Game of Thrones season 7 is hurting Pornhub's traffic

Winter is here for the porn streaming service

Game of Thrones has become a pop cultural moment of seismic proportions, to the point where it's drawing people away from porn. Porn!

Pornhub's Insight statisticians found that traffic to the site was down by 4.5% during the broadcast of episode 1 of the new season, a "considerable change in visitors as Sunday night is one of the most popular times for people to visit Pornhub".

The first episode of Season 6 in April 2016 resulted in a smaller -4.1% traffic drop, in spite of the fact this episode promised an answer to the whole 'is Jon Snow really dead?' thing. The same season's finale on 26 June resulted in the biggest Game of Thrones-related drop so far of -5.2% traffic drop.

​S07E01, 'Dragonstone', shattered GoT ratings records on Sunday night.

16.1 million HBO subscribers watched it, 10.1 million of those viewing traditionally and the rest coming from DVR and streaming.

This represented a quite staggering 50% increase from the previous year's opener.

'Dragonstone' brought HBO a couple more records too: one for the most-watched season premiere for any of its series to date, the other for highest number of concurrent viewers on its streaming platforms HBO Go and HBO Now.

It was the most-tweeted-about episode in the show's history, attracting 2.4 million tweets, a high proportion of which were about Arya Stark's dramatic cold open scene and Ed Sheeran's controversial cameo.

Game of Thrones season 7 continues on HBO, Sky Atlantic and NOWTV Sunday nights.