Overpriced conferences are a great opportunity for local user groups. I'm a member of one and we often invite one of the local conference speakers to do a free, less formal talk after the first one.
Honestly, I believe that a conference ticket should only cover a venue and speakers travel cost. Even with this days economy it's not hard to find a sponsor and with ticket price around 100-200 euro it's certainly possible to provide great experience AND free beer.
They can be an opportunity in other ways too. Some conference organizers are keen to engage with local user groups and can go out of their way to offer space for an on-site meetup or similar things and offer cut price tickets or even free entry.
O'Reilly is a good example of this. They let a free side event take place at RailsConf for a couple of years and you could get right into the conference and mingle with all the RailsConf attendees for free! The only thing you couldn't do was go into the talks (and, yes, they had people checking on the doors.)
I think O'Reilly also does "expo hall" passes for certain conferences for $25 or something.. it's almost like getting the best part (hallway track!) for free :-)
These overpriced tickets mostly come from the fact that companies/agencies send their employees there, book it as an expense and dont think about it.
If every attendee had to pay this with his own private cash, i am sure the average ticket price would be much lower.
I'd love to attend more conferences but as the author says it's too expensive to justify the cost in a majority of cases.
I did always wonder why they are so expensive. Are they the big cash cows we assume them to be? Or are they far more expensive to run than we think them to be?
I was at a conference that did that. The end result was that there was no way to prevent people who hadn't paid for lunch and coffee from just walking up to the buffet table and taking lunch and coffee, and the food being gone before everybody who had paid for lunch had eaten.
I was incredibly excited when I found out Euruko is only £65; every other Ruby conference is extortionate. I don't care about fancy venues or freebies; I want to meet other people and learn something new.
Most of these conferences are pricing out the people who actually want to learn, and instead mostly just filling their seats with people who know it already.
Most EuRuKo venues since it started moving were actually fancy :). I still remember the days when they were hard pressed to find locations in germany that gave a cheap room with a projector to 20 rubyists :/.
I think the model of moving the conference through europe also ensures that there is a healthy competition between the user groups.
But there are other great conferences at a similar price point in the ruby world, for example Ruby Lugdunum: http://rulu.eu/ .
Sorry for replying again, but I saw it too late: Eurucamp (the event that was quickly organized for everyone that didn't get a ticket for EuRuKo 2011) will be continued. I would be surprised if the ticket price would be above the price of EuRuKo. http://2012.eurucamp.org/
A tip for you, and maybe other German speakers here: "beamer" is one of those German words that seems like English, but it's not (like handy). In English, the word is "projector", whether it's analog or digital.
Having attended several conferences and paid for the tickets, I can only conclude that they aren't worth the price. It's a good excuse if you want to travel far or if your employer is paying though.
Those that benefit most are the speakers, often well paid, free travel and accommodation, other freebies, usually a VIP event beforehand, they pimp their book for little effort, are often employed to do so, repeat same talk at other venues etc.
Please post a list of conferences where the speakers are well paid, I'd like to get on that gravy train ;-)
So far, the conferences where I've spoken have done no kore than take care of travel and accomodation. CUSEC, which is a tremendously valuable conference for attendees, did give me a USB stick in the form of a lego block, I will cherish that long after people have forgotten USB technology.
Anyhow, I'm not arguing with travel and accomodation, but as a Dad it can be lonely leaving my family even if it's a real pleasure to meet people at a conference. I personally find speaking to be a net financial loss by a large margin, at the end of the day I'd make much more money staying at home and consulting by the hour.
This conference listed that they paid each speaker $2000, plus travel and hotel.
I understand the dilemma they're trying to avoid. By paying this rate, they're trying to ensure professional speakers of presumably high quality. They contrast this with other options:
"Should all conferences be a single day long and only feature unpaid and inexperienced speakers? Should they all take place in second tier cities in low cost venues and force attendees to bring a packed lunch? Or should they be scrapped altogether, in favour of paid for content on a tutorial site..."
There's definitely room for middle ground in there. Personally, "second tier" cities are probably better choices for many people, due to lower costs, but why mention "packed lunch"? You can certainly have great food provided in 'second tier' cities, and at a lower cost to boot compared to 'first tier' cities.
Paying $2k for each speaker is certainly a nice gesture to the speakers, but they're setting up some extreme options here (basically spending $5k+ per speaker, vs nothing). Best value for all parties will probably be in between those extremes in most cases.
I've gone to MountainWest RubyConf a couple of times, on my own dime, and gotten way more out of it than I paid for tickets, lodging and travel. I'm pretty shy but I push myself to talk to a handful of people every day. Just being around people who are really passionate about what they do, and good at it, is pretty valuable.
But I do live in the middle of nowhere with very few programmers. That might skew my perspective.
I think it's important to separate the question of whether _this_ conference was badly run, and too expensive, from whether all conferences are.
This conference sounds like it was terrible. A well run conference, though, costs a lot more to stage than you might expect. Andy Budd wrote an illuminating article on the subject last year: http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2011/09/theres_a_lot_of_non...
I complete agree. We're a small Ruby consultancy and we run a relatively small Ruby/Ruby on Rails conference in Helsinki[1] and before we organised it for the first time we basically had no idea how much everything would cost.
Expect to be overcharged for everything ranging from coffee, to having power outlets available, to having tables for registration. You can expect a cup of coffee at your venue (any venue) to cost the same or more than it would in a good coffee shop (but it won't be anywhere as near as good). Lunch will probably cost two times more than it would in a decent restaurant nearby (but good luck finding a restaurant that can cater to 200-300 people at once).
Oh, and most venues have terms which prohibit you from using an outside caterer and thus you're stuck with the venue's own catering, no matter what it costs.
In terms of compensation for speakers, we do our best to help them out, but the economics of running a small conference means that we can't afford to pay everyone's travel expenses (never mind paying them a non-insulting speaker's fee). I wrote a blog post partially related to this about a year ago: http://blog.kiskolabs.com/post/5661615036/controversy
In terms of making money, we'd be much better off just concentrating on our core business, but then it's likely that Finland wouldn't have any Ruby conference at all. We'd love to be able to drop our prices to the sub 100€ level, but frankly that's not possible, not even with the great sponsors that we've been lucky to have in the past years.
To help with the "high" ticket prices, we offer discounts to full time students and discounts at a few levels to people who have contributed to Ruby on Rails. In fact, if you have enough contributions to Rails, we'll give you a free ticket.
As someone else mentioned, the real conference happens around the food, the speakers and presentations are just a side show. If everybody disappeared off with their friends to eat on their own, then you've lost much of the point of a conference. At every conference I've been to the highlights have almost always been meeting awesome people over lunch or drinks, and only very rarely any of the actual presentations.
I've only gone to conference once, but I generally ate out with groups of people who didn't already all know each other. A table only holds so many people, so the same strategy is necessary whether people scatter to restaurants or stay in one place for a catered meal.
