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This Is How Much Porn Traffic Dropped During the 'Game of Thrones' Season Finale

According to new data from PornHub, everyone stopped masturbating for an hour to watch incest dragons instead.
Photo via HBO

The final episode of Game of Throne's sixth season aired last Sunday and attracted a record 8.9 million viewers. Indeed, the finale was so eagerly anticipated that, according to PornHub's internal data, people interrupted their regular porn viewing habits just to see if Ned Littletoes sent the dragon back to Mordor.

Pornhub's historical data show as much as a four percent drop in traffic across the United States when Game of Thrones airs on HBO during the Sunday 9 PM hour. With the site's 60 million daily users, those numbers indicate that hundreds of thousands of Americans disrupted their porn routine to catch up on deadly alliances and tastefully rendered incest.

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Read More: Someone Who Has Never Seen 'Game of Thrones' Recaps the Epic Finale

In the days leading up to and following the original airings of this season's ten episodes, people got their fix with Game of Thrones–related searches that ranged from the fairly unimaginative ("hottie," "nudes," "sex scene") to fan-girl level specific, with users searching out specific characters by name (Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen, easily topped that list). Popular search terms during the finale included "midievel [sic]," "peter dinklage," "midget", "lesbians," and "incest."

Popular search terms during the finale included 'midievel [sic],' 'peter dinklage,' "midget," 'lesbians,' and 'incest.'

But Game of Thrones is not the only television event that affects porn viewership. According to Pornhub's Michael Kulich, the site saw a huge traffic surge among solace-seeking Bay Area residents following the Golden State Warriors' loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA finals. Internationally, the Eurovision Song Contest, the long running TV song competition which is transmitted live to countries across Europe simultaneously, caused traffic to plummet an average of 11 percent across Europe, with a 29 percent drop in France.

In the 24-hour span before Netflix premiered the fourth season of Orange is the New Black, searches containing both "lesbian" and "prison" increased by 59 percent, according to Kulich.

In their 2015 Year in Review, Pornhub calculated how media events across the world affected traffic to the site. During the Walking Dead Season six premiere, it went down six percent in the US. And during the US primaries, average traffic dropped 4.5 percent for the Republican debates, compared to an average 2.5 percent during the Democratic debates. Infer from that what you will.

And if you are already jonesing for your next GoT fix, there are plenty of porn parodies out there, including Game of Bones, This Ain't No Game of Thrones XXX, and Gay of Thrones, which should certainly tide you over until next season.