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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In the next few weeks, Trista the bachelorette will finally choose her man, Joe Millionaire will come clean, Demi Moore will play an ex-babysitter on "Will & Grace," and "Dateline NBC" will devote a full, solemn hour to the medical marvel that is Michael Jackson's face. And to what do TV viewers owe such munificence? To the advertisers' hunger for information about who watches what, a hunger that manifests itself, four times a year, in a monthlong viewer-data harvest known as "sweeps."
When advertisers are deciding which shows to buy time on, they want to know not just how many people are watching but what kinds of people, too. So Nielsen Media Research has wired five thousand American homes with electronic "people meters," which enable it to collect national ratings and demographic information on behalf of the major networks. The networks, in turn, use...
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