While this isn’t something happening only in Orange County, it’s certainly something that affects a LOT of OC residents, myself included. Several months ago, the folks at Meetup.com (where I’m a group organizer) sent out a survey asking about meeting habits and possible pricing structures. Their idea was to charge groups a monthly fee in exchange for added services and materials (”added services” being “let users send each other messages” and “materials” being table cards). I spoke out strongly against the idea, letting them know that they’d see a huge migration away from their site if they went that direction.

Today, they went that direction.

While I appreciate being able to use meetup.com for free for the last couple years, there’s no way I’m going to pay $19/month (or even their “discounted” $9/month) for what amounts to no new features my group has any use for.

Hopefully those who use the service will be happy paying the fee, or have a large enough group to make other means of communication useful. Meetup, however, is going to lose groups, lose traffic and ultimately become a shadow of what they used to be.