A DESPERATE bid earlier in the week to slash entry fees and ticket prices couldn’t keep the Bayside Festival going.

It was set up on a 13,300 square metre site behind the Weymouth Pavilion Theatre and cost organisers around £700,000 to stage.

Organisers Mainsail have worked on the America’s Cup, Volvo Ocean Race and the Fastnet Race and ran a large part of the shoreside programme at Cowes Week.

Festival managing director Joe Hall said the most they had at any one time on the 9,000 people-capacity Bayside Festival site during the Olympics was 3,600 people.

On Monday, he said: “We want to be entertaining a lot more people. It’s been disappointing in terms of numbers.

After evening concert ticket prices were slashed from £10 to £5, Mr Hall said that festival goers who had already bought tickets at full price would be offered additional tickets.

In response to the low turn-out for the festival and traders claiming their takings were down 50 per cent on this time last year, Olympic organisers launched a ‘Come to Weymouth’ strategy.

Tweeters spent much of yesterday posting ‘Come to Weymouth’ tweets on social networking Twitter in a bid to attract people to the resort.

A statement from Bayside Festival organisers on Twitter blames the site closure on 'dire' vistor numbers.

It says: "Due to dire visitor numbers to Weymouth, Bayside Festival organisers have elected to voluntarily liquidate the business and close the site."