The Webinar Blog

Yugma Changes Free Service Terms

Yugma today changed the terms of service for free web conferencing clients. They had been offering conferencing for up to 20 participants, but with a more limited feature set than their fee-based products. Now free users get all the features found in the paid product version, but meetings are capped at three participants (a host and two attendees). Free web meetings can also only be up to 15 minutes in length.

This makes the free product much more of an “unlimited trial” account that lets prospective customers test all the potentially useful features of the main product, but with very little real-world applicability for practical web conferences. I can’t remember the last time a web meeting lasted less than 15 minutes!

The free version also includes sponsored advertising and no access to phone or email tech support.

I was surprised to see that the company sent an email on January 3, notifying free customers that the changes would take place on January 4. Imposing new restrictions on capacity and length could easily mess up people with meeting plans already in place. A little more advance warning might have been nice.

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BrightTALK Unveils Data On Webcast Viewing Habits

Our industry desperately needs more quantitative analysis on viewer preferences and behaviors when it comes to live and on-demand webcasts. BrightTALK is ready to help us out with the release of results from their own analysis of attendee data from online events throughout calendar 2010.

Their corporate evangelist, David Pitta, just sent me some teaser information in advance of a public webinar they will host on Wednesday, January 12. At the webinar, the BrightTALK VP of Corporate Development (Brian Stark) will walk us through their findings based on figures gleaned from their series of free BrightTALK Summit webcasts.

In just the first couple of “leaked” graphs that David sent me, I found information that was either surprising or unobtainable from any research studies I have seen previously. David gave me permission to share these nuggets with you, so take the big “CONFIDENTIAL” stamp on the graphs with a grain of salt… They were joking around with a WikiLeaks theme concept. I take data privacy and confidentiality seriously, and don’t want to be accused of unethical business practices!

The first graph flies in the face of a survey I ran more than two years ago. Self-reported preferences for webinar days showed that nobody wanted to attend online events on Mondays. And sure enough, almost no one offers live webinars on Mondays. But BrightTALK found that on-demand viewings of recorded webcasts are just as strong on Mondays as the next three days. It turns out that Fridays get the least viewing activity!

  (Click graph to view full size image)

So does this mean we should offer more live webcasts on Mondays? You certainly wouldn’t be competing against many others for the prime time slots!

Speaking of prime time slots, BrightTALK did something I have never seen reported before… They looked at viewing habits based on type of industry. So for instance, local lunchtime works great for Technology attendees, but is terrible for the Financial Services industry.

  (Click graph to view full size image)

I am hoping they will show us results for other industry breakdowns as well.

It’s wonderful to see information based on real activity for once, rather than self-selecting survey respondents. I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of their analysis in the live session on January 12. You can register online through this link… http://bit.ly/e20zdp

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