Exclusive: Meetup.com is one of my top seven websites for two reasons. First, they have simple and effective tools to manage and update a like-minded community. Second, they are one of the best sites to help you move from the online space and into the real world. When you sign up a group you have to check a box that says you will have real world in-person meetings. Meetup is also a poster child for the NYC tech scene and tech companies that emerged from the dot-com ashes. Now ten years since the site was conceived and under development, Meetup.com is printing money every single day. I conservatively estimate they’re doing somewhere between $25MM-$30MM each year and here’s why.
First you must understand that Meetup.com wasn’t always a paid service. Originally the majority of their organizers didn’t pay anything, but that led to a low quality of meetups and groups that CEO Scott Heiferman explains in my interview with him last fall. While the switch to paid meetups sent their website traffic off a cliff, it set the tone for the type of quality they would require of it’s organizers. If you won’t pay, you’re not really welcome on the platform.
Heiferman has released a series of metrics over the course of the past 12 months of how many Meetups the site has on a particular day. These range anywhere from 3k a day to 13k a day. See them mapped out below. The top two or three metrics were also said to be all-time highs for the service.
We also know that Meetup charges anywhere from $12 to $20 per meetup depending on how many meetups you prepay for. These prices have been pretty consistent for as long as I’ve used the platform with the exception of a couple of price breaks coming in early 2012 for new organizers.
It is safe to assume that at least 50% of their daily meetups come from longtime organizers at $12 per month. I also assume that 25% of organizers are either just starting or never bought the bulk package (in reality this number is probably much higher). I will also assume that 25% come from the middle option of $15 per month. At that rate, with an average of 4,000 daily meetups, Meetup.com has somewhere in the range of $20MM-$25MM in yearly gross revenue with some days where they’re grossing as much as $200K. They also have a lot of promotional sponsorship programs that they push to they organizers and meetup attendees. These are really annoying and I would hope that they wouldn’t subject their organizers to these for under a couple of million dollars each year, but possibly as high as $5MM. That puts Meetup.com comfortably in the $25MM-$30MM yearly revenue range.
This pails in comparison to their largest competitor Eventbrite who is rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of revenue, but they only keep a small percentage (2%-10%) of that pushing the bulk directly to the event organizers. Meetup has positioned itself to own the community space versus the ticket sales business that Eventbrite is in.
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[...] While there is no community organization piece to the site, their payments platform makes Meetup’s look like it’s in the stone [...]
How can you assume that all the events are paid for? What about the thousands of cities across the world where organizing events is free?
Your stats are totally wrong. In order to calculate their yearly revenues, you should take the # of meetup groups worldwide x $72 (per 6 months) x 2 (for a year) = Total Yearly Revenue.
The price you have listed above is the Meetup Group cost (the admin/person who starts the group pays this cost usually). Meetup doesn’t make a profit off of how many meetup groups there are.
Let me know if this makes sense.
Thanks
JJ