A lot of people watched the final season of Game of Thrones — 44 million per episode, by HBO’s count. The Hollywood Reporter calculated that it ranked just below Monday Night Football in the Adults 18-49 demo. It did okay.
But the network has been worried about what comes after. Would people who signed up for HBO just to watch Game of Thrones abandon it after the show was over? What about people who already had HBO subscriptions for a while? Just how bad was the bleeding going to be?
Apparently not that bad. App analytics specialist Sensor Tower looked at whether people who signed up for HBO NOW — HBO’s over-the-top streaming service — to watch Game of Thrones season 8 abandoned the service after the series finale. The company shared its findings with Variety. As of the first billing cycle following the finale, which aired back on May 19, HBO was holding on to 84% of the revenue from those new subscribers. Said Sensor Tower head of mobile insights Randy Nelson:
"The app’s gross revenue on the first billing cycle for new subscribers after the premiere was $1.9 million. For the first billing cycle following the show’s finale, this dropped to $1.6 million."
Granted, there are rather a lot of caveats here. Sensor Tower is only looking at HBO Now subscribers who use Google or Apple as their billing providers. Also, their numbers are estimates based on app store performance data. Only HBO knows the whole truth, and like other services such as Netflix, they’ve never been eager to share.
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Still, a 16% drop isn’t that bad, particularly when you consider that there was a 40% drop after the end of Game of Thrones season 6. HBO is trying its damndest to hold onto viewers with (excellent) shows like Chernobyl, and has big shows like Watchmen and His Dark Materials around the corner. And then there’s the Game of Thrones prequel hovering in the distance. Will all of that be enough to retain these subscribers over the long run and gain new ones? Time will tell, but for now, this is good news for the network.
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