I'm not going to pick on anyone specifically, but if you think that all you get for your money is to hear a few speakers you're probably not going to make it very far in IM. You need to think about a few things before firing off your useless posts that add no value. First off, since you don't value the speakers and any of their experiences we'll take them out of it. Let's just say it's $1,000 to attend, and nothing was offered, here's just a couple of reasons you'd want to consider attending.
The biggest was already mentioned, it's NETWORKING. That's one of the biggest parts of working online. Who you know, and what you have access to can often determine how far you'll make it, especially if you're still getting started. The key is to network with good people that can actually help and are able to take action, not a bunch of talkers that have all the ideas in the world, but no clue on how to put them in play.
This is a good time to bring in the pricing/cost. If it were me, I would want to be able to meet and talk with the most qualified people possible, who wouldn't? Well, if the price to attend was $50 you would obviously see 10x the amount of people that would attend. That's great except what's the overall quality of those people? At that cheap of a cost, anyone can afford to attend, so your chances are hooking up with someone that can really help you is much much slimmer. By pricing it higher you attract a higher quality of person to attend because as those above me said "it's too expensive" for the average person to go. In theory, most people that went to this would be people that could afford to, and therefore would be much more likely to have a successful operation going. Since those are the type of people you would be hoping to meet there the higher cost works to your advantage.
You also need to consider the costs involved with putting an event together and hosting it at a place like Ceaser's Palace. You're talking about renting out rooms in a major casino during peak business days over a weekend. Speakers also don't just volunteer their time for free. There's a lot of things that go into the price that's quoted and if you took a few minutes to analyze that you'd see that it's not any kind of a rip-off or waste of money what-so-ever. I'm not saying it's the steal of the year either, but the way you guys just throw out these nonsense negative posts without any valid reasoning is just flaming and isn't useful to anyone. You're paying for an experience and maybe even some new contacts to help you in the future. Good luck with it though to the OP, I may even consider going myself as I've been wanting to start attending some meetups like this to start meeting more people.
