The Webinar Blog

Web Conferencing Revenues Recap

With WebEx's earnings announcement this week, we come to the end of the reporting period covering the fiscal year for many companies. I decided to root through the financial reports for some of the significant web conferencing vendors to see how performance looked on an overall basis. In summary, the market is healthy and companies are increasing their spend on webcasts, web conferences, and webinars.

I should make a standard disclaimer here at the start, since I'm going to be talking financial results.

1. I hold no stock or financial interest in any web conferencing technology or company, whether mentioned here or not.
2. All reported figures come from public earnings announcements or SEC filings. I did not use any personal interviews and I do not have insider access to any financial information from these companies.
3. I left out some significant names in the industry. Adobe, Microsoft, and West Corporation (owners of InterCall) all have too wide an array of products and revenue sources to easily track the performance of their web conferencing products. Many other vendors (such as ON24 and Vcall) are privately held and do not announce financial performance.
4. I do not imply any endorsement or recommendation related to investment or financial condition of the companies mentioned. I am not a financial analyst and I'm omitting anything related to the companies' net income or other financial health. This is just a simple look at top line revenues.

So much for legal protection. Here's my quick summary of revenue performance (in alphabetical order). Any mention of "years" or "quarters" in these figures refers to each company's own fiscal calendar. All numbers are reported in millions of US dollars.

CITRIX

2006 Q4 revenues were $321, a 19% increase from $269 in Q4 of 2005
2006 FY revenues were $1134.3, a 25% increase from $908.7 in FY 2005

Citrix groups GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToMyPC, and GoToAssist into a reported "Online Services" category. The revenues attributed to this category were:

2006 Q4: $43 (13.4% of total), an increase from $28.7 (10.7% of total) in Q4 of 2005
2006 FY: $148.8 (13.1% of total), an increase from $99.1 (10.1% of total) in FY 2005

CORVENT

Corvent offers services for webinars and webcasts and also resells other vendors' technologies. They aren't public and didn't release absolute figures, but they did issue a press release claiming an 89% increase in revenue from web seminar services, with sales of registration and reporting services more than tripling.

ILINC

2006 Q3 revenues were $3.65, a 12% increase from $3.3 in Q3 of 2005
2006 9-month revenues were $10.7, a 20% increase from $9.0 in the first 9 months of 2005

ONSTREAM MEDIA

2006 Q4 revenues were $2.3, an 18% increase from $1.9 in Q4 of 2005
2006 FY revenues were $8.4, a 3% increase from $8.2 in FY 2005

Onstream breaks out results for its Webcasting Group, which reported approximately 4,500 webcasts for the fiscal year (down from 4,800 the prior year). Revenues for the Webcasting Group increased 3% for the fiscal year and continued to represent approximately 45% of the company's total revenues (unchanged from the prior year). These revenues are primarily production and distribution fees.

WEBEX

2006 Q4 revenues were $101.9, a 22% increase from $83.7 in Q4 of 2005
2006 FY revenues were $380.0, a 23% increase from $308.4 in FY 2005

Some additional statements from their earnings call:

The company reported record growth in new registered web collaboration users in Q4 of 2006. They now have 2.2 million registered users - the largest subscriber base in the on-demand world for on-demand applications.

Indirect channels represented 17% of revenue in Q4, a percentage that has been steadily increasing throughout the year. Key channel partners such as Verizon, AT&T, British Telecom, Premier, and InterCall were major contributors.

Technorati Tags: Citrix, Corvent, Onstream, Onstream Media, web conference, web conferencing, webcast, webcasting, WebEx, webinar

Does Webinar Quality Matter?

A friend sent me an email yesterday talking about a poorly executed web seminar given by a technology company and a major consulting firm. He said several people within his company attended the webinar and spent their time sending instant messages back and forth about how bad the seminar was. The presenters and moderator were chatting informally with each other on the telephone and via the keyboard chat facility. Attendees could see and hear the conversations, which took focus from the material. My friend said that his coworkers used phrases like: "unorganized... unprofessional... exposing their internal issues to the rest of us."