The other problem with these conferences is their size. Most of them are very small. If you only have a few hundred people, the cost of the venue and such isn't divided by a large enough number. This is because these developer conferences are often so specific in their subject matter that the audience is small, and also because of the high price.
I would like to see a convention, not a conference, that is for programmers, period. It should be gigantic like the big geek conventions PAX, Comic-Con, etc. Price could be $50 for three days. Thousands of us would be there. Lots of money to be made selling space to exhibitors. I would go every year.
With some extra space for lightning talks and self organized discussions/BoFs, perhaps. I actually think that would work. I would go too, if only to experience the diversity. I hate it when events get too insular.
If only it was a question of fixed costs being divided by the number of participants, but bigger events have new and exciting fee schedules plus enough legal wrangling to make a grown man cry on the street.
You will find yourself on the hook for gigantic sums of money and paying horrifying fees for AV, room rentals, catering, insurance, registration staff, internet access, or to quote Blackadder: "stamp duty, window tax, swamp insurance, hen food, dog biscuits, cow ointment, the expenses are endless."
Ignoring the details of this particular conference, I think its mostly wrong to say 'conferences should be priced to cover X'
There are conferences that go all the way from free to > $5000, I am constantly hearing about the amazing experiences at certain very expensive small conferences, as well as people enjoying the cheaper events (I recently helped out organising a conference that charged £50 full price).
Obviously we dont want anyone to be ripped off, but generally if you have an expensive conference the organisers and the speakers have to justify that cost, and if they do so great. We also dont want to alienate new people from attending conferences, but as long as their continue to be free meetups and cheaper conferences as an alternative, I dont see the problem
I've run a conference for freelance web devs 2 years in a row, both times at a loss (though the loss is shrinking each year) but have tried to keep the ticket prices down, but also try to cover some expenses for speakers (hotel or travel for speakers from out of the area, primarily).
Tried to keep tickets at a max of $99 the first year. Bumped up to $149 second year (with cheaper 'early bird' tickets both years). Bigger issue was trying to get sponsors to help defray costs. Given the nature of our conference - freelance web professionals (devs, designers, etc) - surprisingly a lot of companies weren't interested because we weren't 'targeted' enough. I may have just been getting polite brush offs, but I'd contacted 45 companies - many of whom sponsor other tech conferences - and had 3 sponsors the first year. A few only want to send a speaker and schwag, but no money. Conference venues and catering staff don't like to be paid in bobbleheads and cup holders, unfortunately.
A note on schwag - I basically hate it. I think it's wasteful, and going to conferences where I've paid hundreds of dollars, then given a bag with a bunch of plastic crap made in and shipped from China just gets my goat. So we don't do 'bags of crap' at my conference. I don't think too many people have missed it so far.
gentle plug - http://indieconf.com is setting dates for this fall in North Carolina. I remember inviting Amber to come speak at our first conference two years ago, but the timing didn't work out - perhaps we can get her to come this year. :)
Often it's a requirement if you have your event in a hotel. The hotel will sometimes have restrictions on who you can use to cater for breaks or lunches.
People expect coffee or drinks during breaks and will complain loudly regardless of the registration fee. $7-10 per person for a coffee break is not uncommon.
Minor point that made a couple speakers happy the first year - I had small break service (venue-speak for snacks/drinks/coffee) in each presentation room, vs out in a main lobby area. Apparently they like being able to get set up in a room then grabbing a quick cup of water before speaking without having to navigate back to a larger common area. Who knew? :)
Conference venue costs - While I'd prefer we were at a hotel, to allow easier movement for attendees and speakers (and better nightlife/restaurant selection) other venues I've looked at in the area start at roughly double what we're paying now. Oh, and then you have to add in A/V costs on top of that. Our conference center provides nice projection screens (huge) and nice mics as part of the rooms.
Catering - people need to eat. 99% of conference venues will not let you bring in random food, or in most cases even professional catering companies, unless they're on an approved list. Snacks/coffee/tea/etc throughout the day cost. Our food cost, including lunch, was north of $20/head. This is surprisingly cheap.
Power - some conference venues charge you for power access. $x/seat or something. We cut down on that this year compared to first year because few people seemed to use it the first years.
Wifi - our conference center has good wifi and it's free. One place I looked at said wifi access was $25/head/day. That's not a typo.
One of my goals was to have an event with non-local speakers. A barcamp is great, but... you end up seeing mostly the same people speak on the same topics. By having people from out of the area (state/region) speak, you'll be guaranteeing most attendees in the region won't have seen/met these speakers before. That costs something. Most of our speakers have been gracious with their time, but I wanted to at least cover some of their expenses in travel. With 20 speakers, and 8-10 with that sort of assistance, that's an additional cost.
I lost > $3k on the first event. ~$2k this time around, and would like to break even this year, or perhaps (gasp) make a small profit. A large profit would allow me to do regional versions of indieconf in different areas, bringing together a mix of local and non-local experts on various freelancing topics. That was the idea 2 years ago, but I can't commit to that until I know I won't keep losing money.
EDIT: oh yeah, insurance. The venue requires an insurance policy. For the minimum coverage, that's another... $600 or so.
EDIT 2: I would have probably broken even this year except for 2 things.
1) speaker dinner. Given the enormous effort many of our speakers put in (and travel) I like to have a low-key speaker dinner that's private for them to unwind. We have a few attendees that pay for a premium ticket to have a few dining hours for some one-on-one with our speakers. As fun as it's been, we may change that event this year.
2) After-party. This year instead of some ritzy club or venue, we had a jazz trio come in and had some catered snacks (veggie trays, etc). No alcohol, but I don't think anyone cared.
Without those two additional things, I think we'd have broken even this year on tickets and sponsorships. I'd rather not eliminate either one, as I think they each add something special for different groups.
Power can be a real issue. We had one sponsor who wanted a large meeting room, but they didn't take into account that they were expecting all the people in the room to use their laptops for an hour.
They sent someone to buy dozens of powerbars and extension cords which they chained throughout the room, plugged them into the wall sockets and then freaked out when the room went dark.
AV rental costs are insane. It is a field so ready for a disruption.
Venue wanted $5/head for power. First year that added > $500 to the event. Almost no one used it. So this year we had powerbars for the first row of seats in each room. They're there if you want/need them, but we're not all paying for them for the majority of people who didn't use them. Worked out well.
AV costs at one hotel I looked at was something like ~$300/day per room. That's ~$1000 extra, on top of the nearly double room rates compared to our current venue. It's just really hard to justify that extra expense just to be in a hotel. Yes, we're within walking distance of downtown, and there's some nice restaurants, but when I've been operating at a loss for 2 years... ;)
We had one venue that wanted to charge us $150 per Ethernet port "to turn it on".
