Since the freshman episode of Gossip Girl, there has been a lot of publicity going on about the drama which follows a group of elite teens who track each other's nasty secrets through an anonymously penned blog, which has the power to make or break reputations. After just 13 episodes, a loyal fan base has already formed for the show, which is an adaptation of the New York Times bestselling novel series of the same name. In fact, the show has been considered as one of the most anticipated series of the 2007-2008 television season. Despite that, it hasn't been able to garner impressive TV ratings. In fact, when it premiered, the show came in last place in its 9pm Wednesday slot with only 3.65 million viewers. Moreover, it wasn't able to keep its viewers in the second outing, thus losing more than half of its lead-in audience from America 's Next Top Model and 22 percent of its own debut numbers in the face of strong competition from other shows such as ABC's Private Practice and NBC's Bionic Woman, which both made impressive debuts that night. Overall, Gossip Girl averaged around 2.6 million viewers for the pilot season. Despite not having enough viewers to survive the airwaves, Gossip Girl has garnered a large audience for new media, thus consistently making it the most downloaded television program on iTunes. "It's sort of become the first show that has managed to achieve some level of cultural permeation and success in the new world order where ratings don't really seem to apply," Executive Producer Josh Schwartz said. The dilemma here is that ratings matter a lot. The sophomore season is approaching and the network executives are already searching for ways on how they can "take advantage of viewership shifting to different places." "When you look at all the ways people are getting Gossip Girl episodes, whether on TV or TiVo or streaming or downloading it, clearly there's a very strong core group of viewers," Dawn Ostroff, the network's president of entertainment, said, "Our job is to start getting the show broadened out a bit." For more resources about Gossip Girl or for the full story of Gossip Girl: Thriving Only on the Internet? please review http://www.buddytv.com
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