Business model for upcoming events web page

I believe you should go for a premium member models, You should have a set of events( 1-2 ) posting to be free, this will help you increase your popularity.

You are going to get issues with adoption as soon as you tell the organizers they have to pay to be listed on your site. Why not make it free for anyone to post events on your site. To make money, charge organizers who are looking to have maximum exposure on your site i.e. listing stays at the top.

So I guess from your writings, that your target customer base are event managers. I also would say that it depends on the size of the event, if the managers have money or not. Therefore I would say that your primary business is here to make the "marketing" for events. So a Premium Model would not be the best model for that. Charge the managers at a hourly rate and create personal contacts with them.

Another solution would be that when you know that there will be an event in a certain area. Try to make some deals with locals and offer it as a service to event managers. So you get payed by both;)

Bill by sales volume or exposure volume.

This way:

1. Your business model is in alignment with your customers needs (More action for them = more revenue for you, a virtuous cycle)
2. Prices scale with your clients (I'm guessing you have minimal marginal cost per post, but to them the value increases with more expensive events)

If you handle the ticket sales take a percent. If you give promotion charge per action (CPC to external site? Cost per views? Targeted by audience type if you have that kind of data ala facebook ads?).

I think you have a range of potential customers, each with a range of needs.

• consumer. Person turning up to find something to do. They want a lot of choice and they want to express what they want easily. They may want to be kept up to date. They don't want to spend long and they have a range of options in your competitors.
• events organizers. These are people looking for work from your client base. You can make a margin or be their sales pipeline.
• small event. Little to no budget, they need people to know about them. There are a huge range of sites they ould use. They may need help writing engaging descriptions which if you had an ideal link you could charge for and it is included in their price. Really these guys provide you the volume the consumers are looking for.
• midsized events. They can pay something for priority of you can prove a return. They may have tickets to sell, they may have marketing materials to create, they may have staffing requirements, they may have planning needs. Presenting packages that help them get it done is a true value add if all your doing is introducing a local business to help them out.
• meetup style events. These are probably just listings and attendance items. Meetup has this covered. It there may be some value add or method of increasing your volume of offerings.
• large gigs. Have money, have a lot of options of how to spend their money, so why your site? Pretty much the other value added items listed here in "solve it for me packages"
• corporate driven events. These guys can pay, they have tickets to be sold, they have a lot of stuff to take care of in setting up the event. Your value add to them is a range of "we will take care of you" packages and you put them in contact with events organizers and planners.
• advertisers. Last but not least, people trying to get in front of any of the above subsets of people. Being able to say I'm targeting large corporates running events is worth a lot to the right advertiser

Work through the senarios and pick the useful subset that gets you volume of customers and volume of the right events, then look at how monitoring that subset first.