The Profitability of Conferences
Jeff Jarvis recently posted about his frustration toward the conference industry:
Too many conferences suck. They’re too expensive. They are filled with boring panels. They are all about speeches and not about conversation and argument and learning and meeting.
But it turns out there are many hidden costs to putting together a large conference...
Scoble posted about how the costs scale faster than the income:
But, wanna do a 1,000 attendee conference? Costs per attendee start going up exponentially.
Now, do you have any clue how much we paid for a hotdog lunch? How about around $30 per attendee. How much for a Coke? $5. How much for an urn of coffee? $1,000.
Brett Tabke also posted in his bot blog about many of the hidden costs in a large conference, stating:
Our Orlando conference of 500 in Feb of 2004 was 7000% more profitable than our Las Vegas conference of 1500 last fall.
Seems to me that size might almost be an enemy to many conferences then, eh?
Location location location
Shop around as you can find places that are more hungry for your business and willing to wheel and deal as I've run into this situation on a smaller scale and it's amazing just what you can find if you're willing to go the extra mile researching available venues.
HINT: Lots of really large hotels have lots of really vacant spaces if you look hard enough you'll find one that blinks and gives you better rates.
>scale
scale
The first two pubconferences and subsequent seoroadshows were great successes but depended GREATLY upon the hard groundwork of nffc, mackin, mivox, 4eyes, and plenty of others (sorry, I know I've missed lots of names). What we've found is that you can do a "no agenda" conference for up to 100 attendees for an approximate cost of $40-50US per person --but again, that assumes someone is willing to do the groundwork for free.
Above 100, scaling issues start to get ugly. Everything from meeting room sizes, to transportation, to pub capacities, to restaurant seating logistics become significantly harder with every 25 or so additional attendees.
I remember when Barry lloyd
I remember when Barry lloyd bought all the beer once in a pubcon. Think that saved me my entrance fee. Need more people like him!
Hire Experts
Conferences are extremely profitible if done correctly. You can hire an expert in the field who has setup hundreds in the city you are looking to be in. They know the right hotels, how to haggle on price, how to pick the right dates, the best caterers, and so on. Of course if a webmaster has no experience in holding conferences or the city they are being held in, they will get taken to the bank.
As for size being bad, I don't see why. More people means more money from the sponsors. I'd imagine a show with 2000 webmasters would ask for more from a sponsor than one that has 200.
So I just don't buy the fact that these shows are difficult to make profitible. You essentially have guaranteed sponsors at all these shows, a guaranteed set of people, and knowledgeable speakers who are essentially speaking for a free pass and some publicity.
I mean 2,000 people at $500 a pop is a cool million. You really can't throw a show on for less than that?
SES Shows
We know, for example, that SES NYC 2005 got around 2500 paid attendees at an average around $1300 - so that's 3.25 million. My guess is that the fees per attendee hovered right around $1000, leaving $300 + sponsorship monies to pay for the people, labor and management and make the profit.
If I had to throw a guess out there, I'd say they made a profit of between $75 - $150 per attendee after all possible expenses ($190K - $375K) - does that math sound totally off to anyone?
>off I don't know enough to
off
I don't know enough to comment. About all I can say for sure is that Meckler's sale of SEW lock-stock-n-tradeshow seemed then to confirm that there's a problem hidden in there somewhere. http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread29652.html
I do think Scoble is credible on those numbers he posted.
I'm not buying that it's a
I'm not buying that it's a bad biz.
Would Brett have a hard time raising attendance fees? Sure.
But would SES have a problem? Hell no. Not with the company footing the bill (+ expense accounts) for the corporate stooges ;-)