That didn't include bandwidth charges which were included in a different line-item with WiFi which was based on buying blocks of 500 simultaneous users at an equally exorbitant rate.
> Wifi - our conference center has good wifi and it's free. One place I looked at said wifi access was $25/head/day. That's not a typo.
At Minecon (a convention for Minecraft) in the Mandalay Bay Las Vegas they were (if I recall the figure correctly) charged $50,000 for wifi for 2 days. It's insane, especially when the wifi was absolutely unusable.
Certainly those rates should entitle one to an actionable SLA...am I clueless? I'm not trying to rag on unions at all (though what union would neteng be a part of?), but for insane money you should get insane service.
Conferences are all about coffee breaks. The coffee breaks are the conference.
Sitting around passively listening to lecturers is not a conference. It is a lecture, or as we call it these days, "live-action Vimeo".
Serving food and drinks to everyone at the same time is a way of keeping everyone together in the same space, where they can bump into each other, look over each other's shoulders, and convene spontaneous hallway meetings. That is what conferences are for. Otherwise we could just use Reddit.
In the end, you need catering because people at your conference want the catering. I spent hundreds of dollars per hour for the chance to stand with my colleagues in a space that's especially designed for meetings, but now I need to leave that space for several precious prime-time hours every day just to find food and eat it? Please, just sell me catering already!
I really enjoyed indieconf last year. I'd agree that the coffee breaks and time between lectures is where the magic happens. The catered lunch was very valuable too.
thank you. I'm glad you found it enjoyable and valuable. Did you stick around for the jazz trio too? I can't match the name 'hiccup' with who you are in real life :)
Instead of spending the money on food, we get a free extra room with selling enough rooms and we use it for people to sit, talk or do quick talks, what ever they like. This gives them the face time without costing us.
Thanks for eliminating the "schwag" waste. I also hate that crap.
Although sometimes taking on schwag is part of the deal you make with the sponsors - so no schwag means less sponsorship money and higher ticket prices.
You're spot on, and I've wrestled with this, and in at least two cases it's why I didn't get some sponsors who I'd contacted.
I'm about 90% certain we will be doing a separate 'sponsor room' this year, where sponsors will have their own tables/booths and can interact with people, it just won't be in the main hallways. I've seen it done well at a couple other events recently, and I think we can use that format, which means we may attract a few more sponsors this year.
Very important, though once you hit a certain size, it gets hard to keep everything on one floor (most people won't believe what hotels will do to cram multiple events into their venues).
You can offset the need for spreading out the coffee by having a fancier snack station in the sponsor room.
One big draw to the sponsor room (especially for summer conferences) are free ice-cream snacks. We had lineups to get into the sponsor room.
Another thing I've seen work well is run a competition with a small prize than involves attendees visiting all of the sponsor tables. Run it at the same time as a coffee break. It's fun, folk who don't care can opt out, gets a bunch of folk some face time with sponsors.
Also, on the schwag front, do what you can to persuade the sponsors to give out useful schwag. For example I've got a stack of branded retractable sharpies that I use every day. Somebody gave out some nice branded planning poker cards one time that I still have and use. Somebody else gave some nice single-card summaries of innovation games that I kept.
The bags, frisbies, pointless brochures... not so much.
Can't upvote enough. Also great if sponsors want to be specifically involved in that process - they can directly see people using what they paid for and do something compatible (at PyCon this year, the Heroku booth had comfy couches where people drank coffee and talked with smart people - I'm certain everyone left with a positive impression)
We put on a technology conference each year in Raleigh, NC for about 300 people and charge 20.00 per person for the 3days and still make a profit. It's next weekend, come check it out http://Carolinacon.org I'm not sure why conventions cost so much, we don't even have sponsors.
To do that for 300 people is pretty impressive but you do need to consider that scale matters.
Think about it, a small WordPress blog on Dreamhost only costs $9/month, but Amazon needs giant datacenters to host EC2 and S3.
For your event you have about 12 presentations, so you don't need to do a huge amount of pre-planning or working with speakers. That makes a big difference.
From the schedule it looks like you are using one mid-sized plenary room plus maybe 1 or 2 side rooms. You are actually doing the hotel a favour by filling up a small block of rooms, they often have empty spaces when bigger events are going on, so everything they charge you is profit as far as they are concerned.
If the hotel has their own builtin projection equipment and you're bringing in your own computers, that seriously cuts the AV costs.
Big conferences tend to suffer from diseconomies of scale. The more you need to do, the bigger the per unit costs become. The hotel isn't likely to provide you with free projectors and screens when you need dozens at a time. That is magnified through every aspect of the conference.
Usually a small conference solves it's problems with work. You spend a lot of hours making sure everything works, but for big conferences, the staffing levels don't tend to increase proportionally with the number of attendees. For big conferences only some problems can be solved with time and effort.
There are fixed costs - rooms are $X, whether you've got 50 people or 200 people (obviously within reason - 2000 people need more space than 50). Our/my biggest issue has been getting a greater number of people there.
That's great that you've made a profit. Do you reimburse your speakers for travel if they need it? What sort of food are you providing for $20 ticket cost?
You are collecting approximately $6000. If we didn't reimburse any speaker travel, skipped an organized closing event, and cut a few other corners, we could get close to that in terms of costs, and having 300 people attend would mean we'd be able to keep ticket prices low. You're "closely associated with various "2600" chapters across NC, SC, TN, VA, LA, DC, and NY" - I'm sure that's helped you get the word out for speakers and attendees much beyond what many other conferences (including ours) are able to do, especially with a limited budget.
Congrats on your event. I've got family in town this week and next, and am not sure if I'll be able to attend, but will attend if I can.
While I'm not a "fan of expensive conferences" per se, I thought this was a bunch of junk. FTA:
"I’m a huge proponent against expensive conferences, as I feel that the point of these conferences in the first place is to get the community together to learn and meet each other."
As The Dude once famously said, "Well, that's just like, your opinion, man."
I don't think that at all; I think a conference that I pay for should be a learning experience. I think that, for $1000 or $2000 that I should be able to get vicarious experiences from attending the sessions/demos/labs that I would either (a) not have been able to receive elsewhere, or (b) not been exposed to. It should replace my time at a training class, for example, except that it should be broader experiences.
Networking is fine but dude - you simply have it wrong if that's what you think programming conferences are all about. And you have it wrong if you think that tech conference attendance fees are paid for by the individual programmers/devs who attend. Oh sure, there are some folks who pay for these huge costs out of their own pocket but, by and large, this is a "job perk" or a "job training" event that is, thus, paid for by their company.
Sorry but, for most companies, there is no "networking" budget for the programmers/devs.
As a frequent conference attendee and speaker, a lot of the points that this post enumerates resonate with me. Our profession seems to have a love affair with conferences, and it's been getting worse year after year.
