You’ve probably heard by now that Pajamas Media is shutting down their advertising network, for a simple reason: it’s losing money. Roger Simon explains that the company is now planning to focus on the PJTV side of the business.

There’s a lot of reaction to this announcement among bloggers in the network, of course. Speaking for LGF, I didn’t start this website to make money. Although I’m disappointed that the ad network hasn’t taken off the way Roger and I hoped when we started PJ Media, I’ve always viewed the advertising as a sort of bonus—not sought, but appreciated. Its loss won’t affect what we do here, except that we’ll be getting a little more creative about how we pay the bills.

TigerHawk makes an excellent point about the short-sightedness of companies who allow the easy (and deceptive) metrics of online ads to drive their decisions:

I am told that web site banner advertising suffers, in a sense, from too much transparency. Media buyers know what they pay “per click through” and per dollar of directly attributable revenue, and therefore tend to value banner advertising according to these concrete metrics. Ironically, that puts internet banner advertising at a great disadvantage to print and broadcast advertising, the value of both of which are much more difficult to measure. Corporate budgeteers can measure a superficially accurate rate of return for internet banner ads but cannot for television, so if the former is too low they kill it before they ax the thing they cannot measure. There is an obvious problem with this thinking — the banner ads get no credit for “building the brand” through impressions, which is in principle one of their great benefits — but nobody ever said that corporate bean-counting cannot drive stupid thinking.