Twitter already has a partnership with Nielsen to build a social TV measurement product called the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating.

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This game will pull a national-TV rating that's huge by sports standards: If precedent holds it will likely outdraw most games of Major League Baseball's World Series.

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Chickens, pigs, cows and horses all suffer fear and discomfort when they are robbed of their lives for nothing more than a fleeting taste or a TV rating.

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Nationally, Martha Stewart Living's ratings in February dropped to a ho-hum 1.5 (one rating point equals almost 1 million TV households), down from 2.4 two years ago.

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This from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, who does the crash test you always see on TV, they gave a couple of small pickups their worst crash rating of poor.

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Though Fox's "Glee, " a music-laced show about a high-school glee club, remains in the top 20 for viewers between the ages of 18 and 49, it has seen its rating drop 25% in that group so far this TV season compared with a year earlier, according to Nielsen data provided by Fox. (Fox, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp.) This could signal a challenge for "Smash, " Mr. Adgate says.

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