Conference sizes

[schulzrinne]

Are there any measurements or rough ideas
about the typical distribution of conference
sizes - something like "50% of conferences have fewer than 5 members" or "very few conferences have more than 20 participants" or anything qualitative or anecdotal?

Thanks.

Henning Schulzrinne
Columbia University

[Kathryn]

Hi Henning,

Great question. I work for PlaceWare a leading Web conferencing company. We see the market much like you in two segments: meetings and larger events. At PlaceWare in 2000 we saw a steady growth in larger events (20+) while the demand for the meetings side of the business just emerging. In a report published by Frost and Sullivan in May 2000 it states that of all web conference services being offered 74% are larger events and 26% are smaller meetings. Today while the events are still growing the meetings market is really starting to take off. As web conferencing becomes more of a mainstream business tool, meetings will eventualy far outweigh events. Most companies who look at our service want the capabilities to do both small collaborative meetings as well as larger events like internal company meetings or web seminars. Does that answer your question?

Best,

Kathryn
PlaceWare, Inc.

Originally posted by schulzrinne:
Are there any measurements or rough ideas
about the typical distribution of conference
sizes - something like "50% of conferences have fewer than 5 members" or "very few conferences have more than 20 participants" or anything qualitative or anecdotal?

Thanks.

Henning Schulzrinne
Columbia University

[schulzrinne]

Originally posted by Kathryn:
Hi Henning,

At PlaceWare in 2000 we saw a steady growth in larger events (20+) while the demand for the meetings side of the business just emerging. In a report published by Frost and Sullivan in May 2000 it states that of all web conference services being offered 74% are larger events and 26% are smaller meetings.
Best,

Kathryn
PlaceWare, Inc.

This is helpful. I wonder if you have additional statistics on either meetings or events (the difference, besides numbers, seems to be largely whether all participants get to speak or just listen/wath), can you tell whether most meetings are 3-4 or are pretty evenly distributed across the 3-20 range.

[mchapman]

For the last few years, the "average" audio conference has been roughly 7 to 9 participants per conference with a duration of 50 to 60 minutes. I'm not aware of any studies that have broken out the numbers for conferences versus larger events but that would be an interesting study.

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