Wikio Experts closing

Photo by Steve Snodgrass

I signed up but hadn't yet gotten around to writing for Wikio Experts, a multi-lingual content site based in France. Now they are closing down their article site and morphing into a paid-for-blogging platform.

They sent out this email today:

Dear Users,

We launched Wikio Experts as a venture earlier this year, and it has been a great learning experience for ourselves and our online community. We’ve published thousands of excellent articles and have grown a fantastic community of talented writers.

We are now setting our sites [sic] on a new, flexible and improved service; closer to your needs, and more advanced than Wikio Experts. We will be closing Wikio Experts and creating a new service alongside our blogging platform Overblog, which already provides an online publishing service for thousands of writers across Europe. We’re aiming to launch this new product towards the end of September this year, and we’ll provide you with everything you need to get started beforehand.

(more after the jump)

This new product will allow you to publish your articles on OverBlog, even if you don’t have a blog. It’ll replace www.the-experts.co.uk, which will be discontinued and its content moved across. The revamped service will offer exciting new features, better suiting your needs.

The development of this service is dependent upon the collaboration of all parties involved. As you will be more involved in your work, from start to finish, you have everything to gain from us through a new revenue sharing remuneration model. Furthermore, in keeping with this shift toward a more autonomous service, we will allow you to choose the topics and titles you want to write about; rather than us determining these for you.

We believe this is the way to ensure our future successes together as publishers and as writers.

We hope you continue your journey with us to help shape the future of digital media together.

We will reveal more soon. A new and exciting adventure begins!

Best wishes,
Team Wikio Experts

The "new revenue sharing remuneration model" is likely to be revenue-share only.  In any case, it doesn't sound like this "new and exciting adventure" will be my cup of tea.  I've already had one disastrous experience with a blogging network (cough, Today.com). Even if this one is well-run, I'd rather do my blogging on my own and keep total ownership and control.