I should say up front that I’m a bad person to make this argument. I run a site that lists technology conferences, hundreds of them, and I like the things. I like the badge lanyard, the bad coffee, the moment a hall opens and a few thousand people walk in at once. Next month I’m taking a small software studio to Web Summit in Lisbon. So I’m not here to tell anyone to stay home. My claim is narrower: as a way of getting information, the conference program, the part with the stage and the lights and the schedule, is close to useless.
Not slow. Not overpriced. Useless.
The value of a conference sits somewhere else, in the corridor and on the expo floor and in the list of who else bought a ticket. The stage is theatre. The hallway is the product.
Ask Who Gets the Keynote First
Here’s a simple test. If you pay for the most expensive pass and sit in the front third of the hall, do you learn anything from the keynote that a person at home in pajamas doesn’t learn at the same moment? At most big tech shows the answer is no, and the organisers tell you so themselves.
Take AWS re:Invent. A full conference pass for this year’s Las Vegas edition costs $2,499. Amazon’s own FAQ says the keynotes will be livestreamed for free, and that keynotes and breakout sessions go up on demand after they’re presented. Free to watch, live, from anywhere; the same words, the same slides, a better seat.
CES works the same way. At CES 2026 a Deluxe Conference Pass ran $1,700 if you bought late. Meanwhile the Consumer Technology Association streamed keynotes on its own live site with replays attached, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang did his press conference on YouTube for anyone who wanted it. Huang did the same at Computex in Taipei in May 2025: Nvidia ran the keynote on its website and its YouTube channel, and the tech press embedded the stream and live-blogged it line by line. By lunch every product name, spec and price on those slides had been written up a hundred times.
Web Summit drew 71,386 people to Lisbon in 2025, its biggest crowd ever. It also posts written summaries of its sessions on its own website, open to anyone, no login. I don’t blame Web Summit for that. It’s the sensible thing to do. But think about what it means: the organiser has decided the content of the talks isn’t the scarce thing it’s selling.
So who is the keynote for? Mostly for the cameras and the stock price. A launch staged in front of a cheering arena reads better on the evening news than a blog post, even when the blog post went up at the same minute and has more detail. That’s fine. Companies are allowed to do theatre. Just don’t buy a ticket for it.
The Organisers Already Know the Hallway Is the Product
You don’t have to take my word on any of this. Ask the people who build the shows.
Freeman, the Dallas company that builds the booths and runs the logistics behind a great many trade shows, publishes an attendee trends report every year. Its 2025 edition says networking has overtaken education and product discovery as the main reason people go to events in person. The share of attendees who name networking as a motivation climbed from 39% in 2021 to 58% in 2024. About half say good networking alone is reason enough to come back next year. This is the industry’s own research, written by a company that makes its living from people attending, and it says plainly that the sessions aren’t why they come.
Look at what Web Summit chose to brag about after the 2025 edition. Not a talk. The headline was a record number of investors in the building, 1,857 of them from 86 countries. That’s an attendee list, and it’s the real thing being sold. A startup founder can read the AI panel transcript on her phone. She flies to Lisbon because a few hundred people who write cheques are inside the same fence for four days.
Developers figured this out a long time ago and gave it a name, the hallway track. It’s the joke that the best session at any conference is the one that happens between sessions, standing up, with no slides. The joke stuck because it’s true.
Some people went further and threw out the stage altogether. Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp was invitation only, so in August 2005 a group in Palo Alto ran an open version and called it BarCamp. There was no program. Attendees wrote session ideas on a whiteboard on the first morning, and everybody was expected to present or run something. The format spread around the world as the unconference, and its whole design is a bet that the people in the room know more than the people on the stage. It’s a good bet.
How to Use a Conference Listed on This Site
So here’s what I’d do with any event you find on this site, from a 1,000-engineer meeting in San Antonio to a 70,000-person festival in Lisbon.
Watch the keynotes on the stream, later, at 1.5x speed. Or read the write-up. You’ll get the same announcements in a fifth of the time, and you won’t lose a morning in a queue for a seat.
Read the attendee and exhibitor lists before you buy the ticket. Most organisers publish exhibitors, and many publish speakers, sponsors and investor counts; some apps let you search registered attendees by company and job title. If the ten people you need to meet aren’t going, the event isn’t for you this year, whatever the agenda says. If they are going, the agenda barely matters.
Book meetings in advance. Two weeks before is good, a month is better. Senior people at big shows fill their calendars early, and the ones who say “come find me at the booth” rarely mean it. A fifteen-minute slot in a café near the venue beats an hour of hovering.
Work the floor. The expo hall is where the engineers stand, the ones who built the thing and actually know what it can’t do yet. They’ll tell you more in ten minutes across a demo table than the CEO will in an hour on stage, because nobody’s filming them.
And go to the side events. The dinners, the receptions, the small breakfasts somebody’s agency organised in a hotel round the corner. That’s where the people you came for go when they’re tired of the main hall.
What I Still Won’t Concede
I’m not saying every talk is worthless. A good technical session at a specialist event, the kind where someone walks through a failure they had in production and what it cost them, can be worth the whole trip. Those talks are rare and they’re almost never on the main stage. They’re in room 214 at 4:30 on the last day, with forty people in the audience.
I’m also not saying the stage should go away. The theatre pays for the building. Sponsors buy keynote slots because the keynote gets press, and that money is what keeps the badge price for the expo floor at a few hundred dollars instead of a few thousand. Without the show, there’s no hallway.
What I reject is the idea that you’re there to watch it. The people worth the trip came to watch it too, and the forty minutes they spend outside the hall waiting for it to start are yours.
Skip the keynote. Stand by the coffee.