Game of Thrones is a drama series taken from George R.R. Martin's best-selling book series "A Song of Ice and Fire".

Brought to the screen by HBO, the series which premiered on April 17, 2011, revolves around medieval fantasy epic of powerful families, kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars and honest men.

With the eighth and the final season of Game of Thrones all wrapped up on May 19th, 2019, there is an increased spike of people wanting to cancel their HBO subscriptions.

This can be seen from Google Trends, which shows an increasing number of people who used Google to search for "cancel HBO subscription".

Game of Thrones - Google Trends
The three spikes coincide with the finales of season five, seven, and eight of Game of Thrones, respectively (source: Google Trends).

Google Trends is a website created by Google, to show users the analytics of the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages.

The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time.

But the numbers Google Trends show, can either be trusted or not. In some cases, it may be very good at prediction, acknowledging that its data comes from what people input on Google Search. But in many cases, the results can be far from the truth, with the fact Google manages to collect its data from users, but only based on keywords.

This was proven by researchers at Wellesley College.

At that time, the researchers were examining the possible outcome of the U.S. Congressional elections in 2008 and 2010, with Google Trends successfully predicting the outcome in 33.3 percent of cases in 2008 and 39 percent in 2010.

According to them, Google Trends did not prove to be a good predictor of either elections.

So in the Game of Thrones' case, the data from Google Trends is comparative.

In other words, there could be a massive increase in the relative frequency of these searches, but the precise number of people cannot be determined.

Related: Pirated 'Game Of Thrones' Most Often To Have Malware, Research Finds