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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Futures Magazine: Virtual Shows – Real Revenues  online-only trade event has been their only events model (and a profitable one at that) since long before the recession. “We volunteered to be the guinea pig three years ago,” says Ginger Szala, group editorial director, but the model of online trade events makes perfect sense for her audience of individual stock and commodities traders. “They are located everywhere and they don’t want to leave their computer.” Time away from the screen means lost market opportunities. “They don’t want to leave home.” The semi-annual Futures I-Trade shows are perfect for this crowd. In fact, Szala says that it is critical for virtual events not to try too hard to recreate the real thing because in some cases a target audience is coming for something very specific. One of the first things they discovered three years ago was that the audience did not want the standard discussions panels. “They just want to learn from real traders and get turnkey strategies,” she says. Futures replaced panels with standalone presentations. The publisher does have to pay a “slight fee” for many of its presenters, but “they are not on the usual speaker circuit,” she says. “That is key. People want to hear different speakers and learn lessons.”The publisher’s payoff can be considerable, and even in these days of rate card discounting, Futures is set to increase its pricing on events sponsorships, says Szala. In three years, the typical registration for these free-to-user shows has grown from 900 to more than 3,000 for the event last March. As a result, the show typically attracts more than a dozen booth exhibitors at $4,500 a booth. A “silver” tier of sponsorship goes for $9,500 and a “gold” sponsor pays $12,500. While neither Futures nor their technology provider InXpo could disclose the specific fee the publisher pays for its series, InXpo did say that an event of this size can run between $35,000 to $50,000 depending on the number of booths and amount of customization. Nevertheless, the math clearly works in Futures’ favor – so much so that the publisher is looking to raise rates and rethink the ways in which it parcels out the 3,000 leads the show generates to sponsors. In the last year the I-Trade Show increased attendees’ time spent with exhibitors 25% and increased the one-to-one interaction with one another 119%. Szala says that 70% of her sponsors are returning for the next show. In next week's issue of min's b2b, we drill further into the I-Trade model with Ginger Szala and explore what the company learned about the care and feeding of booth vendors. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com COMMENTS
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