What Meetups tell us about America

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Interesting:

Many of the results cement city stereotypes. New York is the country’s acknowledged fashion capital, so it is not a shock that Fashion/Beauty Meetups are unusually popular there. With 7,724 members, the most popular New York Fashion group is NYC’s #1 Fashion Events & Parties,. There are 67 other Fashion/Beauty Meetups in New York, ranging from Fashion Secrets of Attractive Men, to Dress Up Nicely For a Brunch.

Brooklyn is also characterized by an unusual interest in Fashion/Beauty. A signup for a Brooklyn-based Meetup is almost eight times more likely to be for a fashion related group than in the rest of the country.

Other results weren’t as expected. We wouldn’t have presumed, for instance, that Phoenix would have such an unusually robust number of people involved in Movement/Politics Meetups. But signups for Meetups in Phoenix are almost three times as likely to be for Movement/Politics groups than for the country as a whole.

The largest Movement/Politics group in Phoenix is the Arizona Liberty R3VOLUTION Meetup!, which has over 1,600 members. It was the first of many Meetups developed to support the Libertarian ideas of former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. Outsider candidates like Ron Paul and Howard Dean have relied on Meetup as crucial campaign tools.

The three cities in our list where Tech is the most unusually popular type are all in the Bay Area: San Francisco, Palo Alto and Mountain View. The Bay Area is generally considered tech’s epicenter, so this is no revelation. But this list made us curious: does Meetup’s data reveal any underrated tech hubs?

Post external references

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    http://priceonomics.com/what-meetups-tell-us-about-america/
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