Last Minute

I went along to this year’s State Of The Browser conference on Saturday. It was great!

Technically I wasn’t just an attendee. I was on the substitution bench. Dave asked if I’d be able to jump in and give my talk on declarative design should any of the speakers have to drop out. “No problem!”, I said. If everything went according to plan, I wouldn’t have to do anything. And if someone did have to pull out, I’d be the hero that sweeps in to save the day. Win-win.

As it turned out, everything went smoothly. All the speakers delivered their talks impeccably and the vibes were good.

Dave very kindly gave shout-outs to lots of other web conferences. Quite a few of the organisers were in the audience too. That offered me a nice opportunity to catch up with some of them, swap notes, and commiserate on how tough it is running an event these days.

Believe me, it’s tough.

Something that I confirmed that other conference organisers are also experiencing is last-minute ticket sales. This is something that happened with UX London this year. For most of the year, ticket sales were trickling along. Then in the last few weeks before the event we sold more tickets than we had sold in the six months previously.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m very happy we sold those tickets. But it was a very stressful few months before that. It felt like playing poker, holding on in the belief that those ticket sales would materialise.

Lots of other conferences are experiencing this. Front Conference had to cancel this year’s event because of the lack of ticket sales in advance. I know for a fact that some upcoming events are feeling the same squeeze.

When I was in Ireland I had a chat with a friend of mine who works at the Everyman Theatre in Cork. They’re experiencing something similar. So maybe it’s not related to the tech industry specifically.

Anyway, all that is to say that I echo Sophie’s entreaty: you should go to conferences. And buy your tickets early.

Soon I’ll be gearing up to start curating the line up for next year’s UX London (I’m very proud of this year’s event and it’s going to be tough to top it). I hope I won’t have to deal with the stress of late ticket sales, but I’m mentally preparing for it.

Have you published a response to this? :

Responses

Charis Rooda 🌿

@paulca @adactio Sometimes I wonder if people, instead of buying late, people _don’t_ buy anymore? Once an event is canceled, people say, “Oh, I wanted to”, but maybe we make that group bigger than what it is?So we think people are buying late, because we don’t see any sales, but maybe we sell less? And we’re hoping it will come late.When I look at our sales graph, it pretty much has the same shape. It’s sometimes a lot less, but the shape is mostly the same. Very curious about what you think!

Shannon Clark

@charis @paulca @adactio I’m guessing but I think one issue is how people learn about/are reminded about conferences and related how companies are/are not covering conference costs for employees and pulling back on sponsoring (I haven’t organized a big conference in a few years but did a few big ones online during the pandemic)

As an individual I often don’t see much about events now in my emails/online until just a few days or a week or two before the event (meaning I’m unlikely to attend)

Shannon Clark

@charis @paulca @adactio and this includes the posts and emails from companies attending/exhibiting at/sponsoring such conferences.

Not unrelated a lot of these companies neglect some key details when they do post or email (ie they write emails about an event but neglect to include the actual dates of the event, location or links to how to register for the event - seemingly assuming that everyone getting the email already is attending / knows the exact dates and details of the event.

Charis Rooda 🌿

@Rycaut @paulca @adactio That’s all very true! There is so much less social media now, and budgets are so much smaller. Back in the day, the sky was the limit; now, only the ones with big newsletters and big teams make it, and sometimes they even don’t.

Shannon Clark

@charis @paulca @adactio and I think it’s a failure of more than just social media. There is less non-social media as well for many industries and those that remain are more insular (conferences and magazines/websites)

Ie google cloud and AWS and Salesforce (and I assume oracle) have their own events but few where they all exhibit and help companies evaluate competitors

(Or Adobe vs alternatives or ad/publishing tools and platforms etc)

6 Shares

# Shared by Marc Thiele on Tuesday, September 17th, 2024 at 7:19pm

# Shared by John Allsopp on Tuesday, September 17th, 2024 at 8:16pm

# Shared by Zach Leatherman :11ty: on Tuesday, September 17th, 2024 at 8:16pm

# Shared by Holger Hellinger on Wednesday, September 18th, 2024 at 6:33am

# Shared by Stefan Baumgartner on Wednesday, September 18th, 2024 at 7:31am

# Shared by James Doc on Wednesday, September 18th, 2024 at 1:07pm

4 Likes

# Liked by Scott Kellum :typetura: on Tuesday, September 17th, 2024 at 7:19pm

# Liked by Marc Thiele on Tuesday, September 17th, 2024 at 7:19pm

# Liked by OrbitalMartian on Tuesday, September 17th, 2024 at 8:16pm

# Liked by Zach Leatherman :11ty: on Tuesday, September 17th, 2024 at 8:16pm

Related posts

Announcing UX London 2025

Save the dates: June 10th to 12th.

That was UX London 2024

Three magnificent days of design knowledge.

Another speaker for UX London

Peter Boersma is joining us for day three to nerd out about design ops.

UX London 2024 closing keynotes

Rama Gheerawo, Matt Webb, and Maggie Appleton!

UX London 2024, day three

A veritable feast of outstanding talks and workshops on design systems and design ops.

Related links

Revisiting Metadesign for Murph – Smithery

I’m really excited about John’s talk at this year’s UX London. Feels like a good time to revisit his excellent talk from dConstruct 2015:

I’m going to be opening up the second day of UX London 2024, 18th-20th June. As part of that talk, I’ll be revisiting a talk called Metadesign for Murph which I gave at dConstruct in 2015. It might be one of my favourite talks that I’ve ever given.

Tagged with

Return to UX London – Smithery

I’m very excited that John is speaking at this year’s UX London!

Tagged with

UX London 2023 | Flickr

These pictures really capture the vibe of this year’s lovely UX London event.

Tagged with

Benjamin Parry @benjaminparry ~ Why I Volunteer And Why You Should Too

Benjamin’s retrospective on three years of volunteering at web conferences, some of them run by Clearleft.

Tagged with

Previously on this day

5 years ago I wrote Geneva Copenhagen Amsterdam

Telling the origin story of the web.

20 years ago I wrote iPodDownload

Yesterday, I put some new music (ripped from CD) onto my iBook. I then transferred the music onto my iPod. Rather than transfer the same songs from my iBook to my iMac, I thought it would be simpler to plug the iPod into the iMac and transfer the songs fr

21 years ago I wrote DNS Update

Here’s a timely update to my last post. Wired News is reporting that the Internet Software Consortium are releasing an emergency patch for backbone computers running BIND:

21 years ago I wrote Lost In DNS Translation

I bet Sofia Coppola really wanted to have Jessica’s domain name for her new movie.

22 years ago I wrote And the winner is...

This website was nominated for an award.