I believe a large part of the problem is that many conferences are priced with the idea that the fee will be covered by corporations that pay for their employees to attend, as opposed to being covered by an individual. Businesses have an easier time justifying a $1000 conference ticket (especially if they're able to recruit or scout out new potential hires at said conference) than an independent consultant.
But, conferences don't need to be quite so expensive. Conference organizers just need to reorganize their priorities. The best conferences I've ever attended (and paid for out of my own pocket) had less than two hundred attendees, were not held in a hotel, and had an incredible focus on the local community.
The best example of this: http://brooklynbeta.org/2011. Total cost for the conference was $100, and an additional $100 for the (optional) special event held the day before the conference, both of which included food, coffee, sponsored after-parties, more beer than we could finish, and the list of attendees and speakers was the best that I had ever seen.
People need to start voting with their wallets a bit more. Stop going to conferences that suck.
[Disclaimer: I now work for the organization that runs Brooklyn Beta, but did not work for them when I attended the conference in 2010 and 2011]
Step one: Decide that spending a few thousand dollars per year on conferences is excessive.
Step two: Discover that if you lived in Brooklyn there would be a critical mass of colleagues living right there in town with you, such that you could put on an awesome local conference for one or two hundred dollars per person.
Step three: Move to Brooklyn, at a cost of an additional N hundred dollars per person per month, regardless of whether that month includes an awesome local conference.
Step four: ?????
Step five: Profit!
(Mind you, I completely agree with your strategy, which is why I live near Boston. I could tease myself just as I'm teasing you. ;) But I don't try to pretend that the strategy is designed to save money. Living in proximity to a number of excellent local conferences and meetups is very expensive - though, of course, you also get the awesome local restaurants and shops and museums and university libraries.)
I kind of agree. I've attended two conferences for the past few years: Pubcon and An Event Apart.
Pubcon was priced at $699, and included three full days of sessions, with 5 different tracks. I learned a lot there, and felt it justified the price.
An Event Apart was $899 the first year I registered, I believe, and this year is $1045. I work for a small company that pays these expenses, but I couldn't even justify asking for that this year.
I know that I am paying to see some of the "biggest names" in the industry. Several of these people are excellent and entertaining, and I don't doubt their knowledge in the field -- Dan Cederholm and Jared Spool specifically.
But do I really need to pay over $1000 to hear from the "biggest names"? I'm not sure if it's worth it. Yes, Eric Meyer is a genius at CSS, but how do I somehow explain the ROI of using slightly more optimized CSS? Or one year AEA had a speaker who spent almos the whole hour somehow relating fashion magazines to web development. Ugh.
I guess what irks me is feeling like I'm paying extra for the celebrity status of some of these speakers, when in reality, I'd most likely learn just as much _useful_ knowledge at a Wordcamp or one of the multitude of sub $200 conferences.
As a response to this problem, a few London-based ruby developers set up a no-frills ruby conference called "Ruby Manor". Talks were chosen democratically from the community, and were of a very high quality. They have had three so far, for, each for under £15 for a day, and they had enough money left over at the end of the day to buy us all a few beers. I think more than anything, they wanted to prove that you could have a great conference without charging large amounts of money:
I'm seeing the same thing in Berlin these days - tech conferences of all kinds, usally 2 days, tickets ranging from 300,- euros up to 1200,- euros.
Even if employers would send their developers to one of those two or three times a year - how many developers from different countries can even afford those prices? Half of europe simply isn't that rich and doesn't pay nowhere near that high salaries.
On top of the two-days event you'd have to add hostel/hotel and travel (train or flight) - even with my (in comparison) rather high german salary I think twice if I really want to pay several hundred euros for an event of two days.
And conferences don't have to take place in hotels, there's all kinds of venues - some hotter, some less so - one could meet with 50, 100, 500 or 1000 people. Some developer conferences simply take place in rooms of the local university for example. (Usally a not so hot location, ok..)
I would really like to see that developer's conferences stay (really) affordable for _all_ of the intended audience.
JavaZone in Oslo, Norway costs 1033 USD (or 5950 NOK) - a lot of money, and inflated by low dollar and high krone. Although I don't have any statistics, I believe few individuals pay this themselves - most participants get their company to pay for it. It's a great conference. Two days, seven (7) tracks. Food included, and lots of it. At the end of the first day there's ClubZone, which includes free beer.
Is it overpriced? Perhaps. It could probably be done cheaper. The money seems to be going to make a great conference, though, and as long as most people don't pay for it themselves, I don't think it's a big problem. It's really the place you want to be if you live in Norway, so perhaps it is a bit unfortunate that it isn't more accessible to people who can't get their company to pay for it.
Great conference, highly recommended. Many, if not most talks are in english. Unfortunately, the website seems to be broken at the moment: http://javazone.no
I've never attended any conferences in my life (and I have been programming for 25 years (16 years professionally)). I can buy books, read online, watch videos online on more programming topics than I have time/capacity for. My tolearn.txt is quite long all the time.
For networking among programmers there are more than enough online communities.
Business networking would be very useful (basically meeting people who need my knowledge/expertise and learning about business opportunities), but how can I do that among people who want to sell the same thing that I want to sell?
I am not saying that conferences are not useful, just I did not find the motivation yet to attend one.
"Business networking would be very useful (basically meeting people who need my knowledge/expertise and learning about business opportunities), but how can I do that among people who want to sell the same thing that I want to sell?"
Umm.... it's generally not about selling right there and then, but making connections which may turn in to relationships.
I've been to conferences and have made a great network of people I wouldn't have met otherwise, and some of it has led to projects/work months or years after our initial meeting. Most of the conferences I go to now are almost always just for hallway networking and socializing.
20 years ago, I used to wonder "how does someone run a business? how can you compete? it's a closed network - just friends of friends, etc". That's not 100% true, but it's more true than many people would want to admit. However, it's not all that hard to 'break in to' some circles and become part of a network. It does take time and commitment.
My problems do not just include the ticket, here in the U.S. there seems to be a desire to have conferences in the most expensive cities possible. New York, Boston, LA, SF, etc. It seems as if there's this bubble filter that makes these people think developers are only in these locations. Please note, developers are everywhere, think about it.
Often times the airfare and hotel equal or go beyond the costs of the conference ticket. Therefore I don't go to a lot of conferences, it's just too hard to justify them. At this point I'm more apt to look for more training-like gatherings where the speaker will discuss actual code instead of just talking about whatever random subjects. A speaker describing his favorite topic fits fine for local meetups and the like, I once spoke on a one of my pet peeves to a local meetup and it was great. I suggest that people look for more of that type of thing these days.
It can be cheaper for people to get to these cities and get accomodation - as well as the millions that live nearby.
I did a conference at the Anaheim convention center (=Disneyland). Flights to LAX were $200, there was a $10 shuttle from the airport and a line of $50 motels.
