Meetup.com – an interesting freemium model.
CC: kalandrakas
Meetup.com over the years became THE place for people to organise all sorts of group activities around a particular topic. Starting from programming language groups through stay-at-home-mums to nudist men - everyone now wants to connect with likeminded individuals and they use Meetup.com for this. It serves a very simple purpose of creating an event calendar, managing the member list and RSVPs and notifying members about new meetings or changes in the current ones. We now have more features like picture galleries or voting for meetup ideas as well as message boards and advanced user profiles. But the basic purpose is: get people organised for a particular date.
Now, the business model. Every meetup organiser pays a monthly subscription, starting at 12USD. There is no free plan, but you get your first 30days free, so you can check how it works for you before being charged. Where is the 'free'mium then? Well, group members don't pay anything. A whole 4 mln of them. Now, as you notice, it's not a typical freemium model. Normally you'd provide the basic service for free and charge for advanced features. Well, meetup works just the same, it's just harder to notice. When you're attending meetups - it's free. If you want to go into 'advanced mode' - which here is organising meetups - you start paying.
There are a lot of businesses that have two groups of 'customers' - like for AdTaily, we have publishers and advertisers - both of which are important for us. Sometimes we manage to convert a publisher into an advertiser, but this is not our focus. For Meetup.com, I guess that's their primary 'lead generation' system for getting new organisers - getting more group members. And this is why I think Meetup.com has an interesting freemium model.
August 7th, 2010 - 15:23
Everyone wants something for free. And, often, the web provides just that.
During the .COM boom, it seemed like advertising would be enough to make an online business profitable. But that idea has pretty much passed and sites are often challenged to come up with a business model that produces income without losing their users.
I’m a website developer and am very familiar with the challenges. Meetup actually has VC investors and they need to make money. All things considered, the model you’ve described probably makes as much sense as any other.
August 9th, 2010 - 12:00
@Jonathan – my point was that Meetup implemented a different approach to the freemium model, which other businesses could learn from. Thanks for stopping by