I thought after last year’s Meetup subscription debacle, that they were destined to fail and it did impact their number of active groups to the tune of losing about 80%. So why am I talking about them? Because eBay has jumped in with others and bought a 10% stake in them:

Founded in 2002, Meetup first gained national attention for launching Howard Dean’s brief Presidential candidacy during the 2004 elections. The site had 54,000 Meetup groups listed last May, when it began charging a small subscription fee of up to $19 monthly to sponsor the groups. Since then the number of groups has dropped to just over 10,000.

eBay has been on a buying spree this last year, snagging a 25% stake in Craigslist and of course Skype. I still am wondering what they’ve done with Skype. Om Malik talks about something I figured would arrive faster: skyping bids. This isn’t being launched here in the US though, which Om credits:

I find it interesting that most of the tests are in countries that are not hostile to Skype. I think such a roll-out in the US would have the MSOs and the phone company(s) up in arms. Now if you are like me, then you are asking: this is it for $4.1 billion? There’s got to be more, right.

eBay/Skype could turn out to be one of the most underutilyzed, overpriced acquisitions in history. Add to this the fact that they see value in an online meeting site which admits to losing the majority of its groups over the last year makes even less sense. Oh, but they do say the remaining 10,000 groups are more active. How are they measuring that? Do they have some Meetup spy at every meetup group or something? Or is it simply the number of people who say they are or aren’t coming to a meetup by clicking something on their website?

If I was an eBay investor, I’d be worried. Since I’m not, well, it’s only money. Meh.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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