Sally Ryan for The New York Times

An effort to buy the maker of the oft-ironically enjoyed Pabst Blue Ribbon beer has fizzed out, after the Securities and Exchange Commission became involved.

The regulator settled on Wednesday with two advertising executives, Michael Migliozzi II and Brian William Flatow, over their effort to raise $300 million to buy the Pabst Brewing Company, which makes P.B.R. and another hipster staple, Schlitz.

The two men agreed to a cease-and-desist order from the S.E.C., though neither admitted or denied any of the agency’s findings other than jurisdiction over the matter.

According to the S.E.C., Mr. Migliozzi, 45, and Mr. Flatow, 41, created a Web site, BuyaBeerCompany.com, in November 2009. The idea was to raise the money needed to buy Pabst by collecting pledges via their Web site, Facebook and Twitter through a process called crowdsourcing.

Contributors would receive two things: a “crowdsourced certificate of ownership” — and beer worth the amount of the pledge.

Mr. Migliozzi and Mr. Flatow had collected $14.75 million in pledges within the first three weeks of their venture and more than $200 million by Feb. 22 of last year.

Their sin was not registering those securities with the S.E.C. first, according to the agency.

The plans of the two ad executives went as far as to include incorporating BuyaBeerCompany.com and hiring legal counsel to advise on matters like collecting pledges and planning a possible initial public offering.

But by April 2010, Mr. Migliozzi and Mr. Flatow took down their Web site and had collected no money.

Last summer, Pabst sold itself to a better-known private investor, the consumer-brands specialist C. Dean Metropoulos.

While the terms were not publicly disclosed, it appears that the Pabst sale price might have been within BuyaBeerCompany’s reach. According to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Metropoulos’s firm paid about $250 million.