Live Webinar and Virtual Event Attendance Is Up This Year: Notified Report

Is virtual dead? Not quite — even with the general focus of the industry moving away from virtual events and towards the return to in-person, webinars and virtual events still have an important role to play and continue to be leveraged by teams taking an omni-channel approach to their content creation and distribution.

Notified this week released its 2022 Benchmark Report for Webinars and Virtual Events, which includes data from around 9,000 client standalone webinars and more robust virtual events hosted on Notified’s platform between June 2021 and June 2022.

“With the widespread adoption of event technology over the past several years, some norms and best practices around conducting webinars and virtual events have been persistent and some new trends have started to emerge,” said Notified Chief Revenue Officer Dan Lotzof.

“As we analyzed this year’s data, the two core themes that stood out are agility and optimization – as marketers and event planners continue to evaluate their strategies and budgets for 2022 and beyond, they’re seeking ways to keep audiences highly engaged through meaningful experiences and formats.”

Among the key findings was that live attendance at webinars and virtual events has increased and remains higher than before the pandemic. According to Notified’s data, webinars during this time frame were viewed live 65 percent of the time, up from 39 percent in 2019, while 71 percent of virtual event minutes viewed were watched live.

When it comes to the timing of webinars and virtual events, Notified found that Wednesday and Thursday are the most popular days to host webinars, while Tuesday and Wednesday are the most common days for holding virtual events. Notably, 23 percent of webinars were held outside of normal business hours, in an effort to cater to the schedules of busy professionals.

Notified’s data also reflects the changing formats of virtual experiences — the average number of speakers per event is now 20, up from only six in 2019. This tracks with attendees’ strong preference for short sessions at virtual events, thereby allowing for more of them, as well as event organizers’ efforts to pack in as much valuable content as possible for their audience.

Video content has been on the rise for several years as a way to better engage audiences, especially younger generations that spend their time on apps like TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube. This trend applies to digital events as well, with 77 percent of webinars now leveraging video, compared to 61 percent in 2019.

Also related to this trend is the rise of mobile — nearly one-fifth of attendees access virtual content from their mobile devices, and this number will only grow, making apps and mobile-optimized content increasingly important for events.