‘House of the Dragon’ Saw 65% Jump in Viewership From Episode 1 to 2, According to Nielsen

The HBO original series secured 1.2 billion viewing minutes in the first week of Season 2

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Here’s more proof the audience for “House of the Dragon” Season 2 is growing. Viewership for Episode 2 of the HBO original jumped 65% compared to Episode 1, according to the Nielsen Streaming Top 10 report for the week of June 17-23.

Overall, the series secured 1.2 billion viewing minutes as well as the No. 4 spot on the Overall Top 10 list for the week after the season premiere. It should be noted that these numbers reflect a slightly delayed impact, as new episodes release on Sunday nights, the end of Nielsen’s measurement interval, and have a larger impact the following week. However, they continue a trend for the HBO juggernaut.

HBO and Nielsen first reported the first episode of Season 2 saw 7.8 million viewers across platforms — including HBO and Max — during its June 16 premiere. Episode 4 then secured a season-high best of 8.1 million viewers across platforms, which was credited to catch-up viewing over the July 4 weekend. Regardless, this paints a picture that the audience for “House of the Dragon” is still growing.

As well as the series may be doing week to week, Season 2 still can’t compete with Season 1’s viewership numbers. Season 2’s premiere was down 21.9% from Season 1’s, which scored 9.986 million viewers in the summer of 2022. That premiere also ranked as the largest audience for any new original series in HBO history.

Elsewhere, the first two slots of Nielsen’s Overall Top 10 list for the second to last week of June were occupied by shows on Netflix. At 2.465 billion viewing minutes, “Bridgerton” continued to reign supreme. In fact, nearly 1.5 billion minutes of the series’ total viewership — a number that’s greater than the week’s total of streaming minutes for “House of the Dragon” — was attributed to the four new episodes of “Bridgerton” that were released on June 13.

“Your Honor” came in second place with 1.947 billion viewing minutes for the week. The Bryan Cranston-led drama originally premiered on Showtime and ran for two seasons from 2020 to ’23 and is currently available to stream on both Paramount+ and Netflix, which added the title to its library in May.

The No. 3 spot belonged to Prime Video thanks to Season 4 of “The Boys.” The superhero satire raked up 1.291 billion viewing minutes, 100 million of which came from the episode that was released the week of June 17. Nielsen also shared that “The Boys” had the highest concentration of male viewers of any title on the overall list with 64% of its audience identifying as male.

The rest of the list was made up of the usual suspects. What’s less usual is that, of the 10 titles occupying the Overall Nielsen list, four of them were available either partially or exclusively on Hulu.

Disney+’s “Bluey” came in fifth place with 1.111 billion viewing minutes, followed by “Grey’s Anatomy” on Hulu and Netflix (929 million viewing minutes), “Criminal Minds” on Hulu and Paramount+ (882 million viewing minutes), “NCIS” on Netflix and Paramount+ (881 million viewing minutes), “Family Guy” on Hulu (877 million viewing minutes) and “Bob’s Burgers” on Hulu (862 million viewing minutes).

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