I'm a fan of meetups, I've attended a few and have met great people and learned a lot - I see the value.
I'm building an app that allows event organizers to monetize the events and sell tickets to their audience using our platform, so you can still host the occasional free meetup on meetup.com, but can also use our service to post a paid event and share the link with your audience. All you do is hook-up your bank account and the ticket sales are directly deposited into your bank account within 3-5 days. We simply take a small 7% transaction fee per ticket sold.
We're in development but I'm looking for feedback, to see if any of you would use something like this.
Thanks Anthony