WebinarListings.com just put an announcement on its LinkedIn group saying that “at the end of the month WebinarListings.com will be no longer actively promoting webinars.” Their web page has a similar announcement.
I first reported on WebinarListings with their beta test announcement in March of 2010. In July of 2011 the owner put the venture up for sale. And now the new owner has decided to cease operations.
WebinarListings.com joins a line of predecessors that have suffered the same sad fate. This blog has reported the launch of webinar listing and search services including my own WebEventSearch.com along with Finervista.com, Webinar-Directory.com, WebinarHero.com, and FreeWebinarDirectory.com. None of them has an active web presence anymore.
On the positive side, some webinar listing services continue to exist: WebinarExplorer.com, WebinarBase.com, EventSpan.com, and WebinarBucket.com all show current webinar listings that can come from any host. Specialty sites such as BusinessExpertWebinars.com and BrightTALK.com have listings of upcoming webinars produced on their own platform and infrastructure.
It is difficult to make a generic open-listing service work. I think the biggest problem is that the generic sites bill themselves as places to find webinars. And that’s not what people are looking for. They don’t want webinars, they want specific information of value to them. The delivery method is incidental. The type of container is not the selling point. This is the reason that grocery stores have aisles with signs saying “pasta”, “cat food”, and “baking goods.” They found that it didn’t work so well when they created aisles of “cans”, “boxes”, and “bags.”
If you promote your own webinars, heed the lesson. Don’t emphasize the webinar. Emphasize the information. Emphasize the value of being able to have two-way instantaneous communications with subject matter experts. Emphasize the value of communal learning and shared experiences. Think like your neighborhood liquor store… People don’t shop there because of the bottles. They shop there because of the booze.
