When Six Apart launched Vox, a blogging/social network platform with strict privacy controls, in 2006, investor David Hornik had high hopes. Vox is an “amazing blogging platform,” he said, because “Finally I have a place where I can post pictures and video of my kids without concern about who is looking at them.”

Vox will be shut down on September 20, says Six Apart.

What they’re not saying is why. Part of it is likely cleanup for a merger that the company continues to flatly deny – CEO Chris Alden will have fun explaining his way out of that one if it actually happens.

But it’s also that Vox is just pretty much a ghost town. The site has just 5.7 million monthly uniques, says Comscore. And if you really want to show family pictures to your friends, you’ll probably make the effort to just wade through Facebook’s privacy settings quagmire. As for private blogging, well, it just isn’t all that SEO friendly. WordPress ate their lunch, and they do private blogs, too.

We’ve put Vox into the TechCrunch DeadPool.