Monetizing Meetro
Google's supposedly about to buy Meetro. There's no discernable business model on Meetro's site, as the download for the software is free, and I saw no mention of having to pay to participate.

In a June 20th interview with the Chicago Sun-Times Meetro's CEO and co-founder Paul Bragiel said said "he plans to 'monetize' Meetro, which has eight employees, by licensing software to city Web pages, conventions and other businesses that want to put people together locally."

I'm not sure why a conference, such as, say SES, would pay a dime for software that's probably already running on many of the laptops of attendees.

If I were running a conference I'd simply suggest that attendees download the software and meet up that way if they want.

Right away I'm seeing obvious Blogger/GoogleMaps and Meetro synergies though. And especially at conferences.

Bloggers are a communal lot, if they're blogspot bloggers they already have profiles that could be ported over into Meetro. I know some major geeks who'd love to see which of their buddies/fellow bloggers are in the neighborhood, conference or not.

As far as the more "romantic" hook-up type capabilities of Meetro (which could be monetized per match, cherish, etc...) that's obviously not going to happen until the application can run on something smaller than a laptop. I mean, I'm not bringing my laptop out when I get freaktastic. Not that I have a laptop.

So the other monetization angle I see is a sort of push-messaging from local businesses that pay to advertise to nearby Meetro members. This plus Google maps could be a compelling local paid search model if there are actually enough Meetro geeks in a given locale.

If I were running birds I think I could find some uses for Meetro too.

A fool sees Hello and Meetro connections, though mostly glosses over the local angle.

So how do you see Google monetizing Meetro?
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |