{"id":255,"date":"2007-05-01T09:40:35","date_gmt":"2007-05-01T17:40:35","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2016-05-25T23:34:30","modified_gmt":"2016-05-26T06:34:30","slug":"the-lucrative-conference-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/archive\/2007\/05\/the-lucrative-conference-business","title":{"rendered":"Most Profitable Web 2.0 Business: Conferences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The tech conference business continues to amaze me. I just received an email a few minutes ago from the organizers of the annual Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco telling me I am a V.I.P. and I can attend their conference under this special classification.  Sweet!  I&#8217;m thinking free admission, maybe hotel and airfare too.  Something like that.<\/p>\n<p>In reading the rest of the email, it appears I&#8217;m being offered the V.I.P. rate of <STRONG>JUST OVER THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS<\/strong>.  And that&#8217;s $500 off the Very-Unimportant-Person rate!<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/images\/inline\/web20conference.gif\" width=\"450\" height=\"205\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Who has the enthusiasm to pay these sorts of prices?  Even when I worked at Disney, a multi-billion dollar corporation, I would never even dream of taking $3000 out of the budget for an event like this.<\/p>\n<p>Nothing against the conference&#8230; I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;s great.  I just can&#8217;t think of a single conference I&#8217;d pay over a $1000 for (and even that is expensive) unless part of the deal was a personal dinner with Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.askmen.com\/women\/models\/15_gisele_bundchen.html\">Gisele Bundchen<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In a way, I guess these sorts of conferences are like business travel for airlines.  They figure since companies are footing the bill, the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Price_elasticity_of_demand\">price elasticity of demand<\/a> is low.<\/p>\n<p>As for me, I&#8217;d rather spend that $3k on any of the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>One week trip anywhere in the world (with a decent budget!)<\/li>\n<li>Husky season tickets for both basketball and football<\/li>\n<li>A donation to a charitable cause.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I guess you can&#8217;t blame the organizers of the conference for charging $3000 because clearly people are willing to pay it, but if you really want <em>individuals<\/em> showing up at conferences, it would seem that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch20.com\">Techcrunch20<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Unconference\">unconferences<\/a> would be the better routes.<\/p>\n<p>Oh well&#8230; off to go plan my first conference I guess. I&#8217;m thinking &#8220;Fortune 100 Giselefest 2007&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The tech conference business continues to amaze me. I just received an email a few minutes ago from the organizers of the annual Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco telling me I am a V.I.P. and I can attend their conference under this special classification. Sweet! I&#8217;m thinking free admission, maybe hotel and airfare too. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,282],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-original"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}