Really cool that you built this from scratch for so many major cities! I am located in Chicago but browsed SF and the list returned there looked like a logical categorization of events & things to do.
Re: your question of whether to pursue the project, my thoughts from the perspective of someone who works in the tourism & travel industry.
Collecting and aggregating event listings is, as you note, time consuming. It can't all be done by crawl/scrape. Curation is an important factor here, and so perhaps you tailor the product to the perceived needs of a specific type of end user.
First user type that comes to mind: those of us who maintained Facebook accounts for the event listings/invites, but have all but fallen off of Facebook over the years due to... everything else that's wrong with the product :)
I'll say this, too — Airovic is entering a space where your number one competition is Google. Google orients its event listings geographically, around a "place," and I think your opportunity is to orient around people and their preferences.
To that end, another competitor here is Spotify for concerts — much as I hate to admit this, as a retired "Cool Person," I'm generally made aware of bands I want to see touring in my area first by Spotify, and then by social and local media.
That said, in identifying and meeting the needs of a narrower band of users, you may find that emphasizing curation and personalization could position your product as a more useful method of discovery.
They've been separate entities for years. The Onion under Univision became more of a digital production house. Editorial staff was always distinct. I presume that the handful of people leaving are writers, and they'll need to staff up around operations.
Really neat application of the data. I'm the Director of Marketing at a mid-sized destination marketing organization (DMO) represented on your map (Aurora, Illinois -- we're actually a terrific place to visit in winter!). Curious to learn more about the variables used to deploy the "best time" pages and get a sense for where you'd like to take this further.
Wouldn't be so certain about blizzards. Warming increases the amount of moisture in the atmosphere during the cold months, producing more blizzards. My only fear about living in the Great Lakes is that we may end up snowed under before our ready access to fresh water makes a difference in terms of climate change preparedness.
Closing up shop as a marketing strategy is interesting as a high-risk/high-reward last ditch effort.
If under a particular set of circumstances, the most viable path to attracting eyeballs is to go under, it could be really effective to give potential users a "last chance" and then pivot to a new name.
Re: your question of whether to pursue the project, my thoughts from the perspective of someone who works in the tourism & travel industry.
Collecting and aggregating event listings is, as you note, time consuming. It can't all be done by crawl/scrape. Curation is an important factor here, and so perhaps you tailor the product to the perceived needs of a specific type of end user.
First user type that comes to mind: those of us who maintained Facebook accounts for the event listings/invites, but have all but fallen off of Facebook over the years due to... everything else that's wrong with the product :)
I'll say this, too — Airovic is entering a space where your number one competition is Google. Google orients its event listings geographically, around a "place," and I think your opportunity is to orient around people and their preferences.
To that end, another competitor here is Spotify for concerts — much as I hate to admit this, as a retired "Cool Person," I'm generally made aware of bands I want to see touring in my area first by Spotify, and then by social and local media.
That said, in identifying and meeting the needs of a narrower band of users, you may find that emphasizing curation and personalization could position your product as a more useful method of discovery.