Of all events held on the Bizzabo platform in 2026, 63 per cent took place in person, 33 per cent were fully digital and just 4 per cent were hybrid (Bizzabo State of Events, March 2026). Those three figures describe the market more precisely than any trend piece: a third of events still happen online, and the format that promised the best of both worlds has become the exception. For you as an organiser, the question is no longer whether digital events will last. It is which goals you use them for, and who runs them.
Digital events have clear strengths in 2026, particularly when reach, frequency and cost per contact are priorities. If your main goal is to build business relationships, consider how the format will support personal conversations. Below you will find an overview of the formats with attendance benchmarks, a five-question decision guide, the updated reasons digital is here to stay, a candid look at hybrid, and cost guidance to help you decide whether to hire an agency.
What is a digital event? A short definition
A digital event (also called an online or virtual event) is an event whose programme, interaction and networking take place entirely on an internet platform. The term covers the one-hour webinar as much as the multi-day online conference with parallel stages, the virtual trade show with exhibitor profiles, and the matchmaking event where pre-scheduled video meetings are the programme. Hybrid events combine an in-person event with digital participation and form a category of their own.
What separates a digital event from a video call is intent: a registration, a programme, an audience beyond your own company and a measurable goal, usually leads, knowledge transfer or business contacts.
Where Digital Events Work Best
The definition lists five formats, and the 2026 stock-take shows they have developed very differently. The global market for virtual events stood at 119.8 billion US dollars in 2025 and is expected to reach around 145 billion in 2026; exhibitions and trade shows are the largest application at 31.3 per cent, and 55.2 per cent of revenue goes to platforms rather than services (Grand View Research, Virtual Events Market Report, July 2026). Worldwide, about 21 per cent of all events in 2025 were planned as virtual-only (Statista, cited by Cvent, March 2026). For your planning that means: the format is normal rather than experimental, and the centre of cost has moved from the agency to the platform.
Stock-take 2026
Where digital events stand today
Market size says nothing about which format delivers which goal. The table sorts the five formats by what you hold at the end.
| Format | Typical length | What to expect | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Webinar | 45 to 75 minutes | 47.7% of registrants attend, 68 minutes average length (Livestorm, 09/2026); 57% show-up rate and 51 minutes viewing time (ON24, 02/2025) | Leads, knowledge transfer |
| Online conference | 1 to 3 days, several stages | Reach without travel budgets, webinar-level show-up rates, sharp drop after day one | Reach, content library |
| Virtual trade show | 1 to 5 days, often open year-round | Largest market segment (31.3%, Grand View Research, 07/2026); exhibitor profiles, lead capture | Exhibitor leads |
| Matchmaking event | Half to full day, pre-scheduled meetings | Rule-based 1:1 video meetings, meeting quotas measurable | Business contacts |
| Hybrid event | 1 to 3 days | Only 4% of events (Bizzabo, 03/2026), 52 to 58% attendance rate (Venuera benchmark, 07/2026) | In-person plus extended reach |
Attendance is a key planning figure in that table. Collect 1,000 registrations for a webinar and plan for 480 to 570 attendees. Paid formats do better: the median no-show rate is around 17 per cent for paid events and 28 per cent for free ones (PheedLoop analysis of more than 860 events, cited by Venuera, July 2026). Paying for a ticket can strengthen a participant’s commitment to attend.
Which ten variants hide behind these five categories, and which of them produce networking results, is sorted out in our guide to the 10 types of virtual events. This article is about the decision before that.
When is digital the right answer? A five-question decision guide
The table compares the formats; your objectives determine which one fits. Picture the finance director who asks in the budget round: “Why are we still travelling for this?” The question is fair, and it has two correct answers depending on what your event is supposed to produce. Five questions lead to the right one.
Decision guide
Five questions before you fix the format
- Question 1 What outcome do you want to achieve? Leads, knowledge or a business relationship? For the first two, digital is the default answer. For the third you need in-person contact or a matchmaking format with fixed appointments.
- Question 2 How scattered is your audience? Ten countries, three time zones, no travel budget on the attendee side: digital. One region, the same 200 decision-makers every year: in person.
- Question 3 How often must you reach them? Digital formats can make monthly or quarterly events easier to organise. Once a year justifies travel and a venue.
- Question 4 What does one result cost? Calculate cost per held meeting or per qualified lead, not per attendee. A webinar with 83 viewers can cost more than a matchmaking day with 40 meetings.
- Question 5 How will you prove it? Digital platforms can help capture these figures and make them available for reporting. If your board demands evidence, that favours digital or at least digitally tracked formats.
If the answers read “leads, scattered audience, high frequency”, your event is digital. If they read “relationship, regional audience, once a year”, it stays in person. The most common mistake sits in between: chasing a relationship goal with a reach format. Then 400 people sit in a livestream and nobody has had a conversation.