Then I had to go to Pittsburgh, sounds like a cheap place. But flights were $1000 with a lot less choice (who wants to got to Pittsburgh?). There were only a couple of hotels near the convention center and they were $200/night.
Las Vegas is one of the cheapest places in the US to get to and stay at, that's why it's so popular for conferences. Similarly for Amsterdam in Europe.
That's an advantage that we at Steel City Ruby Conf are actively promoting-- we're targeting Ruby devs who haven't been to conferences before and hoping that the cheaper accommodations and costs in Pittsburgh help.
It sounds like the conference Amber went to was a bad conference. They exist. Both expensive and non-expensive ones :-)
A few thoughts...
1) Price != Value
Just like everything else in life the price tag is not the way to judge a conference. It's the value received. Some free conferences will be worth £1000 to somebody. Some £1000 conferences will be worth nothing to somebody else. Some expensive conferences will suck universally. Some free events will too. If you want to know what a conference will be like - go look at previous years. Go look at the speakers. Go talk to people who have attended. Figure out if it's the right conference for you.
For example, I was scheduled in as a speaker at last year's Agile 2011 conference. As a speaker it would have cost me about £6k to attend once you take travel from the UK, hotel & lost work hours into account. That's money out of my pocket - I run my own business.
I couldn't attend at the last minute due to family illness. Judging by previous years not attending has lost me money. Agile 2011 is worth more that £6k to me and my business. To somebody in a different business, or with different skills - probably not.
Another way to think about what conferences provide - ask yourself what your day rate is? How many working days of value are you expecting to get from the conference?
2) Experts need events too
Yes there have to be events with a broad appeal for "high schoolers, college students and newbies to our industry". But there also needs to be events for "people who already know everything you’d need to know about the presented topics".
The latter might not enjoy the former's events. The former may not enjoy the latter's events. Finding a balance that will attract and entertain both groups is really fricking hard.
3) Cost of large events
I've been involved several times with organising conferences both small (e.g. BarCamp Bournemouth - 2days, 75ish people, free) and large (Agile 2010 with 1400ish people, five days, $1-2k & Agile 2012 - probably about the same). Anybody who thinks large conferences are massive money spinners has never been involved with organising a large conference :-)
Large conferences are not usually cheaper to organise because of economies of scale. Quite the opposite if anything.
For example take the venue. For small conferences you can often cadge a venue with some sponsorship, or find a small one in a slack period running cheap. You're flexible because you can change location on very short notice and there are usually multiple venues in a town or city that can support you.
For large conferences there are few venues that can support you. Those venues' business is based around extracting every last penny from large events - and they're very good at it. They need to be booked months, sometimes more than a year, in advance. Which brings in a whole set of different organisational and cash-flow issues... They often require a guaranteed minimum income from the floorspace, which gives you much less flexibility of resizing and scheduling. Short version - it's really freaking hard.
Then there's insurance. Speaker compensation. Programme selection. Managing submissions (if you have an open submission process) and/or finding speakers. The folk needed for security, health & safety, catering, etc. Food. Wifi. Transactional fees. Power. AV. Publicity. Etc.
For the last two years I have run the MathsJam conference, and I'll be doing so again this year. Last year the fee covered lunch Saturday, dinner, accommodation, breakfast, lunch Sunday, all tea, coffee and biscuits, and all sessions. No bag, paper, pen, coasters, pins, or other swag. Nada. You want it, you bring it. We didn't pay the speakers, and last year we had 60 lightning talks of 5 minutes each.
Fantastic atmosphere of 120 enthusiastic people who love their subject and wanted to share stuff.
10% discount early bird, 10% discount for the unwaged.
Full price: ukp165 (which is about usd200).
That covered expenses with basically no head room. Note that accommodation was included, as was a ferry from the local train station.
Maybe more "gatherings" and less conferences are the way to go (invite a speaker once you have an interested group) - kind of like the way these BSD guys in NYC do it: http://www.nycbug.org/
I love how everyone screams about the 'open' web and yet these conference tickets are priced so highly.
I think conferences are a fantastic idea.. you meet like-minded individuals and hear from really passionate presenters but the prices are crazy and thus I have only ever been to 1.
I understand how there are certain costs to be factored in like venue and speakers costs but come on, there must be something that can be done so developers from all backgrounds can take part in such events.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadHonestly, I believe that a conference ticket should only cover a venue and speakers travel cost. Even with this days economy it's not hard to find a sponsor and with ticket price around 100-200 euro it's certainly possible to provide great experience AND free beer.
O'Reilly is a good example of this. They let a free side event take place at RailsConf for a couple of years and you could get right into the conference and mingle with all the RailsConf attendees for free! The only thing you couldn't do was go into the talks (and, yes, they had people checking on the doors.)
I think O'Reilly also does "expo hall" passes for certain conferences for $25 or something.. it's almost like getting the best part (hallway track!) for free :-)
I did always wonder why they are so expensive. Are they the big cash cows we assume them to be? Or are they far more expensive to run than we think them to be?
I wish conferences offered two rates: one for just the talks, and one for talks + (coffee,wifi,lunch).
Most of these conferences are pricing out the people who actually want to learn, and instead mostly just filling their seats with people who know it already.
I think the model of moving the conference through europe also ensures that there is a healthy competition between the user groups.
But there are other great conferences at a similar price point in the ruby world, for example Ruby Lugdunum: http://rulu.eu/ .
A tip for you, and maybe other German speakers here: "beamer" is one of those German words that seems like English, but it's not (like handy). In English, the word is "projector", whether it's analog or digital.
Thank you so much for that clarification.
Those that benefit most are the speakers, often well paid, free travel and accommodation, other freebies, usually a VIP event beforehand, they pimp their book for little effort, are often employed to do so, repeat same talk at other venues etc.
So far, the conferences where I've spoken have done no kore than take care of travel and accomodation. CUSEC, which is a tremendously valuable conference for attendees, did give me a USB stick in the form of a lego block, I will cherish that long after people have forgotten USB technology.
Anyhow, I'm not arguing with travel and accomodation, but as a Dad it can be lonely leaving my family even if it's a real pleasure to meet people at a conference. I personally find speaking to be a net financial loss by a large margin, at the end of the day I'd make much more money staying at home and consulting by the hour.
Other speakers' mileage may vary :-)
This conference listed that they paid each speaker $2000, plus travel and hotel.
I understand the dilemma they're trying to avoid. By paying this rate, they're trying to ensure professional speakers of presumably high quality. They contrast this with other options:
"Should all conferences be a single day long and only feature unpaid and inexperienced speakers? Should they all take place in second tier cities in low cost venues and force attendees to bring a packed lunch? Or should they be scrapped altogether, in favour of paid for content on a tutorial site..."
There's definitely room for middle ground in there. Personally, "second tier" cities are probably better choices for many people, due to lower costs, but why mention "packed lunch"? You can certainly have great food provided in 'second tier' cities, and at a lower cost to boot compared to 'first tier' cities.
