How many shows can the industry support?

[RawAlex]

HP, for quite a while there were really 4 shows a year... 2 IA2000 shows, a Cybernet show, and Adultdex, which was really more of a public show that ran at Comdex time. It sort of worked out Adultdex november, ia2000 january, cybernet in june, and then ia again in September. The november and january shows were in vegas, and the cybernet shows wandered around.

That all changed when (If I remember correctly) Ron from CE decided to do a bunch of regional shows. It was actually a pretty good idea, to start with, the concept was more of getting their reps (and thier friends reps) out to different areas to deal with regional webmasters, the shows were suppose to be small and all that.

Then Pheonix came along. Originally a smaller show, it really picked up and set a new standard for shows in many ways: Almost the entire deal was organized around social events, with little or no actual show.

CE's deal sort of faded away, but then GFY had gotten big and started their Webmaster Access shows, and there have been a pile of those things. Everyone and their dog has tried to have a "show", and most of them aren't shows just an excuse for 100 people to end up in the same bar / hotel / city / beach.

With Internext Florida dropping their show floor entirely and moving the whole deal outdoors, and with really no other shows or events in NA having a show floor, it leaves only Vegas in January as the last "really big shoe". The rest are social events, nothing more.

As a side note, the shift from "show" to "social" is a direct result of companies not wanting to spend the money to run booths and have enough staff on hand to run it, ship it, set it up, take it down, and so on. It is also a result of webmasters, who more often than not spend all their "show" time at the bar, by the pool, at lunch, passed out from the night before, or 101 things other than being on the show floor. The decline of the affiliate model, and the shift in the business from being a friendly competition to an often very adversarial system has also spread people out. People are choosing sides, and that never helps.