Since many meet already be on meetup.com, they then discover another meetup which also might suit them. All these alternatives might have the functionality that meetup does, but none of them provide exposure.
Everyone loves to hate on ads nowadays. They do not want to be tracked, etc, but I would love to see an ad-supported version of Meetup. It is too expensive at $15 a month for many small groups.
Meetup has a search engine that allows you to find events by date, location, or subject matter. So I could
- look up events near me for this coming week.
- look up events within a certain radius from a location.
- look up events based on my interests.
> if I'm looking for an event I Google.
That's the fallback. I think what Meetup provided was a single site that people visit to find local events that fit their interests, which also allowed community-building.
"I do not want to be tracked" + "$15/mo is too expensive for many small groups".
Big Mac in Philadelphia is $3.99. 15/mo is 4 Big Macs. That's expensive for a small group in the US?!
Imagine you want to have some small hyper local group such as Memorial Park Dog Owners. Obviously, members will not pay for such a group, but the organizer is on the hook for almost $200 a year. Hard to create community with such prices.
Active groups of over 250 members? The pricing starts getting better.
It is 4 big macs a month. It is 3 Starbucks coffees a months. It is 3 cans of soda bought as singe units in a super market a month.
If a group cannot afford it, then maybe stop pretending that the group needs RSVPs or other services. Use a paper and a pen and pin an announcement on the bulletin board of a park.
The group does not pay for the meetup, the organizer does. Most social meetups are created by the kindness of the organizer, who want nothing in return. $15 a month is a lot of kindness.
My fictitious group was an example. I do not like dogs. :) But your solution goes back to my original comment. The article lists functional alternatives, but there is no way for someone to find the group, unless they explicitly searched for it. Most end up searching on Meetup and Facebook.
The article lists other solutions that will either:
1. Start monetizing via data mining and ads. This is a very dubious proposition for sites targeting small communities unless those sites convert every single inch of space on screen into ads or unless community management part of it is a just another place to stick ads like it is for Google and Facebook
2. Charge the money from either attendees or organizers to support a going concern, causing the same kind of freak out meetup is currently experiencing.
3. Shutdown
The "those who pay the least whine the most" is showing to be true here as well.
There are free solutions, Meetup can turn over and die.
That's the type of argument akin to "If you do not have a funded retirement you should not have a latte": if someone thinks that saving a money on a latte is going to make a difference in his or her retirement, then they have a structural problem that not having a latte won't solve.
> There are free solutions, Meetup can turn over and die.
Yes. They are called email lists or pen and paper.