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I fear this $2/attendee grab by Meetup will drive more people to Facebook for finding and planning and advertising events. Sadface.

The understandable reason: Facebook is "free" and most of these better alternatives will be fragmented and mainstream unknown for a long time.

Maybe one overarching event-search service could help the fragmentation problem, if it doesn't already exist.

4 comments

A per-person charge makes free/volunteer-organized events largely a non-starter. Any charge is a huge friction for people signing up for something. And unless it's a corporate sponsored event (and often even then), the $5 or so per person who actually ends up attending is significant.

Probably people/companies will just depend on word of mouth and other channels to promote events and not depend on discovery through a specific service.

Yup, if this goes through, we'll need to move all our meetups to email notifications, which will kill virality but given that no-one's going to pay for a meetup, is probably the better solution.

I fucking hate WeWork (i was really worried when Meetup.com was acquired, and it appears that I was correct to be).

I would have been OK with We buying Meetup if they offered their space for meetups ... but alas ... they did literally nothing and likely we'll see that the product was killed in the end.

Meetup.com does let organisers book WeWork spaces. Free.

Yeah, they kept hassling me for months trying to get me to use 4-8 people spaces for our meetups which have 60-80 people.

one group i am in uses meetup for event announcements, but manages the event on their own website. it's really just to enable people to find them on meetup. meetup never sees any rsvps except some that rsvp by mistake.

the only thing that virality helps with is event anouncements. finding all events in the same place, that is what makes meetup.com useful. the actual registration, and what not can be done anywhere else without causing to much friction.

For smaller group, people updating attendance is really useful. I've cancelled meetings when not enough people could attend, or change venue if more than I initially anticipated acknowledged. This is not easy to do on a simple github.io style static site.

oh, of course, but it doesn't have to happen on meetup.com, you can use any other service, from the many suggested in this discussion.

of course having two sites is more complex than having it all-in-one. that was the whole benefit of meetup.com, but that benefit is now going away.

one reaction is to reduce the dependency on meetup.com for groups. we need meetup.com to help get the word out, but we can use other tools for the actual group management.

I run a corporate sponsored meetup and the $2 fee is a non starter. My budget is for the venue, stickers and beers, this would increase the cost of every meetup by 50% providing nothing in return.

Edit: After reading a bit more about it, the cost is to the users, not organizers, which makes even less sense. Why would anyone ever RSVP instead of just showing up?

This is a serious question -- you really can do a venue, stickers, beers, and other stuff for $4 pp? Because I am struggling to see how that works. My rough guess from having thrown events would be $14 pp for decent food, beers and some nicer-than-soda non-alcoholic alternatives, etc.

The venue should be available for free if your meetup is attractive to people that could be potential employees of the hosts. And why do you feel the need to give people free food and drinks? Reframe the issue : Everyone who attends should be motivated to come to the event for the content, rather than free food on their way home.

They already walking back their massive own-goal:

https://www.meetup.com/lp/paymentchanges

UPDATE October 15, 2019 1:30 pm ET

This payment change is currently only a limited test for a small number of groups. Organizers of these select groups have the option to opt-out of this test. We will not be making any significant payment changes in the near term. We are committed to providing advance notice before any changes go into effect.

We’ve also updated our FAQs below to address specific questions.

It is nice to see that walked-back.

Meetup is a resource for me. My guess that this change would complete end every single meetup I know of except for a few tech meetups - and these probably have alternatives and so wouldn't want it either.

It seems like this also illustrates a complete misunderstanding by the meetup company of how the meetup app is used by their users/customers. Among other things, it's standard for people to find group, sign-up maybe once and then not sign-up further but continue to attend regularly - the group I run and the group I've previously run were like that. Meetup was/is about discovery. Expecting potential attendees to pay is absurd, regular attendees wouldn't feel obligated to register and so wouldn't pay. The confusion is complete.

Agree very much. I do attend a few non tech meetups, like movie meetups & hikes for eg. 2€ fee over the movie ticket rarely makes any sense. While proper tech style meetups may actually have organizer costs and such, a meetup where the whole point is meeting a bunch of people over a coffee or so with minimal organizational requirements doesn't make sense with the fee.

Right, I really hate to admit it, but Facebook Events works pretty well for this. (Except for those without Facebook accounts.)

Doesn't Meetup also "ban" itself from development countries, where $2 is a lot? In some places, $2 is like $26. — Or will Meetup charge less, based on local purchasing power?