I just got notification that Webinar Base has launched yet another entrant in the field of webinar listing/search functionality. Interestingly, the business seems to be based in Romania, which is one of the less-common business locations for webinar-related offerings.
The site has the usual bits of puffery on the home page… I don’t really think it contains “the largest collection of webinars and webcasts,” but I’m becoming inured to those kinds of statements by now.
Searching for webinar listings can be done by category or by keyword. There are 15 category options and some are non-intuitive as to what they might contain or whether they overlap with others. For instance, “Business Webinars” seems to cover a lot of ground and would include many of the other topics such as “Management/Leadership Webinars.” I found when I listed a test event that I could only choose one category to define it, which was a bit frustrating. I want my event to be found under any relevant search topic.
Posting a new listing involves filling in text fields on a web page. Interestingly, things like price and date are text fields as well. It could be a bit tough on the administrator to figure out which date format I’m using if I enter 6/8/10 in the date field. Apparently the date field should also include the time, since there is no other field for that, nor anyplace to indicate what time zone applies.
Entries are submitted for approval and posting by the site’s administrator. That always worries me in terms of both eventual scalability and critical path dependencies. If she goes on vacation or is otherwise occupied, your listing sits in a pending queue.
You can list free webinars for free, but fee-based webinars cost $9 per listing. There is an additional $49 fee to get your listing in the scrolling slider bar of “Featured Webinars” on the site’s home page.
Webinar Base has also started a blog with some general interest tips and pointers for webinar producers and presenters. As I write this, there are only two entries, but I’m sure they will be adding more over time.
Good luck to Webinar Base. They face some stiff competition from other established webinar listing services, but if experience has taught us anything, it is that there seems to be infinite room on the Web.
