BUSINESS WEEK -- Apr 13 -- Meetup made its reputation when Howard Dean backers used the meeting site to form local groups. The number of "meetups" has jumped 50% from a year ago, to more than 2,400 a week. Meetup told its 2 million members that it's time for their groups to pay up. Organizers of each Meetup group, of which there are currently 54,000, are to pay $19 a month, or $9 a month for existing groups. Founder and CEO Scott Heiferman says he hopes the move will help the 29-person NYC company turn a profit by yearend. Friendster, with 14 million registered users, hopes to make money from advertisements and corporate sponsorships. LinkedIn launched a for-pay service, charging up to $95 a month for job listings. As Heiferman says bluntly: "Meetup doesn't deserve to continue if it's not creating value."
The full article was originally published at BusinessWeek, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: There are too many dead groups on MeetUp. Charging a nominal fee will ultimately enrich the user experience. Good move.
I'm a little hesitant, because like the average online user, I'm not to keen on suddenly having to pay for services that were free.
Yet, I kept my .Mac email address, even though it was free for two years prior.
In this case, I think paying for the service will enrich the Meetup experience. The price for existing groups is affordable... and at least they allow you to find ways to collect group fees from the users themselves. So you know, all around I think I'll support Meetup.
Posted by: sungoddess | Apr 17, 2005 at 03:46 AM
I'm not too clear on the new policy. Will this be a fee imposed on the groups INSTEAD of the fee that is currently imposed on Meetup Organizers, or will it be ON TOP of that fee?
In my case, they're giving me until mid-September to decide one way or the other. My particular group's attendance is so variable (3 people one month, 10 the next), that I'm not sure that we'd be willing to continue under the Meetup banner. At this point we all know each other well enough that if we wanted to we could get together without benefit of Meetup.
Posted by: Claude | Apr 17, 2005 at 04:32 PM
Poor business model and even worse attempt at trying to salvage it. How do you burden the person/s that are the main promoting tool in your business model. The organizers of the meetups are the ones that are actually driving the people to the site. Ass backwards, they should actually be rewarded. Just sounds wrong.
Instead they should have setup up subscribtion-based tools for these meetups and keep 15% of it and let the organizations keep 85%. Good way for the meetups to raise money for their causes and organization and meetup gets to make a small change.
Posted by: Meet Singles | Apr 17, 2005 at 05:25 PM
Yes, on the surface one might think it more fair to charge the attendees....but that would definitely kill MeetUp in a flash. Take a journey into the minds of the leaders. They are leading groups because they love to lead, love the attention, love the notoriety and 'giving' to the community. MeetUp provides tools to ease their mission. That saves them time. MeetUp helps them grow the group. Leaders will pay. Smaller groups will die. MeetUp will be enriched. The wheat will be sorted from the chaff and I expect to see the community grow nicely, with it's higher quality, more committed leaders.
Mark Brooks
Editor
Online Personals Watch
Posted by: Mark Brooks | Apr 17, 2005 at 11:24 PM
Hi all. This is Scott from Meetup. Meetup Organizers make the Meetup experience. So, it may seem counter-intuitive to make them responsible for their Group's fee, but they're the ones with the entrepreneurial vision for a great Meetup about something in their town. They take risk and get reward. When their Meetup takes off, the Organizer becomes powerful and is a hero in their comminity.
Perhaps most simply and importantly, we decided against a required member fee (vs. a flat group fee payable by the Organizer and sharable by the group) because Organizers wouldn't like us standing in the way of their Group's growth.
Good site here, Mark.
Scott Heiferman
CEO
MeetUp
Posted by: Scott Heiferman | Apr 18, 2005 at 08:03 AM
Don't agree. Why would you do that? It doesn't make sense. You can put your effort into creating meetup tools, a set of value-added features that members can subscribe to for a semi-anually fee of lets say $4.99.
Just use Mark's coined term "The perception of exclusivity" and create some nifty meetup tools people that are signed as free members wouldn't mind upgrading too. Don't cut current services . . . instead bundle some new value added tools.
Let's charge the few xx,xxx group leaders who promote our site . . . or lets create a value added service 15% of our 1.5 million members can "upgrade."
Use your current feature set as a free, "let's get them in the door kinda thing." Then advertise your upgrade all over your site.
Posted by: Personal Ads | Apr 18, 2005 at 02:50 PM
It's about time Meetup started making money off of a good idea that got the needed pub to prosper as a business during the Dean campaign. Kudos to them I say.
Posted by: dwhit110 | Apr 18, 2005 at 06:34 PM