An online conference focuses on content, while a matchmaking event centres on scheduled conversations. If your goal is business contacts, you need a format in which participants say in advance whom they want to meet, and a platform that turns those wishes into a schedule. How to organise such video meetings so that they actually take place is the subject of our guide to virtual networking events.
Why are digital events here to stay?
The decision guide shows when digital wins. The reasons below explain why the format did not disappear once in-person events returned.
1. High reach
Digital events reach people regardless of location and travel budget, and capacity is practically unlimited: 50 parallel workshop rooms cost nothing in venue hire online. For audiences spread across continents there is no other format.
2. Reliability without travel and venue risk
Strikes, weather, visas and travel freezes at your attendees’ companies do not touch a digital event.
3. Cost per contact
A one-day virtual event for 1,000 attendees costs around 30,000 to 35,000 US dollars all in, including platform, production, speakers and marketing (vFairs Virtual Event Budget Guide, July 2026). Per contact reached, digital is several times cheaper. Per business relationship, it is not automatically so.
4. Sustainability
No travel, no hotel nights, no stand construction: most of an event’s emissions come from travel, and digital formats avoid it entirely. For companies with sustainability reporting duties that is a booking argument, not a bonus.
5. Extending the life cycle
Recordings, interviews and presentations stay available after the event. Publicly accessible replays are viewed 14.6 times on average, gated ones only 4 times (Livestorm Webinar Benchmark Report, September 2026). Share the recording openly and you more than triple its reach.
6. Measure and analyse success
Digital platforms can record registrations, viewing times, questions and meetings, depending on their features and configuration. How to turn those numbers into a business case is covered in our guide to measuring B2B event ROI. These records can reduce the effort needed to compile a report.
7. Digital events drive new behaviour patterns
Attendees have grown used to digital formats and choose them deliberately: 53 per cent plan to attend more webinars in 2026 than last year, while 54 per cent plan to attend more in-person events (Bizzabo State of Events, March 2026). Attendees are not swapping one format for the other; they use both for different purposes.
8. Frequency instead of an annual occasion
Digital formats reach the same audience twelve times a year instead of once. 39 per cent of meeting professionals name “holding more virtual meetings” as their answer to rising costs (Amex GBT Global Meetings and Events Forecast 2026, October 2025). Frequency builds familiarity that one annual event cannot.
9. Save time
One hour of programme costs one hour, not two days of travel. That explains why almost half of webinar registrations arrive only in the final week (49.6 per cent, Livestorm, September 2026): the barrier is so low that nobody plans ahead.
10. Cost savings
No flight, no hotel, no expenses. At companies with frozen travel budgets, a digital event is often the only one that gets approved.
11. Interaction and networking
Chat, polls and pre-scheduled video meetings lower the threshold for making contact, on one condition: networking has to be organised. An open attendee list produces no conversations online. A meeting matrix that defines who meets whom and when does.
12. Information and knowledge transfer
Webinars remain the workhorse of knowledge transfer: the average webinar now runs 68 minutes, and sessions of 60 to 75 minutes draw the largest audiences (Livestorm, September 2026). For pure knowledge goals no format is more efficient.
Do attendees strongly prefer live events?
The twelve reasons explain why digital stays. They do not explain why in-person events are growing at the same time. 70 per cent of attendees rank in-person events as their primary source of professional learning, ahead of webinars, on-demand platforms and social channels (Freeman Trends Report, April 2026, more than 4,700 attendees surveyed). In Germany, 395 million people attended in-person events in 2025, up 4.6 per cent on the previous year (Meeting- und EventBarometer 2025/26, GCB German Convention Bureau, May 2026). Among exhibitors, 97.5 per cent regard trade fairs as indispensable (AUMA Exhibitor Outlook 2026/27, June 2026).
These figures do not contradict the twelve reasons. They describe a different goal. In-person wins where trust has to form, where negotiations are due and where the audience gathers in one place anyway. So the finance director gets two answers: for the spring lead campaign we do not travel. For the autumn partner conference we do, because contracts are made there. And 27.7 per cent of exhibitors say they increasingly have to defend trade fair participation internally against digital alternatives (AUMA, June 2026): the question “why not online?” is asked in one company in four.
Are hybrid events the future of the event industry?
For four years hybrid was the standard answer to the in-person-or-digital question. The 2026 numbers say otherwise. Only 4 per cent of events on the Bizzabo platform are hybrid (Bizzabo, March 2026), around 15 per cent of North American events were planned as hybrid in 2025 (Amex GBT, cited by Cvent, March 2026), and the attendance rate of hybrid formats, at 52 to 58 per cent, sits below that of purely in-person events (Venuera benchmark, July 2026). Hybrid has not failed, but it has become a specialist format.
