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“The House of the Dragon” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” are two completely different TV series. However, their near-simultaneous premieres prompted people to make comparisons. While we can’t say which series is better, the download numbers show that torrent pirates clearly favor the Game of Thrones prequel.
With the release of HBO’s ‘House of the Dragon’ and Amazon’s ‘Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’, two major fantasy series premiered in the past month.
The first was an instant hit on pirate sites where, in true Game of Thrones spirit, it was leaked ahead of the official premiere.
Although the two series are difficult to compare, the media has pitted them against each other to see which performs better. Does “The Rings of Power” eclipse “House of the Dragon” or vice versa?
In terms of user ratings, the Game of Thrones prequel wins by a landslide, but official viewership stats are harder to come by. According to Variety, Dragons now averages 29 million viewers per episode. Amazon hasn’t released much data on its billion-dollar production, but previously said the premiere of Rings drew 25 million viewers.
Dragon Crushes Rings on pirate sites
To add our two cents to this battle, we decided to take a look at how both series are doing on pirate sites. With the help of IKnow, we’ve looked at a large sample of millions of global BitTorrent transfers over the past two weeks (September 7-21), resulting in a clear winner.
“House of the Dragon” takes the crown with over 1.4 million estimated downloads on peak days. In the two weeks we collected sample data, the show racked up over 9 million estimated downloads.
The chart above shows that The “Rings of Power” doesn’t even come close to peaking at around 650,000 estimated downloads. It usually beats the GOT prequel by a small margin, soon after a new episode is released. Over the two weeks, it resulted in 5 million downloads.
To give an indication of the popularity of “House of the Dragon”, on the day of its release, the show accounted for over 10% of all movie and TV show downloads. That’s a percentage we haven’t seen in a while.
Russia on top
Looking at the countries where “House of the Dragon” is downloaded the most, Russia is clearly in the lead. This makes sense as torrent downloads are traditionally popular there. Also, as a result of sanctions due to the invasion of Ukraine, there are no legal options to watch the series.
Brazil is second on the list of countries, while the United States is in third place. The top ten is completed by India, the United Kingdom, South Africa, China, the Philippines, Australia and France.
The data shared here covers a large portion of estimated public torrent downloads. However, this is only a small part of all piracy activity, as “views” on unauthorized streaming sites cannot be measured so easily.
That said, we think torrent downloads are a good indicator of general pirate interest.
Most pirated?
The general finding that hackers prefer Dragons to Rings is also corroborated by hacking tracking firm MUSO. The company told Adweek that there’s been a lot more interest in the Game of Thrones prequel on torrent sites.
At this rate, it wouldn’t be surprising to see “House of The Dragon” pick up where Game of Thrones left off. Simply put, the TV series is on its way to becoming the most pirated TV show of 2022.
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