Web Summit, Europe's largest technology conference, which had 70K+ attendees last year, will be held entirely online this year in December
London (CNN Business)Europe's largest technology conference will be held entirely online this year, as the coronavirus pandemic forces scores of major events to go digital.
Context & Ripple Effects
Web Summit's move to an all-online format lands weeks after CES's own about-face, where a planned hybrid Las Vegas event was scrapped for a fully virtual one (reversal to an all-digital format). Europe's largest tech conference had been the biggest domino still standing, with more than 70,000 attendees last year.
The arc closes a year later: Web Summit returned to an in-person Lisbon event in November 2021 (its return to Lisbon), making this digital-only edition the pandemic's one-year gap in the conference calendar.
First-order effects
- Web Summit's 70,000+ annual attendees and exhibiting startups lose the Lisbon dealmaking floor for 2020, with networking moved entirely onto a digital venue in December.
Second-order effects
- Sponsors and exhibitors choosing between virtual editions now have two data points to price against — and CES's virtual pivot showed the cost, drawing roughly 1,900 exhibitors against 4,500 the prior year (a steep exhibitor shortfall) — pressuring conference operators on virtual ticket and booth pricing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, major tech conferences stop being purely physical franchises and settle into hybrid models, with the in-person return of events like Web Summit testing how much of the pre-pandemic format survives.
The trend: Pandemic-era cancellations are pushing flagship tech conferences like Web Summit and CES from physical-only gatherings toward hybrid event businesses whose virtual editions prove a weaker substitute.