Sometime last year someone did a super cut of all the GOT sex scenes through season 3. It was 16 minutes long. That's just under 1% total screen time. If the story is to be believed Fifty Shades will run twenty times higher than that (100 minutes long/20 minutes of sex scenes = 20% total screen time). Who's using sex to attract an audience here?
Exactly. Which is why the nudity in GOT is gratuitous. HBO threw it in because that's what HBO does. The question is, what percentage of GOT's viewship was attracted by the nudity, as opposed to a magical medieval soap opera?
The books were best sellers, so I imagine the televised version would have been successful even if the actresses were better draped. But as successful? That's a hard question.