Meetup.com payment changes coming soon
meetup.comThe tech community teaches me so often that no matter how cynical I am, the world will find a way to exploit whatever shred of optimism is left.
I have a message in my inbox from the leadership of Meetup.com thanking us for... something nebulous, from just a couple days ago. I’ve only been using meetup for a year or so but can’t recall getting a note before.
Aww that’s nice.
No, it wasn’t nice. It was buttering us up for this news.
One of the pieces of advice I’ve cherished is that if you’re going to ask someone for something, just ask. Especially if you haven’t talked in a while. Putting pleasantries in front of it just makes the whole exchange feel cheap and exploitive. If you want to ask about the kids, the dogs, the book she wrote, by all means do that afterward. Then it looks sincere, instead of like stalling.
I’m gathering nobody gave Meetup that advice, or at any rate they didn’t listen.
I was waiting for the shoe to drop on this.
1) WeWork buys meetup.com for some unknown reason. Starts offering to host meetups at WeWork offices for free as an intro to charging for it.
2) Reports every day that WeWork is losing money hand over fist from their terrible business model
3) Reports that SoftBank is going to start stepping in to try to fix their finances
I figured that it would only be a matter of time with those reports that WeWork would try to wring every possible dollar out of Meetup. It's a bold move for them to give refunds after this change, because a lot of groups will just close. And it's a shame, because it'll probably be a long time before a meetup site is as effective as Meetup.com was
This change will likely kill meetup. If you run a tech group in a decent sized metro and have say 200 members, will they all be willing to pay to show up to the meeting? And if someone signs up, but doesn't show up - how does a group bear that cost? Perhaps WeWork should change their name to WeBill.
Spot on. Sadly this is liable to drive a lot of meetup style stuff to Facebook groups.
I've got about 1200 members for my local CSS meetup and get about 50 RSVPs and 30 actual shows. I'll be paying far too much if I keep this up with the new payment plan.
I've got about the same members and attendees. This will drive the cost up about 3x but honestly, that wasn't the part we were concerned about most.
A couple of things: 1. At no point in this change did meetup suggest they were offering new things for subscribers that would justify a 3x cost increase. 2. Asking our members to start paying would now incur so many logistical costs on us: we'd now have to spend a bunch of time discussing with our members why they had to pay for something that was previously free. We'd also have to create email copy describing the change to them. We'd also have to deal with customer service issues where people thought we were charging them rather than meetup and they'd want a refund if they didn't show up. We'd also have to explain how charging met or didn't met our core values. 3. $2 isn't enough in the part of the world we're in to "prevent people from not showing due to cost". That's less than a cup of coffee so it's not much of a sunk cost to not show up. We could of course charge much more than $2 but that's a radical shift for something that was previously free. 4. Do we now charge or sponsors on an "on demand" basis based on how many members that show up? Or do we overcharge every sponsors based on the fear of how many people will show up? What used to be a $X per event cost has now added more unknowns that make logistics harder.
#1 is a small expense but #2 is a radical shift in the values and relationship between our group and our members. The logistical costs of changing how we interact with our members are MUCH higher than the added subscription fees per year. These kind of changes make almost no sense to us as we can't explain how meetup needs a 3x cost increase to deliver the same product it did yesterday.
In addition, the communications about this were terrible. A total of 0 times did they explain why this was happening and what our increased costs would bring us. They also tried to frame this as "lower subscription fees" but the total cost of the platform went up.
This degraded all trust we had in the platform and kicked off a search for alternatives immediately.
FYI, I told the Meetup focus group the same thing.
This is a pretty ambitious change, I'd love to see the data that they used in making it.
I've had people use a service I made for meetups before, https://tagmap.io, but its feature set is a bit different than meetups because it focuses on letting users meet other users rather than centrally-coordinated meetups and events, but it still does allow for community events to be created and marked by users for attendance.
From the comments section here it looks like Meetup will have a lot of other up-and-coming competitors either way though, curious to see how https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/chapter/blob/master/README.m... will look in awhile.
They're also creating more opportunities for FB too.
So one of the laravel members is creating https://eventy.io/ to counteract this.
I keep seeing lots of meetup alternatives, but meetups network effect was always too strong. It will be fascinating to see if this is what finally puts a chink in that armour.
Meetup has been a pretty shoddy product for quite a long time, I'm really hoping that something better takes off.
As of October 16, 2019, the page has been changed to show a note from Meetup's CEO: https://www.meetup.com/lp/paymentchanges
freeCodeCamp is making OSS replacement: https://mobile.twitter.com/ossia/status/1183845054449930241
Very dumb move imo, but excited to see any new alternatives.
Here's the Github project: https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/chapter
The description is "A self-hosted event management tool for nonprofits"
Maybe they're just being coy currently, and planning to make it a network after all, but the thing that made Meetup work was the network. You setup a meetup.com group, and random people find you by stumbling upon it on meetup.com . We run Larp games in Philly, and every couple months random players find us on meetup, show up to try it, and stay, and that was worth the meetup.com cost for us. If there's going to be a replacement for meetup, it has to also replace the network part of it, since that was much of the point for most groups. If I just wanted a self-hosted platform to track events, I have a wordpress plugin for that already.
