I’ve been hearing rumors of this for the last week, but now it’s official – the DX3 conference is cancelled. Although I was not planning to speak or attend DX3, I’m still sad, because it would have meant a lot of friends would have been in town. Oh well.
This article in eweek gives some more details on the reasons why it was canceled. Now, naturally, they are not going to come out and say, “Our prices were inflated beyond what the average attendee was willing to pay personally, so we didn’t get enough ticket sales.” But I can’t help but think that $1000 – $1500 per ticket scared a lot of people away.
Reasons given were, “the tight timing of our Dx3 event in relation to recent announcements of new Microsoft and Adobe technologies, as well as competing industry events.” Competing events, maybe, but I don’t see how announcements of MS and Adobe products would hurt conference sales. I guess maybe that people want to save their money so they can buy the new products? Well, again, if admission wasn’t the same or more than some of the CS3 suites, that might help things.
OK, obviously I’m on a pricing kick here. And I think $1000 to $1500 is just way to much for a conference. I already blogged about this before, and got almost universal agreement that this price range was ridiculous. It may be a drop in the bucket for corporations sending their employees, but for the individual attendee, the self-employed developer/designer, the enthusiastic noob, the student, it’s a big chunk of change. And it’s this latter group that has built the community into what it is, not the big corporations.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see what will happen with FlashForward this fall, also by Lynda.com, also in Boston, also with ticket prices of $900 to $1500, and also most likely close in time to other events and product releases.
more than a grand for a conference ticket is pretty outrageous, Conferences shouldn’t cost that much. It’s funny I’ve heard more about DX3 being cancelled than I had about the conference itself, apparently all the money charged for tickets and the sponsorship money, none of it went to advertising or anything.
the age of big expensive conferences IMO is coming to a close.
I’m not happy with dx3 being canceled either and I wasn’t planning on going or speaking. Who knows what all the causes were. I’m sure it was a bunch of stuff.
On the one hand, I think conferences should be cheaper and involve generous sponsorship… Take MIX for example… it’s heavily funded by Microsoft. MAX is funded by Adobe–though they save a tiny bit by not paying the speakers (a different topic all together). Both those conferences are very good. (Oh, and I should note that some of the early FlashForwards were the among the best.) The interesting thing is that you’d think maybe by having such sponsorship it would squash a good discussion… and, frankly, the rules on some conferences trade show floors (like what books they are and are not allowed to sell) are questionable. But in both MAX and MIX they were quite good and while I didn’t see any mention of WPF at MAX or Flash at MIX (though, I guess they probably mentioned it as a comparison very often) they were both good conferences.
Anyway, I don’t mean to tell people how to run the conferences… if I knew what to do maybe I’d just do my own conference. However, I’ve been to a wide variety of conferences and it’s interesting to note what makes them good or not good.
I should clarify: MAX doesn’t pay speakers from outside the company.
I should note that I’ve never paid for a single conference ticket, nor has any company I’ve ever worked at paid my way. I’ve always gone free as a speaker or author. So this isn’t about my personal budget or stinginess, but what would make a good conference – namely, making it easy for people to get in. And by people, I mean individuals, not just employees of large companies with conference budgets.
I also don’t have anything against conference organizers making a profit. It’s a full time job, and takes a lot of people to pull off a good conference. I would say that Shawn Pucknell of FiTC and John Davey of FOTB have found the sweet spot of quality conference, affordable pricing, and hopefully profit.
I have a hunch the need to cancel DX3 was more straightforward than the marketing spin they put on it and can be largely brought back to ticket pricing.
Think there’s a need to see a code of conduct where industry events publicly state whether or not they’re paying speaker for their travel expenses, accommodation and/or an honorarium.
When conferences get away with charging such prices for their tickets, attendees deserve to have at least some basic info on how that is justified, a rough percentage breakdown of expenses or something.
Though I’m in the same situation as yourself and rarely have to buy my own conference ticket — I’d be happy to pay a premium price for attending a conference if I could see its not just a case of getting the maximum amount of profitability for the organizer.
Keith,
Definitely agree with you and am also sad to see this one cancelled. I talked a little bit about this on my blog as well. I think that price aside, it was a little too ambitious in terms of scope and subject matter to entice the majority of folks to attend. Hope it slims down, get’s a little more focused, and cheaper to allow for it to come back as something else.
I was able to attend the last MAX ($800 early bird special) conf last year only because my company footed the bill. But that won’t be possible this year- 1500 dollars is my monthly mortgage payment, or all my utlities, studentloans, car loan, car insurance and my 401k contribution. These conferences (save FITC) are really becoming the territory of company-sent employees when you add in airfare, hotel, and food. And honestly beyond employee satisfaction from going my company legitimately wants to know what the benefit is? Most of the info is posted after the conf for free. Or in the case of apollo-you end up getting access to all the info and betas the same as everyone else. They’d rather have me work the week on billable hours than not and spend 2000k on the conf. It’s a better argument when the tickets are more in the 300-500 range (360 was 99 i think) and the conf is partly over the weekend like FiTC. ADLnet finds a way of keeping the prices low on their plugfests. Sometimes i feel like these conf pick the most expensive facilities, hotels. I’m n ot saying have it in a HS gymnasium but there is a middle ground.
Interesting indeed. I don’t think its a secret that getting Adobe and Microsoft at an event is, um, a bit of a challenge. So i was very interested to read about DX3, and was, for a number of reasons, curious as to how it would go down. Its a shame it’s been cancelled.
Pricing of festival tickets is obviously something im acutely aware of, and yes, while i do need to run it at a profit to continue doing it, i do spend a lot of time trying to set the price just right so i feel that it is fair all around. We also run a number of initiatives to allow people who could not afford to come, an opportunity to attend…the FITC Scholarship program, the volunteers, student discounts, educator discounts, ect.
I can remember the early FF days, and they were great! It was those events that inspired me to do one in Toronto! But i also wasn’t really in a position to afford a ticket. Luckily i was either given a ticket or a nice discount as a speaker, judge, or, one of the companies i worked at would foot the bill. But once i was on my own (small flash shop) well, it was not realistic to attend (ticket price, flight, hotel, ect).
Anyways, i wanted to post to say thank you personally for some of the cool props to FITC on this page. I think it does help that we, (as well as FOTB) are very small companies, and also, we are both developers (well, im now an ex-developer!) and therefore our perspective is perhaps different than a large company doing these types of events. But hey, thats my opinion, and you know what they say about opinions 😉
Cheers, and look forward to seeing some of you at FITC Toronto…in 14 days. Jeeze. Time flies!
I’ve spoken at both MAX and FF and been a guest at MIX. While I certainly have issues with Adobe not at least paying travel expenses for their speakers, I think it’s unfair to compare MAX and MIX to FF or any of the other non-company sponsored conferences. MIX and MAX (Microsoft really needs to change the name, honestly) are both promotional conferences by their respective companies. Both of those companies should understand that the conference is not about turning a profit, it’s about building a community. I saw much more of an attempt at building community at MIX than I did at the last MAX, frankly. Hopefully Adobe will really focus on making this year’s event the conference it can be.
As for the “other” brand conferences, they HAVE to make a profit. It takes an amazing amount of organization and overhead to put one of these together. The staff at Lynda have had a lot of experience at doing it, and DX3 being cancelled means that they obviously saw something wasn’t working. I applaud their effort at expanding the reach and focus of the conference and hope they can pull it off again in the future.
Agreed – that is WAY too much for a new conference to be charging for tickets. FlashForward is also starting to get up there, which is why I’ve been preferring to attend FITC instead. Very similar sessions, for ~$500… not bad. Good post.