Before the loneliness epidemic and all the friendship apps that followed, there was Meetup.com, the pre-Facebook platform for hanging out with strangers from the internet. After growing a loyal user base, surviving a stint under WeWork, and then stalling out, Meetup is angling for a second wind\u2014but its turnaround may be turning away longtime fans.<\/p>\n
Origins: Meetup launched in 2002 after its co-founders noticed a general desire for community in the wake of Sept. 11. The concept was straightforward\u2014give people with similar interests a forum for organizing hangouts:<\/p>\n
The startup initially grew<\/a> by finding online blogs for niche groups and inviting them to organize Meetups for fake holidays, like International Pug Lovers Meetup Day.Meetup crossed 1 million users in 2004 after it was publicized as a grassroots organizing tool for the presidential race.Soon, it started charging volunteer organizers $12 to $19 per month, leading to its first profitable year in 2010.<\/p>\n By the time it was acquired in 2017, the platform boasted 35 million members and an estimated 300,000 communities, according to its new owner.<\/p>\n The beginning of the end?<\/p>\n WeWork bought Meetup for $156 million in what seemed like a natural pairing\u2014about 100,000 people had already attended Meetups at a WeWork space, the companies said at the time. With the acquisition, Meetup organizers thought<\/a> their days of cramming into community centers or caf\u00e9s, or paying for venues themselves, were over…<\/p>\n …until WeWork crashed in 2019. Its tumble appeared to trickle down to Meetup, which laid off<\/a> as much as 25% of its staff, weeks after testing a $2 RSVP fee that also ruffled users\u2019 feathers. Once the pandemic started, it became harder for the platform\u2019s ~50 million members to meet up in person. WeWork sold it in March 2020 for far less than it paid.<\/p>\n New owner: Bending Spoons, an Italian firm that buys struggling tech companies of yesteryear (see: Evernote, Vimeo, AOL, and Eventbrite<\/a>), acquired Meetup in 2024. It raised organizer fees for the first time since 2019, from $24\/month to $45\/month, and started paywalling<\/a> some features. Though the move aggravated users, new app registrations increased by 20% last year, hinting at a potential post-pandemic resurgence, Engadget reported<\/a>.\u2014ML<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before the loneliness epidemic and all the friendship apps that followed, there was Meetup.com, the pre-Facebook platform for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539958,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[165,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-539957","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-mobile","9":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539957\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}