Vroom, vroom! That’s the sound of two big advertisers saying auf wiedersehen and annyeong — namely goodbye — to Bill O’Reilly.

Germany’s Mercedes-Benz and South Korea’s Hyundai are pulling ads amid (another) sexual harassment scandal at Fox that raises the question of whether the network will stick by its No. 1 star.

(Update: About a dozen companies and counting have now pulled their advertisements from “The O’Reilly Factor.”)

So far, Fox has paid about $13 million to settle sexual harassment complaints against O’Reilly, who makes $18 million a year, according to The New York Times. There are millions more in other harassment settlements and, now, a Fox News contributor’s lawsuit against former Fox king Roger Ailes and Bill Shine, the network co-president.

The O’Reilly mess in part highlights the market-driven ways of television, which print journalists are often very ignorant about. For sure, if anything vaguely like this enveloped a reporter at a major newspaper, he’d be long gone.

But it’s a different culture, with more immediate metrics to assess performance. That was underscored when I granted anonymity to several current and former high-ranking TV executives to lay out the pros and cons of keeping O’Reilly.

Call it a Talking Points Memo on TV personnel practices.

“It’s not just about ratings. The calculus is more complex,” said one current broadcast executive when I said that keeping him was all about ratings.

If Fox dumped O’Reilly, what might it cost?

There would be a fat exit deal for him; the likelihood of some lost ratings and advertisers; the possible risk of lousy performance by whatever program replaces Fox’s top show; the possibility that some of the audience and advertisers would move to whatever media platform O’Reilly would surely decamp to; and a perception to some, perhaps those it sought to recruit, that Fox is spineless in supporting employees.

There’s also the possible damage inspired by whatever the garrulous O’Reilly would say publicly about Fox, even if he signed one of those often legally porous no-blab provisions (what if he starts getting nasty and naming names?).

What are the possible benefits of canning him?

They’d seem pretty straightforward: a publicity boost among a lot of women, a far smaller number of men and a few advertisers like those two car companies; saving a lot of dough as you bid adieu to an idiosyncratic employee; and the chance to come up quickly or develop over time a replacement while the network’s ratings are very strong (just check how well Megyn Kelly’s replacement Tucker Carlson is doing).