People already pay for Meetup.com. As an organiser I think I'm paying around $180 a year and that limits me to three meet-up groups under my ownership.
From what I've seen, no one is complaining about paying for Meetup's services. It's the unfairness of the charge that is the problem.
Why is it unfair? For one, meetup attrition is often in excess of 50%. So, 100 people RSVP, you pay $200 for that one event (more than the previous annual fee), and maybe 50 people show up. It's also out of scale with what similar services charge. Another problem is that it makes running a free/community meet-up unpredictable financially. I'm happy to stump up $180 a year if it means Meetup.com makes it easier to grow the audience for a group I run as a hobby. I'm not happy for that to become, potentially, 12 times that.
People are demonstrably willing to pay for Meetup.com. They're not willing to open themselves to unpredictable and, frankly, wildly higher fees just because Meetup's parent company is going through a hard time.
People are happy to pay but there's a limit. I pay that $180 for a Meetup group yearly but that's already crept up from... $120, I think, over the past few years, and I was already starting to wonder if I was going to keep paying it.
If they increased it another $50 on me, I'd probably just kill it and move as much of the group over to Facebook events (doesn't help the group has been in a lull lately either since I've had a year of planning for my wedding taking up all my time).
So I think they figured this change would let them get more money in the long run without having a bunch of Organizers drop their Meetup groups with a big price hike, but they're going to lose groups this way too and I suspect it's going to make things worse in the long run.
I can't think of any other way they can make money without exploiting their users somehow. Either Meetup turns their userbase into machine learning datasets, people spend some pocket change on it, or Meetup doesn't exist. (This same dilemma exists for most non-data center/non-ecommerce internet companies. People feel that a row in someone's database isn't worth paying for even though it took significant labor to create.)
I mean it's not like going to an event in real life is free in the first place. You have to pay for transportation and so on. You spend your precious time. If it's important to you, why be stingy over 2 bucks.
