Analytics Stories

CHAPTER 36Predicting Game of Thrones TV Ratings

Hollywood moguls who underwrite TV shows and movies would love to be able to predict the TV show's ratings or a movie's revenues. It seems reasonable that the number of people searching the Internet for information on the show or movie in advance of its release should correlate well with the number of viewers of the TV show or the number of people paying to see the movie. Fortunately, Google Trends allows you to easily download into Excel information about the frequency of searches for any search term. In this chapter, we will show you how to use Google Trends and close the chapter by using Google Trends data to forecast the ratings of the premiere episode for multiple seasons of Game of Thrones (GOT).

What Does Google Trends Tell Us?

If you are interested in the search history for a particular term, you can go to Google Trends (trends.google.com/trends/) and type in one (or more) search terms and get the relative number of searches for that term for any time range going back to 2004. You can choose the desired location for the searches. (We chose the United States.) Choosing Custom Time Range From The Past 12 Months drop-down-list allows you to select any desired time range. If you choose a time range containing at most 90 days, then you can download a comma-separated value file (a file with a .csv extension) which contains a daily query index. When you open a .csv file, you may then save it as an Excel file. For a given region, ...