Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 " - small data point from here, when I stumbled upong meetup, I was doing search engine lookups for…
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.
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.