Coverage of the tech conference circuit’s 2023 recovery has generally emphasized how many major conferences retained virtual access even after in-person attendance fully returned. Less visible, but genuinely significant, was a parallel trend among mid-sized and smaller conferences: a real and growing number of organizers quietly discontinued their virtual and hybrid offerings entirely during this period, reverting to in-person-only formats after multiple years of maintaining some virtual component. That in-person exhibition and events remained the industry’s economic center of gravity is reflected in the continued focus of bodies like the International Association of Exhibitions and Events, whose members deliver face-to-face marketing experiences across more than 50 countries.
The Engagement Data Told a Discouraging Story
For many mid-sized organizers, the decision to drop virtual access wasn’t ideological — it was a direct response to engagement data that had accumulated across two or three years of running virtual or hybrid options. Remote attendee engagement metrics — session completion rates, networking feature usage, virtual booth interaction — had consistently underperformed in-person equivalents at these organizations’ events, and by 2023 there was enough accumulated data to distinguish a genuine, durable pattern from a temporary pandemic-era anomaly that might have been expected to improve with more experience running the format.
For flagship conferences with very large remote audiences, even a modest engagement rate translated into a meaningful absolute number of engaged remote attendees, justifying continued investment. For mid-sized conferences with smaller total registration numbers, the same modest engagement rate translated into a genuinely small absolute number of engaged remote participants — often too small to justify the ongoing production cost and complexity virtual access required, once organizers looked honestly at cost-per-engaged-remote-attendee rather than simply cost-per-registered-remote-attendee.
Cost Pressure Made the Calculation Sharper
The AV supply chain and cost pressures affecting the broader industry during this period made this calculation more urgent for cost-conscious organizers. Maintaining a genuinely adequate virtual or hybrid production — the level of quality that avoided producing an obviously second-tier remote experience — required real, ongoing investment in streaming infrastructure, dedicated remote-production staff, and often platform licensing fees, all of which competed directly against other conference budget priorities during a period when overall event costs were already under pressure from other directions.
Organizers who ran the numbers honestly often found that the marginal registration revenue from virtual-only attendees didn’t come close to covering the marginal cost of producing an adequate virtual experience, meaning virtual access was, for these organizations, a cost center rather than even a break-even proposition — a conclusion that was uncomfortable to reach after investing years of effort building virtual capability, but one that a growing number of organizers reached and acted on during this period.
Not Every Organizer Reached the Same Conclusion
This trend wasn’t universal, and the organizers who discontinued virtual access tended to share certain characteristics: smaller total audience size, an audience with less geographic dispersion (making travel to in-person attendance more broadly feasible for their specific attendee base), and content that benefited less from broad reach compared to conferences built around content with a wider potential audience beyond their core attendee base.
Organizers with genuinely globally dispersed audiences, or with content that had real value to a broader audience than could realistically travel to a single physical location, more often continued investing in virtual access despite the cost pressure, since the reach benefit remained proportionally larger for their specific situation even under the same cost constraints affecting the broader industry.
The Decision Was Rarely Announced Publicly
Organizers discontinuing virtual access generally didn’t frame the decision as a retreat or a failure publicly — dropping a feature is a harder message to communicate than adding one, and most organizers who made this choice simply didn’t renew virtual access in a subsequent year’s event without extensive public explanation, rather than issuing a formal announcement about the change. This made the trend harder to track through public industry commentary than the more visible, actively-promoted decision by flagship conferences to maintain virtual access, even though the underlying shift away from virtual access at the mid-market level was arguably just as significant a signal about where the industry was actually settling.
What Replaced Virtual Access for These Organizers
Organizers who dropped live virtual attendance didn’t necessarily abandon extending their content’s reach entirely — some shifted toward a lighter-weight alternative: recording key sessions and making them available on-demand after the event, without the cost and complexity of live streaming infrastructure, remote-engagement tools, or dedicated production staff monitoring a live remote feed. This approach captured some of virtual access’s reach benefit — attendees who couldn’t attend in person could still access recorded content — at a meaningfully lower production cost and complexity than maintaining genuine live virtual or hybrid attendance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did some mid-sized conference organizers discontinue their virtual attendance options?
Accumulated engagement data showed remote attendee engagement consistently underperforming in-person equivalents, and for organizers with smaller total audiences, the absolute number of genuinely engaged remote attendees was often too small to justify the ongoing production cost and complexity virtual access required.
Did all organizers reach the same conclusion about dropping virtual access?
No — organizers with smaller, more geographically concentrated audiences and content with less broad appeal beyond their core attendee base were more likely to discontinue virtual access, while organizers with genuinely global audiences or broadly appealing content more often continued investing in it.
Why wasn’t this trend more visible in industry discussion?
Discontinuing a feature is a harder message to publicize than adding one, and most organizers simply didn’t renew virtual access without extensive public explanation, making the trend less visible than the more actively promoted decisions by flagship conferences to maintain virtual access.
What did organizers offer instead of full virtual attendance?
Many shifted toward recording key sessions for on-demand access after the event, capturing some of virtual access’s reach benefit without the cost and complexity of live streaming infrastructure and dedicated remote-production staff.
For more on this cost dynamic, see our piece on hybrid event budgets stabilizing in 2023.