I think the risk to meetup.com is that the established meetups for groups like programmers or other career/professionals, the ones most likely to be important e

I think the risk to meetup.com is that the established meetups for groups like programmers or other career/professionals, the ones most likely to be important enough that people would pay $2 to attend, are also precisely the ones least in need of meetup's audience, since they are established. Also, charging $2/person means about $0.25 goes to Visa/Mastercard/PayPal/whoever does the payment processing, which is about 12.5% of your revenue skimmed off the top immediately. Charging the organizer more, and everyone else nothing, works better from that point of view even if the attendees chip in a few bucks each to compensate the organizer. Of all the business models one could imagine for this site, this seems like one of the less well thought out.