When Bizzabo analyzed the 988 virtual events that ran on its platform between January 1 and April 1 of this year, it found an interesting pricing trend: A full 91 percent of the events were offered free to attendees. That’s a marked increase over 2020, when 80 percent of events that used the platform were free.
Bizzabo offered three hypotheses to explain the change:
• After a year of online events, organizers may feel they have to fight “Zoom fatigue” by offering free registration to drive higher attendance numbers.
• Organizations could be changing the way they measure success in the virtual realm, with registration revenues becoming less critical than lead generation and client engagement or retention.
• Event organizers may now be more successful with sponsorship revenues than in 2020.
Another reason might be found in a change to the virtual-event types that Bizzabo is hosting. Conferences accounted 43 percent of events on the Bizzabo platform in 2020 but just 34 percent in Q1. At the same time, internal events increased from 13 percent of the total last year to 19 percent in Q1
Here are six other findings from Bizzabo’s latest Virtual Event Benchmarks Report:
• On average, virtual events have 15 sessions.
• The average virtual session lasts 54 minutes.
• 42 percent of attendees watch the entire virtual session.
• On average, attendees view 68 percent of a session that lasts between 30 and 60 minutes.
• The average event has 13 sponsors.
• About 13 percent of an event’s viewership will be on-demand after the live virtual event.
