Popularity forces Adcritic shutdown

Adcritic.com, a Web aggregator of TV and radio commercials, has shut down, according to a message on the company's Web site. "We became so popular so fast that we couldn't stay afloat," the message reads.

The closure comes amid a brutal shakeout for companies that stream content online, a costly business that has faced weak advertising sales despite the growing popularity of audio and video programming. Adcritic was attracting some 35,000 visitors and serving about 300,000 page views a day when it closed, according to the Web site. But its costs for delivering video and audio were never matched by comparable advertising revenue. Perhaps best known for its archive of Super Bowl spots, the site recorded peak traffic in January 2001, when it streamed 32.5 million video clips in a one-week period.