Paying $2k for each speaker is certainly a nice gesture to the speakers, but they're setting up some extreme options here (basically spending $5k+ per speaker, vs nothing). Best value for all parties will probably be in between those extremes in most cases.
I've gone to MountainWest RubyConf a couple of times, on my own dime, and gotten way more out of it than I paid for tickets, lodging and travel. I'm pretty shy but I push myself to talk to a handful of people every day. Just being around people who are really passionate about what they do, and good at it, is pretty valuable.
But I do live in the middle of nowhere with very few programmers. That might skew my perspective.
This conference sounds like it was terrible. A well run conference, though, costs a lot more to stage than you might expect. Andy Budd wrote an illuminating article on the subject last year: http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2011/09/theres_a_lot_of_non...
Expect to be overcharged for everything ranging from coffee, to having power outlets available, to having tables for registration. You can expect a cup of coffee at your venue (any venue) to cost the same or more than it would in a good coffee shop (but it won't be anywhere as near as good). Lunch will probably cost two times more than it would in a decent restaurant nearby (but good luck finding a restaurant that can cater to 200-300 people at once).
Oh, and most venues have terms which prohibit you from using an outside caterer and thus you're stuck with the venue's own catering, no matter what it costs.
In terms of compensation for speakers, we do our best to help them out, but the economics of running a small conference means that we can't afford to pay everyone's travel expenses (never mind paying them a non-insulting speaker's fee). I wrote a blog post partially related to this about a year ago: http://blog.kiskolabs.com/post/5661615036/controversy
In terms of making money, we'd be much better off just concentrating on our core business, but then it's likely that Finland wouldn't have any Ruby conference at all. We'd love to be able to drop our prices to the sub 100€ level, but frankly that's not possible, not even with the great sponsors that we've been lucky to have in the past years.
To help with the "high" ticket prices, we offer discounts to full time students and discounts at a few levels to people who have contributed to Ruby on Rails. In fact, if you have enough contributions to Rails, we'll give you a free ticket.
[1]: http://frozenrails.eu
Do the attendees really all have to go to the same restaurant?
I would like to see a convention, not a conference, that is for programmers, period. It should be gigantic like the big geek conventions PAX, Comic-Con, etc. Price could be $50 for three days. Thousands of us would be there. Lots of money to be made selling space to exhibitors. I would go every year.
You will find yourself on the hook for gigantic sums of money and paying horrifying fees for AV, room rentals, catering, insurance, registration staff, internet access, or to quote Blackadder: "stamp duty, window tax, swamp insurance, hen food, dog biscuits, cow ointment, the expenses are endless."
Was it worth it? Not really.
The talks were put on YouTube and the 'goody' bags weren't that great.
Some of the speakers were ok but I guess I would of rather put that money elsewhere.
It wont stop me from attending conferences but lesson learnt.
There are conferences that go all the way from free to > $5000, I am constantly hearing about the amazing experiences at certain very expensive small conferences, as well as people enjoying the cheaper events (I recently helped out organising a conference that charged £50 full price).
Obviously we dont want anyone to be ripped off, but generally if you have an expensive conference the organisers and the speakers have to justify that cost, and if they do so great. We also dont want to alienate new people from attending conferences, but as long as their continue to be free meetups and cheaper conferences as an alternative, I dont see the problem
Tried to keep tickets at a max of $99 the first year. Bumped up to $149 second year (with cheaper 'early bird' tickets both years). Bigger issue was trying to get sponsors to help defray costs. Given the nature of our conference - freelance web professionals (devs, designers, etc) - surprisingly a lot of companies weren't interested because we weren't 'targeted' enough. I may have just been getting polite brush offs, but I'd contacted 45 companies - many of whom sponsor other tech conferences - and had 3 sponsors the first year. A few only want to send a speaker and schwag, but no money. Conference venues and catering staff don't like to be paid in bobbleheads and cup holders, unfortunately.
A note on schwag - I basically hate it. I think it's wasteful, and going to conferences where I've paid hundreds of dollars, then given a bag with a bunch of plastic crap made in and shipped from China just gets my goat. So we don't do 'bags of crap' at my conference. I don't think too many people have missed it so far.
gentle plug - http://indieconf.com is setting dates for this fall in North Carolina. I remember inviting Amber to come speak at our first conference two years ago, but the timing didn't work out - perhaps we can get her to come this year. :)
Thanks for eliminating the "schwag" waste. I also hate that crap.
People expect coffee or drinks during breaks and will complain loudly regardless of the registration fee. $7-10 per person for a coffee break is not uncommon.
Catering - people need to eat. 99% of conference venues will not let you bring in random food, or in most cases even professional catering companies, unless they're on an approved list. Snacks/coffee/tea/etc throughout the day cost. Our food cost, including lunch, was north of $20/head. This is surprisingly cheap.
Power - some conference venues charge you for power access. $x/seat or something. We cut down on that this year compared to first year because few people seemed to use it the first years.
Wifi - our conference center has good wifi and it's free. One place I looked at said wifi access was $25/head/day. That's not a typo.
One of my goals was to have an event with non-local speakers. A barcamp is great, but... you end up seeing mostly the same people speak on the same topics. By having people from out of the area (state/region) speak, you'll be guaranteeing most attendees in the region won't have seen/met these speakers before. That costs something. Most of our speakers have been gracious with their time, but I wanted to at least cover some of their expenses in travel. With 20 speakers, and 8-10 with that sort of assistance, that's an additional cost.
I lost > $3k on the first event. ~$2k this time around, and would like to break even this year, or perhaps (gasp) make a small profit. A large profit would allow me to do regional versions of indieconf in different areas, bringing together a mix of local and non-local experts on various freelancing topics. That was the idea 2 years ago, but I can't commit to that until I know I won't keep losing money.
EDIT: oh yeah, insurance. The venue requires an insurance policy. For the minimum coverage, that's another... $600 or so.
EDIT 2: I would have probably broken even this year except for 2 things.
1) speaker dinner. Given the enormous effort many of our speakers put in (and travel) I like to have a low-key speaker dinner that's private for them to unwind. We have a few attendees that pay for a premium ticket to have a few dining hours for some one-on-one with our speakers. As fun as it's been, we may change that event this year.
2) After-party. This year instead of some ritzy club or venue, we had a jazz trio come in and had some catered snacks (veggie trays, etc). No alcohol, but I don't think anyone cared.
Without those two additional things, I think we'd have broken even this year on tickets and sponsorships. I'd rather not eliminate either one, as I think they each add something special for different groups.
They sent someone to buy dozens of powerbars and extension cords which they chained throughout the room, plugged them into the wall sockets and then freaked out when the room went dark.
AV rental costs are insane. It is a field so ready for a disruption.
