He may be among Game of Thrones' most evil characters but it seems that hasn't stopped one nation of fans from favouring Joffrey Baratheon best.

If figures from web data collector, Outbrain, are to believed, the United States reads more online about King Joffrey (who truly is an inbred Lannister), played by 21-year-old Irish actor Jack Gleeson, than any other Thrones character.

It many not surprise many to learn that Australia cannot get enough of Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and is ranked the second biggest nation of Thrones fans behind the United Kingdom. Our fellow Commonwealth nation appears to have succumbed to wildling wiles of Snow's paramour Ygritte, played by Scottish actress Rose Leslie, 27.

But if the Game of Thrones was to be turned into Risk, a game of world domination, then the character commanding the attention of most nations (and possibly able to stake a claim for the Iron Throne) is Cersei Lannister, played by Lena Headey. Germany, Italy, India, Philippines and Singapore all prefer to read about the icy queen, who would rather bed her twin brother than make friends.

That leaves Cersei's much-maligned dwarf brother Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) with the conquest of France and Daenerys Targaryen, mother of dragons and freer of slaves, with Spain as the only place to call home.

But Daenerys fans don't despair, the rightful heir of Westeros has in no way been banished to the desert of our minds. According to the data, she still gets the most media attention and fills the most headlines.

But poor Sansa Stark (played by Sophie Turner) is the least popular character among global fans.

Outbrain has claimed to have used a data base of over 100,000 publisher sites and more than 150 billion recommendations each month to infer, with a bit of theorising by its staff, these national insights.

It even goes so far as to suggest that the US is well down on the scale of diehard fans globally, coming seventh out of a possible 10 nations, with Italy being the country that least favours Thrones out of the forementioned nations.

Still television ratings in the US may beg to differ, with this week's Thrones episode (Beware spoiler: ending in the demise of the most-loved-to-hate boy king) almost equalling the new season premiere; garnering 6.3 million viewers just down on the 6.6 million viewers from the week before.

Season four's episode two, titled The Lion and the Rose, broke piracy records, with roughly 1.5 million people downloading the episode, according to TorrentFreak data.

Australia once again held the lion's share (ahem) of torrent downloads at 11.6 per cent, while the US made up 9.3 per cent of downloads and 5.8 per cent came from the UK. The top downloading cities were Melbourne, Athens, Sydney, London and Stockholm.

Local pay TV figures mirrored trends in the US, suffering a minor downturn to 237,000 viewers compared to 316,000 viewers who tuned in overall for the new season launch last week.