I believe a large percentage of the network effect of meetup was showing up in google, bing, etc... as much as I told many people to simply go to meetup.com and start looking for random things to go check out, I sadly know it's likely any of them who actually went looking, ended up doing a google search for 'meetup.com <city name>" -
small data point from here, when I stumbled upong meetup, I was doing search engine lookups for things like '<activity group> <mycity>' - and found meetup to have what I was looking for and more - I enjoyed browsing it, using it, and appreciate the email reminders.
I think a wordpress plugin would be fine for getting much of the network effect if it had title tags (with city perhaps) and everything SEO right so events showed up in search results fine - a bonus if it could include a 'link wheel' I think it used to be called(?) in the footer showing other meets in same city - perhaps pulled from an API with this thing coming from freecodecamp - or some other apps that could do a same scheme or something.
I noticed buddypress (plugin for WP that adds groups and such) is now API friendly - so I would think these things could be mashed up pretty easy and quickly these days.
I really appreciate(d) what meetup has done for me in the past and I'd like to see that kind of thing continue to be an option for future humans and not have the burden for fees so it's only pay for play.
Everyone's traffic is different. Meetup shows up on google for us, sure, but so does our website (above meetup), and our website sells it far better than meetup does.
When we get new people from meetup, it's because they were on meetup surfing through events near them. I usually see they've joined a dozen other meetup groups in the area. We pay the organizer fee because of the network.
When I mentioned "bonus if it could include a 'link wheel' I think it used to be called(?)" above, what I was actually trying to recall is the days many web sites had a "web ring" type thing in the bottom footer... ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring )
I'd actually like to see the return of these, maybe some plugins where people can select the top ones to show first, or randomize as others have voted to put other sites within certain rings..
give me that, and an open source thing that does what google calendar does with the ability to suck in info from fbook, google cal, and apple cal - then we would have a couple of plugins that groups and small shops could add to their web sites that would actually help others in similar industries and get updated when one or more of their in-house people don't know who to update html can depend on calendar edits.
now I'm wondering if a list of sites can be stashed via git so it's easy to clone - and can an api be used to pull from those to display the needed web ring things and such.
What happens if someone shows up who didn't RSVP? Turn them away? Make them pay $2 at the door? Let them in for free? If the latter, then nobody will RSVP anymore and just show up.
Not seeing this on the front page at all, but seems like big news. Will we finally get a better owner for Meetup soon? If this is indeed prep for a fire sale.
Some kind of new WeWork tactical plans to draw attention?
Sad to see a useful product self destruct this way through what I would basically label as incompetence. The UI was always a bit of a mess but at least they had the community which made it tolerable. Like many old websites, it seemed to get by without any apparent major attempts to address any of that. Then they alienated meetup organizers by charging for starting new meetups and now they are sealing the deal by pissing off the users as well. Since plenty of alternatives seem to be available, including some open source ones, I don't think this will end well for them.
In short, this is corporate stupidity. The premise of properly running a site like this is that scaling it is relatively cheap and you can charge for add on services. Meetup.com never really bothered to do add on services. Now that they have a bloated organization with (apparently) clueless executives struggling to come up with a monetization strategy to justify years of hiring useless people doing useless things (as opposed to fixing their UX while not alienating their users and coming up with a plan for making some money).
For example, ticketing was never a thing on meetup.com. This was an obvious missing feature five years ago. Making that opt in for organizers and taking a cut would have made it an awesome tool for anyone organizing paid trainings or workshops. That money is mostly going to others like Eventbrite; which lacks any form of community but gets healthy revenue from people organizing paid events nevertheless. Back in the day lots of meetup.com events would actually tell you to go to eventbrite to get a ticket. That's how obvious the need was for this feature. Eventbrite got big on meetup.com being asleep at the wheel.
Another source of untapped revenue is facilitating commercial sponsoring deals. Many meetups are sponsored financially (and with venues, beer, and other support) by companies. Those companies might like to advertise that they are doing that with some branding. That's something you can charge for. Not a thing on meetup.com either.
If you have sponsoring and paid tickets, a next obvious thing to charge for is promoting the events to sell more tickets. Doesn't seem to be a thing on meetup.com either.
Most conferences are just big meetups. Not a thing on meetup.com either. Most paid events flock to other platforms because meetup.com doesn't do anything useful for them. Meetup.com has been leaving money on the table for as long as they exist and instead of fixing that, they are now self destructing.
Whomever ends up buying meetup.com from WeWork would do well to just get rid of the current management (because they add negative value) and rip out all forms of payments and pricing already in place and go back to basics. Then restore and nurture the user base back being healthy and start doing all of the above to make some money. I'd also recommend scaling down the team to a small core of developers, community management and a smart marketing team. Which is probably what it was in the early days. Focus the team on community growth and real monetization opportunities that serve instead of tax that community. That would be a new thing for them because they have never done that.