Today, we're shutting down Westmonster, our UK political website. Last month, we closed our other site, Glitterditch. So we're no longer in the digital publishing business, and we're focussing instead on digital consulting to the UK media, NGO, and advocacy sectors.

We're not taking the decision lightly, but the fact is that the audiences for these titles didn't warrant continued investment, particularly in the light of the advertising downturn the media sector is wrestling with.

When we launched last year, it was with the belief that there was an unserved niche for stylised reporting and content that fell between what the large media companies were doing, and what independent bloggers were providing. We're not saying that isn't true, but we are saying it's going to take significant amounts of investment in marketing and audience-building to build a business in there, for all sorts of reasons.

We've also found it really hard to recruit writing talent for the titles. We started with the working assumption that there was a significant tranche of young journalists in the UK willing to take a punt on a small publisher in return for increasing their own profile - we were offering pay, of course, but linked to audience and posting levels. What we found was that, at least at this point in time, those writers just don't seem to exist in any significant numbers in this country. While we were able to find some very dedicated and talented writers, the effective advertising CPM we'd have needed to pay them a reasonable wage only existed at an audience size orders of magnitude larger than we were able to achieve.

That said, we've had a lot of fun during our brief stint as media moguls. Despite the size of the audience, Westmonster in particular had moments where it punched well above its weight, attracting the attention of the traditional media and of the blogosphere.

To all of those who read and supported our titles, and particularly to those few intrepid writers who were willing to have a go, we'd like to extend our heartfelt thanks.

We're still working on things, separately and together, and MessyMedia does have a future. But not, for now, in digital publishing.

--Lloyd Shepherd & Andrew Levy, co-Managing Directors, MessyMedia

PaidContent's interview with Jean-Philippe Maheu, Chief Digital Officer at Ogilvy, has lots of interesting stuff in it - such as the fact that Ogilvy no longer has a "digital" department, but instead adds digital to "everything we do". But I was particularly taken by this:

Marrying search with storytelling: Digital advertising has largely been focused on search, while traditional advertising has been about condensing a narrative about a product into a 30-second TV commercial, a page in a magazine or newspaper, or a billboard. Among Maheu's goals when he took the job at Ogilvy last year was to bring the art of storytelling to interactive advertising: "One of the key things we're working on is how to engage with Yahoo, Google and MSN in a way that is creative, unique and that is a bit more strategic than just buying media."

The notion of "telling stories" through advertising seems to me to be fundamental to the business of selling stuff to people. And it seems it must be particularly hard to do through search advertising (so why are Ogilvy only talking to GYM about it?). Advertising through "social media" seems to be all about telling stories. Which is maybe why Bebo went for as much as it did.