Explore New York's Manhattan on a budget

My review has been withdrawn as Simonseeks has closed down and monthly payments no longer made.

Unfortunately I cannot completely remove my piece, so I have to substitute my review with 200 words of nonsense.

I always questioned the logic of simonseeks – given that travel is such a crowded spot on the web it seemed they either needed to focus upon a specific niche, beaches or do the tripadvisor approach and “pile it high sell it cheap”.

Instead Simonseeks seemed to want a restricted number of articles with a fairly strict quality control, and sometimes a month would elapse between the user writing and submitting a piece and it being approved.

That was no way to build up the numbers of reviews and loyal contributors needed to make an impact on the search engines. Still, I quite enjoyed hanging around and making a little bit of beer money.

Apparently a group of former employees may yet purchase simonseeks, but in its usual style, we the contributors have been told very little – after waiting patiently for news between May and August 2011, I’m now withdrawing my work while I am still able.

I certainly hope any new Simonseeks team learn from the lessons of the failed first version. However, given my recent experience of “no news” I’m not hopeful.