Meetups can be great fun but I’ve often wondered how Meetup Inc planned to pay its bills. I mean, surely the cost of bandwidth alone would be significant for them. Well, now we have our answer: monthly group fees. Granted, the fees are only charged to organizers (and not participants) but they’re not exactly cheap — if you’re an existing organizer, you can get a special 2005 rate of “only” $9/month, while new organizers will be stuck with paying $19/month (as will existing organizers after 2005, presumably).
I understand that companies have a right to make a profit, but I’m not sure this is the right way to go about this. That $9/month might be enough to make an organizer think twice about continuing his/her group if his/her group is only puttering along. And, say you have a movie fan that's thinking about organizing a movie fan Meetup. He could either pay the $19/month to get the group started or he could put that money towards a Netflix account instead. One choice has uncertain success while the other offers a stack of DVDs in one’s mailbox every month :-/.
In some ways, this reminds me of the debacle when Six Apart changed the licensing terms for Movable Type last spring. The Six Apart guys probably sought an increase in revenue (which is fine) but they dove in head first which turned a lot of people off. (I still think that Six Apart's move to start charging for non-commercial use of Movable Type was one of the best things to ever happen to WordPress.)
But, getting back to Meetup, they offer a separate FAQ on their decision to add fees where they ask the question I had mind: “Why don’t you increase the advertising on the site?”, to which they reply “If we tried to get most of our revenue from advertising, we'd spend too much time serving advertisers, and not enough time serving you.”. The words sound benign enough but I can't help but wonder how adding fees is “serving” me more than adding some ads to the site. Concerns aside, I hope Meetup Inc pulls through. I’ve rather enjoyed the recent WordPress Meetups in particular and I wouldn’t want those to go away. Perhaps they’ll take a cue from Six Apart and revise their new licensing plans.
(Via: Asymptomatic)
Update 04-14: In a Slashdot story on this subject, several commenters pointed out some free alternatives to Meetup — EventWiki (which looks a bit sparse), My People Connection (which only has 17 cities) and MEETin.org (which looks promising).
The fees were most definitely not the way to go about paying their bills. I expect this will be proven after the launch of two upcoming sites, Gatheroo.com and CityCita.net. Check them out. For more information on free alternatives to meetup, check out my blog of the same name.