Stats Spotlight - Close-Up on Game Of Thrones

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Sunday's episode of Game of Thrones was its 24th in total, and the fourth episode of this season, so let's take a look at some numbers

As all Game of Thrones fans will know, it's an extremely popular show around the world, continuing to grow its viewership and fanbase on screen, while smashing BitTorrent records off screen.

Sunday's episode on HBO earned a 2.6 adults 18-49 rating, and 4.87 million viewers. This is an incredible ratio between viewers and ratings. According to TVByTheNumbers, a single adults 18-49 ratings point is worth 1.265 million viewers aged 18-49. So if we do some maths, 1.265 x 2.6 = 3.289 (we will use 3.29 for rounding purposes). This means that out of the 4.87 million viewers who tuned in to Sunday's episode, 3.29 million of them were aged 18-49. Converting that to percentages, it tells us that 67.5% of the Game of Thrones audience is 18-49 years old. These sorts of ratios are very rare on network television, but cable television shows tend to achieve ratios like this more frequently, but rarely do they approach the 65% mark like Game of Thrones manages to do most weeks.

For the record, the episode in the series with the highest percentage of 18-49 viewers, was the season 3 premiere, with 69.5%. In the first season, percentages ranged from 47.5% to 58.8%. The second season saw percentages range from 59.8% to 65.6%. The first four episodes of this season have all had higher percentages than any of the episodes last season.

A normal show on network television screens 24 episodes in a season, whereas Game of Thrones screens 10 per season. Because Sunday's episode was the series' 24th, let's have a look at Game of Thrones as if it was a single season.

In terms of 18-49 ratings, Game of Thrones averages a 1.67 18-49 rating (or 2.11 million 18-49 viewers) per episode. With the increase in ratings over the course of the series, Game of Thrones hasn't seen a rating this low since the ninth episode of last season, though that episode was a bit of an outlier, with no other episodes in season 2 falling below 1.9. To find an episode that

The average audience sits at 3.39 million, and that same outlier episode - the ninth episode of last season - is the last time an episode fell below that average. Don't forget that with each new episode that airs, and rates around where the episodes this season are rating, the series average for ratings and audience increases.

Finally, a brief look at audience totals. If we add the audience of all 24 episodes together, we get a total of 81.34 million viewers. Don't forget the tens of millions around the world who watch the show legally or illegally, in the US and other countries around the world

Remember that all statistics have a margin of error. For example, ratings are only provided to the nearest tenth of a point - or 126,500 viewers, and total audiences will most likely share a similar margin of error. There's nothing we ca do about that though - it will be the same for every other show, whether it be network or cable

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Jimmy