AV costs at one hotel I looked at was something like ~$300/day per room. That's ~$1000 extra, on top of the nearly double room rates compared to our current venue. It's just really hard to justify that extra expense just to be in a hotel. Yes, we're within walking distance of downtown, and there's some nice restaurants, but when I've been operating at a loss for 2 years... ;)
That didn't include bandwidth charges which were included in a different line-item with WiFi which was based on buying blocks of 500 simultaneous users at an equally exorbitant rate.
At Minecon (a convention for Minecraft) in the Mandalay Bay Las Vegas they were (if I recall the figure correctly) charged $50,000 for wifi for 2 days. It's insane, especially when the wifi was absolutely unusable.
Conferences are all about coffee breaks. The coffee breaks are the conference.
Sitting around passively listening to lecturers is not a conference. It is a lecture, or as we call it these days, "live-action Vimeo".
Serving food and drinks to everyone at the same time is a way of keeping everyone together in the same space, where they can bump into each other, look over each other's shoulders, and convene spontaneous hallway meetings. That is what conferences are for. Otherwise we could just use Reddit.
In the end, you need catering because people at your conference want the catering. I spent hundreds of dollars per hour for the chance to stand with my colleagues in a space that's especially designed for meetings, but now I need to leave that space for several precious prime-time hours every day just to find food and eat it? Please, just sell me catering already!
Although sometimes taking on schwag is part of the deal you make with the sponsors - so no schwag means less sponsorship money and higher ticket prices.
I'm about 90% certain we will be doing a separate 'sponsor room' this year, where sponsors will have their own tables/booths and can interact with people, it just won't be in the main hallways. I've seen it done well at a couple other events recently, and I think we can use that format, which means we may attract a few more sponsors this year.
You can offset the need for spreading out the coffee by having a fancier snack station in the sponsor room.
One big draw to the sponsor room (especially for summer conferences) are free ice-cream snacks. We had lineups to get into the sponsor room.
Also, on the schwag front, do what you can to persuade the sponsors to give out useful schwag. For example I've got a stack of branded retractable sharpies that I use every day. Somebody gave out some nice branded planning poker cards one time that I still have and use. Somebody else gave some nice single-card summaries of innovation games that I kept.
The bags, frisbies, pointless brochures... not so much.
Think about it, a small WordPress blog on Dreamhost only costs $9/month, but Amazon needs giant datacenters to host EC2 and S3.
For your event you have about 12 presentations, so you don't need to do a huge amount of pre-planning or working with speakers. That makes a big difference.
From the schedule it looks like you are using one mid-sized plenary room plus maybe 1 or 2 side rooms. You are actually doing the hotel a favour by filling up a small block of rooms, they often have empty spaces when bigger events are going on, so everything they charge you is profit as far as they are concerned.
If the hotel has their own builtin projection equipment and you're bringing in your own computers, that seriously cuts the AV costs.
Big conferences tend to suffer from diseconomies of scale. The more you need to do, the bigger the per unit costs become. The hotel isn't likely to provide you with free projectors and screens when you need dozens at a time. That is magnified through every aspect of the conference.
Usually a small conference solves it's problems with work. You spend a lot of hours making sure everything works, but for big conferences, the staffing levels don't tend to increase proportionally with the number of attendees. For big conferences only some problems can be solved with time and effort.
That's great that you've made a profit. Do you reimburse your speakers for travel if they need it? What sort of food are you providing for $20 ticket cost?
You are collecting approximately $6000. If we didn't reimburse any speaker travel, skipped an organized closing event, and cut a few other corners, we could get close to that in terms of costs, and having 300 people attend would mean we'd be able to keep ticket prices low. You're "closely associated with various "2600" chapters across NC, SC, TN, VA, LA, DC, and NY" - I'm sure that's helped you get the word out for speakers and attendees much beyond what many other conferences (including ours) are able to do, especially with a limited budget.
Congrats on your event. I've got family in town this week and next, and am not sure if I'll be able to attend, but will attend if I can.
Thanks!
I gave up after seeing no value and crappy hotels too often.
"I’m a huge proponent against expensive conferences, as I feel that the point of these conferences in the first place is to get the community together to learn and meet each other."
As The Dude once famously said, "Well, that's just like, your opinion, man."
I don't think that at all; I think a conference that I pay for should be a learning experience. I think that, for $1000 or $2000 that I should be able to get vicarious experiences from attending the sessions/demos/labs that I would either (a) not have been able to receive elsewhere, or (b) not been exposed to. It should replace my time at a training class, for example, except that it should be broader experiences.
Networking is fine but dude - you simply have it wrong if that's what you think programming conferences are all about. And you have it wrong if you think that tech conference attendance fees are paid for by the individual programmers/devs who attend. Oh sure, there are some folks who pay for these huge costs out of their own pocket but, by and large, this is a "job perk" or a "job training" event that is, thus, paid for by their company.
Sorry but, for most companies, there is no "networking" budget for the programmers/devs.
I believe a large part of the problem is that many conferences are priced with the idea that the fee will be covered by corporations that pay for their employees to attend, as opposed to being covered by an individual. Businesses have an easier time justifying a $1000 conference ticket (especially if they're able to recruit or scout out new potential hires at said conference) than an independent consultant.
But, conferences don't need to be quite so expensive. Conference organizers just need to reorganize their priorities. The best conferences I've ever attended (and paid for out of my own pocket) had less than two hundred attendees, were not held in a hotel, and had an incredible focus on the local community.
The best example of this: http://brooklynbeta.org/2011. Total cost for the conference was $100, and an additional $100 for the (optional) special event held the day before the conference, both of which included food, coffee, sponsored after-parties, more beer than we could finish, and the list of attendees and speakers was the best that I had ever seen.
People need to start voting with their wallets a bit more. Stop going to conferences that suck.
[Disclaimer: I now work for the organization that runs Brooklyn Beta, but did not work for them when I attended the conference in 2010 and 2011]
Step two: Discover that if you lived in Brooklyn there would be a critical mass of colleagues living right there in town with you, such that you could put on an awesome local conference for one or two hundred dollars per person.
Step three: Move to Brooklyn, at a cost of an additional N hundred dollars per person per month, regardless of whether that month includes an awesome local conference.
Step four: ?????
Step five: Profit!
(Mind you, I completely agree with your strategy, which is why I live near Boston. I could tease myself just as I'm teasing you. ;) But I don't try to pretend that the strategy is designed to save money. Living in proximity to a number of excellent local conferences and meetups is very expensive - though, of course, you also get the awesome local restaurants and shops and museums and university libraries.)
Pubcon was priced at $699, and included three full days of sessions, with 5 different tracks. I learned a lot there, and felt it justified the price.
An Event Apart was $899 the first year I registered, I believe, and this year is $1045. I work for a small company that pays these expenses, but I couldn't even justify asking for that this year.