My friend's summary was: "For an organization like <xxx>, one awful seminar can have a lasting impact. They just wasted however much money, time, and resources putting this together. They brought together X number of people, as prospects or influencers for branding purposes. If it's for prospects they will have a small convert ratio and if to influence people, they did... though not in the way they had hoped." He then wondered whether the company is seeing smaller numbers of people enroll in their webinars over time. They certainly won't get many repeats.

A poorly produced webinar reflects badly on the company hosting it and on the guest speaker and their company as well. You lose goodwill and trust from your audience. And whatever message you hoped to convey or behavior you hoped to stimulate from your audience is forgotten while they fume about their wasted time.

Putting on a good online event is not that difficult. It simply requires attention to detail and a conscious desire to invest the time and effort necessary to present a quality production to your audience. Unfortunately many companies and individuals concentrate solely on information content without respect to the presentation forum they are using.

I attended an event this week that featured an expert in webinar marketing and an executive from a major web conferencing technology company. The first thing I heard as an audience member was a telephone operator with poor diction and a bored tone reading off the standard operator introduction speech: "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our "Effecting Change Through Primal Screaming" webinar..." [Obviously I'm changing the title here to protect the innocent]. Right off the bat I'm on edge as an audience member. My first impression is that this speaker doesn't care about the subject and probably doesn't have any idea what the title means. Notice how the sentence structure doesn't sound quite right when you jam the title into the blank they had created in the script? It would have been so much smoother to say "Welcome to our webinar addressing ways you can effect change through primal screaming." You can and should get access to the technical introduction script. Change it if needed. Listen to your operator before the call. If they don't sound like they have the same presentation quality as your speakers, simply tell them that you will read the introduction speech. It's your event and your prerogative. When I work with clients as a moderator for their events, I almost always read the welcome speech myself. It just gives me one more thing I can control, rather than leave to chance.

I have another client producing a series of training events for an internal audience around the globe. The IT department schedules the events as a service offering to the business unit. I know the software they are using, and spent some time detailing exactly which options should be set to make sure the experience would be optimal for the attendees. The IT response was "Oh, I don't even know if we have those options. We've done plenty of events in the past without those settings and they've worked fine. It'll be good enough the way I scheduled it." As soon as you hear the phrase "good enough" you can usually assume there is a way it could be done much better. Look for it. Use it.

Rehearsals are your primary defense against problems before they happen. Yet rehearsals are usually seen as inconveniences to be grudgingly attended and gotten through as quickly as possible. Especially in multi-presenter events, you need to make sure everyone knows exactly how to use the software, who will be taking care of what aspects, how handoffs are to be done, and what is the backup plan for technical difficulties. Then you need to run through the material to make sure it works as a presentation. I find it vanishingly rare to be involved in a pre-event rehearsal that does NOT result in changes to the flow or resolution of small questions that crop up.

Your final line of defense against problems is to have a qualified event producer on the session. This person doesn't have to worry about content and presentation aspects. They can advance slides, add notations, handle question management, offer technical help, and generally provide a sense of calm for the presenters, who can concentrate on their "performance." There is a reason that theater actors rely on a stage manager to make sure that the lights get lowered, the curtain gets raised, and sets get moved on time. It creates a sense of smooth professionalism for the entire production. If your company produces lots of events and you have an experienced event specialist in house, use that person and make sure they are involved and assisting. If your technology provider offers professional event producers, you can elect to use them. And if you want to use an outside service, companies like Webinar Success are here to take that burden off your shoulders.

We hear a lot about competitive differentiators being important to business success. The quality of your web events can be a huge competitive differentiator. The face you present to your prospects and customers is part of your image, your brand, and a significant contributor to the success of your marketing and sales efforts. Make sure that your differentiation is positive by treating your webinars as well planned and prepared business offerings, rather than ad hoc get togethers.

Technorati Tags: lead generation, marketing, presentations, web conference, web conferencing, web meeting, webcast, webcasting, webinar, Webinar Success