The Hit That Isn't

"We did very well with teens, and that's where a lot of these shows all start," Ostroff said. "At the end of the day, this show is getting the network so much buzz. You feel the groundswell. You know it's out there in the zeitgeist." The program's feature-laden website -- which includes postings from Gossip Girl, who narrates the program, and a Second Life portal -- was in recent weeks among the top 10 most visited television show websites, according to the research firm Hitwise. Visitors to the site initiated 6 million streams of the shows' episodes so far this season.

"Our viewers are early adopters of those technologies, and what you're seeing on 'Gossip Girl' you're going to see more and more on shows that skew older in the future," said executive producer Stephanie Savage.

"There's all this anecdotal evidence that it's much, much bigger than what the ratings would indicate," Schwartz added. "For us, it's taken the pressure off of the 'live or die by what the ratings are the next morning.' "

But traditional broadcasters can't afford to forgo TV viewership for online watching, Cole said. "There's no way to monetize it yet," he said. "The primary value is to engage viewers."

With the new promotional campaign, marketing executives are hoping to exploit the growing popularity of the "Gossip Girl" actors. Before the show launched, they were largely unknown except for Lively, who starred in the movie "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants." Now her cast mates have joined her as regular fodder for the entertainment magazines and New York gossip columns.

Badgley, who plays Dan, noted that he went from being "virtually nobody" to getting recognized "everywhere I go, pretty much, which is a surreal thing. . . . I think it proves that maybe Nielsen is the only one that's not watching."

When the show was shooting in New York, the crowds that gathered to watch grew exponentially as the season went on, the cast said. During one of the last days of production, hundreds of fans -- mostly young girls -- swamped the sidewalks as they shot a scene on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"They had to call in police and bodyguards, because it would take us an hour to get to our trailers because of the floods of people," Lively said. "That was just really mind-blowing. We literally felt like we were like the Spice Girls, the way these people were screaming and crying."

Eventually, the industry will figure out a way to measure that kind of following, said Chace Crawford, who plays blueblood Nate Archibald. "I'm proud to be part of a show that's kind of redefining what it means to be a hit show with today's younger generation that is very media-savvy," he said. "I think it could be pushing the envelope of change of the way the Nielsen ratings are viewed."

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matea.gold@latimes.com