I know that I am paying to see some of the "biggest names" in the industry. Several of these people are excellent and entertaining, and I don't doubt their knowledge in the field -- Dan Cederholm and Jared Spool specifically.
But do I really need to pay over $1000 to hear from the "biggest names"? I'm not sure if it's worth it. Yes, Eric Meyer is a genius at CSS, but how do I somehow explain the ROI of using slightly more optimized CSS? Or one year AEA had a speaker who spent almos the whole hour somehow relating fashion magazines to web development. Ugh.
I guess what irks me is feeling like I'm paying extra for the celebrity status of some of these speakers, when in reality, I'd most likely learn just as much _useful_ knowledge at a Wordcamp or one of the multitude of sub $200 conferences.
http://rubymanor.org/
Even if employers would send their developers to one of those two or three times a year - how many developers from different countries can even afford those prices? Half of europe simply isn't that rich and doesn't pay nowhere near that high salaries.
On top of the two-days event you'd have to add hostel/hotel and travel (train or flight) - even with my (in comparison) rather high german salary I think twice if I really want to pay several hundred euros for an event of two days.
And conferences don't have to take place in hotels, there's all kinds of venues - some hotter, some less so - one could meet with 50, 100, 500 or 1000 people. Some developer conferences simply take place in rooms of the local university for example. (Usally a not so hot location, ok..)
I would really like to see that developer's conferences stay (really) affordable for _all_ of the intended audience.
Is it overpriced? Perhaps. It could probably be done cheaper. The money seems to be going to make a great conference, though, and as long as most people don't pay for it themselves, I don't think it's a big problem. It's really the place you want to be if you live in Norway, so perhaps it is a bit unfortunate that it isn't more accessible to people who can't get their company to pay for it.
Great conference, highly recommended. Many, if not most talks are in english. Unfortunately, the website seems to be broken at the moment: http://javazone.no
Videos from last year: http://vimeo.com/tag:javazone2011
I am not saying that conferences are not useful, just I did not find the motivation yet to attend one.
Umm.... it's generally not about selling right there and then, but making connections which may turn in to relationships.
I've been to conferences and have made a great network of people I wouldn't have met otherwise, and some of it has led to projects/work months or years after our initial meeting. Most of the conferences I go to now are almost always just for hallway networking and socializing.
20 years ago, I used to wonder "how does someone run a business? how can you compete? it's a closed network - just friends of friends, etc". That's not 100% true, but it's more true than many people would want to admit. However, it's not all that hard to 'break in to' some circles and become part of a network. It does take time and commitment.
Often times the airfare and hotel equal or go beyond the costs of the conference ticket. Therefore I don't go to a lot of conferences, it's just too hard to justify them. At this point I'm more apt to look for more training-like gatherings where the speaker will discuss actual code instead of just talking about whatever random subjects. A speaker describing his favorite topic fits fine for local meetups and the like, I once spoke on a one of my pet peeves to a local meetup and it was great. I suggest that people look for more of that type of thing these days.
I did a conference at the Anaheim convention center (=Disneyland). Flights to LAX were $200, there was a $10 shuttle from the airport and a line of $50 motels.
Then I had to go to Pittsburgh, sounds like a cheap place. But flights were $1000 with a lot less choice (who wants to got to Pittsburgh?). There were only a couple of hotels near the convention center and they were $200/night.
Las Vegas is one of the cheapest places in the US to get to and stay at, that's why it's so popular for conferences. Similarly for Amsterdam in Europe.
A few thoughts...
1) Price != Value
Just like everything else in life the price tag is not the way to judge a conference. It's the value received. Some free conferences will be worth £1000 to somebody. Some £1000 conferences will be worth nothing to somebody else. Some expensive conferences will suck universally. Some free events will too. If you want to know what a conference will be like - go look at previous years. Go look at the speakers. Go talk to people who have attended. Figure out if it's the right conference for you.
For example, I was scheduled in as a speaker at last year's Agile 2011 conference. As a speaker it would have cost me about £6k to attend once you take travel from the UK, hotel & lost work hours into account. That's money out of my pocket - I run my own business.
I couldn't attend at the last minute due to family illness. Judging by previous years not attending has lost me money. Agile 2011 is worth more that £6k to me and my business. To somebody in a different business, or with different skills - probably not.
Another way to think about what conferences provide - ask yourself what your day rate is? How many working days of value are you expecting to get from the conference?
2) Experts need events too
Yes there have to be events with a broad appeal for "high schoolers, college students and newbies to our industry". But there also needs to be events for "people who already know everything you’d need to know about the presented topics".
The latter might not enjoy the former's events. The former may not enjoy the latter's events. Finding a balance that will attract and entertain both groups is really fricking hard.
3) Cost of large events
I've been involved several times with organising conferences both small (e.g. BarCamp Bournemouth - 2days, 75ish people, free) and large (Agile 2010 with 1400ish people, five days, $1-2k & Agile 2012 - probably about the same). Anybody who thinks large conferences are massive money spinners has never been involved with organising a large conference :-)
Large conferences are not usually cheaper to organise because of economies of scale. Quite the opposite if anything.
For example take the venue. For small conferences you can often cadge a venue with some sponsorship, or find a small one in a slack period running cheap. You're flexible because you can change location on very short notice and there are usually multiple venues in a town or city that can support you.
For large conferences there are few venues that can support you. Those venues' business is based around extracting every last penny from large events - and they're very good at it. They need to be booked months, sometimes more than a year, in advance. Which brings in a whole set of different organisational and cash-flow issues... They often require a guaranteed minimum income from the floorspace, which gives you much less flexibility of resizing and scheduling. Short version - it's really freaking hard.
Then there's insurance. Speaker compensation. Programme selection. Managing submissions (if you have an open submission process) and/or finding speakers. The folk needed for security, health & safety, catering, etc. Food. Wifi. Transactional fees. Power. AV. Publicity. Etc.
For the last two years I have run the MathsJam conference, and I'll be doing so again this year. Last year the fee covered lunch Saturday, dinner, accommodation, breakfast, lunch Sunday, all tea, coffee and biscuits, and all sessions. No bag, paper, pen, coasters, pins, or other swag. Nada. You want it, you bring it. We didn't pay the speakers, and last year we had 60 lightning talks of 5 minutes each.
Fantastic atmosphere of 120 enthusiastic people who love their subject and wanted to share stuff.
10% discount early bird, 10% discount for the unwaged.
Full price: ukp165 (which is about usd200).
That covered expenses with basically no head room. Note that accommodation was included, as was a ferry from the local train station.
I think conferences are a fantastic idea.. you meet like-minded individuals and hear from really passionate presenters but the prices are crazy and thus I have only ever been to 1.
I understand how there are certain costs to be factored in like venue and speakers costs but come on, there must be something that can be done so developers from all backgrounds can take part in such events.