I was doing some back-of-the-envelope estimates of the prevalence and type of events that are found online to help our planning with Pathable. This information is hard to acquire without spending a lot of money on market research reports so I thought I would share what I found:
How many events are coordinated and/or promoted through online social software? These numbers are very rough, provided to give a sense of scale.
- 5,500 conferences online each year in the networking directory confabb
- 67,000 conferences with 4 million registrants in the registration service RegOnline
- 15 million registered users in Evite
- 150,000 estimated(1) events in the United States in Upcoming
- 250,000 estimated(1) events in the United States in Facebook
- 150,000 estimated(1)events in the United States in MySpace
(1)These numbers are roughly estimated by finding the rates of events per user across four metropolitation areas (New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago) and then extrapolating to the larger population. Therefore the numbers are biased by urban rates. If any of these sites want to send me their real numbers I would be very happy to receive them.
What types of events are being posted?
I found the following types of events by scraping a week’s worth of event data in Facebook across those same four urban centers:
Looks like parties, and in particular birthday parties, are the big winners in Facebook.
Hi there,
Number of conferences in the searchable Confabb database is actually 55,538.
Thanks! Jon Mandell, Confabb COO