Ciao to Ciao

It looks like Ciao.com is shutting down. They say it's 'merging with Bing', but Bing doesn't appear to be a review site. If you've earned any money from Ciao, it's still yours, but they won't be paying out anything new. This makes me terribly sad - I wasn't earning a lot, but I'd paid a bill with some money from Ciao. It was a nice source of a little bit of income.

I don't know if the newly merged Ciao will be paying for reviews. It doesn't mention that they will, so I'm guessing probably not. I suppose one shouldn't jump to conclusions, but I don't see any reassurances in the letter that it will be otherwise.

My personal opinion is this: from what I've seen on the website, Ciao was probably bleeding money to nonsense reviewers, plagiarists, and users who did not contribute any sort of unique or worthwhile content. This is my own speculation, it is not a fact, but I cannot help thinking this. The plagiarism and garbage reviews were rampant, and I can't see how Ciao would be able to sustain itself when much of its content was either copied or nonsense.

Ciao isn't the only paid review site out there, though. There is an alternative, a website I didn't like as much because I don't like the interface, so I never used it much - it's called ReviewStream. The payment system is a bit different - $2 for review, unless you let them give you the bulk rate, and $.10 per rating. You can't really log in - you submit reviews with your email address, and your account balance is tied to it - so it's not as socially gratifying. You also have to wait for your submitted reviews to be approved, and the minimum cashout is higher at $50.

If you have reviews on Ciao, do what it says and save them. I'm going to find out if they can be "recycled" or if Ciao will be keeping them up. It looks like I'll be hopping over to ReviewStream now.

So I guess, to Ciao... "ciao".