The reason is economic: a hybrid event pays for two productions and often gets one audience, because online attendees drop off after the first morning. It pays off when the digital side has a purpose of its own: international participants who would never have travelled, or pre-scheduled meetings between online and on-site attendees. How to plan such a format without diluting the in-person side is the subject of our hybrid event planning guide. For matchmaking across both audiences, Converve offers a solution for hybrid events in which the meeting matrix schedules on-site and online participants under the same rules.
A hybrid format needs a clear purpose and a budget that covers both audiences.
Agency or in-house: what digital event support costs
Once the format is settled, the next question is who runs it. Many organisers start by searching for an event agency, which is right for some tasks. For others they pay agency fees for work a platform now does by itself.
| Task | An agency delivers | A platform takes over | Stays with the organiser |
|---|---|---|---|
| Concept and dramaturgy | Yes, core competence | No | Goal setting, sign-off |
| Studio, direction, livestream production | Yes, for studio productions | Partly (integrated stream) | No |
| Registration, ticketing, attendee communication | At extra cost | Yes, standard | Email content |
| Programme, stages, recordings | Set-up against a fee | Yes, standard | Content upkeep |
| Networking and 1:1 meetings | Rarely, usually bought in | Yes, rule-based scheduling | Setting the matching rules |
| Sponsor and exhibitor spaces | Sales on commission | Yes, profiles and lead capture | Sales |
| Reporting and proof | Report against a fee | Yes, automatic | Interpretation |
The cost frame: event planners and agencies typically charge 15 to 20 per cent of the event budget or hourly rates between 75 and 250 US dollars (DesignRush Event Planner Cost Guide, 2026). In the German-speaking market, agency hourly rates run from 80 to 350 euros depending on seniority and consulting day rates from 1,200 to 3,500 euros (mhoch3 agency fee benchmark, August 2025); project flat fees or a percentage mark-up on the total budget are the usual models (bvents, September 2026). A professional moderator adds 500 to 2,500 euros (Seminar-Institut, April 2026). On the platform side, licences range from 3,000 to more than 25,000 US dollars per event (vFairs, July 2026) or 675 to 10,000 US dollars per month for large formats (Markletic Pricing Breakdown, November 2024).
That yields a simple rule. An agency is worth it when your event needs staging: studio, direction, dramaturgy, several cameras. It is not worth it when your event is a process: registration, programme, meetings, reporting. A platform runs that process with its own project manager, and your team keeps the rules in hand. Which platform qualifies is compared in our guide to choosing a virtual and hybrid event platform; the cost question for the matchmaking part is answered in our overview of event matchmaking software pricing.
A realistic middle way: book the agency for the opening block and the keynote production, and run registration, programme and meetings yourself on the platform. The finance director then sees an invoice in which every line belongs to a task. That is the proof she wanted.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a digital event?
A digital event is an event whose programme, interaction and networking take place entirely on an internet platform, from webinars and online conferences to virtual trade shows and matchmaking events. It differs from a video call through registration, a programme, an external audience and a measurable goal. Around 21 per cent of all events worldwide were planned as virtual-only in 2025 (Statista, cited by Cvent, March 2026).
Which digital event formats have held up in 2026?
Webinars and online conferences for knowledge transfer and leads, virtual trade shows as the largest market segment at 31.3 per cent of volume (Grand View Research, July 2026), and matchmaking events for business contacts. Hybrid events have become a specialist format at only 4 per cent of events on the Bizzabo platform (March 2026).
How many registrants actually attend a digital event?
On average 47.7 per cent of webinar registrants show up (Livestorm Webinar Benchmark Report, September 2026, 33,786 sessions), or 57 per cent according to ON24 (February 2025). Hybrid events reach 52 to 58 per cent. Paid events have a median no-show rate of around 17 per cent compared with 28 per cent for free events (PheedLoop, cited by Venuera, July 2026).
How much does a virtual event cost?
A one-day virtual event for 1,000 attendees costs around 30,000 to 35,000 US dollars including platform, production, speakers and marketing (vFairs Virtual Event Budget Guide, July 2026). The platform licence alone ranges from 3,000 to more than 25,000 US dollars per event depending on attendee numbers and features. Keep a contingency of 15 to 20 per cent.
Do I need an event agency for a digital event?
Only for the staged part: concept, studio, direction and livestream production. Registration, programme, 1:1 meetings and reporting are standard functions of an event platform. Agencies typically charge 15 to 20 per cent of the budget (DesignRush, 2026) or hourly rates of 80 to 350 euros in the German-speaking market (mhoch3, August 2025). Booking the agency for the keynote production only is often the most economical option.
When should an event stay digital and when should it be held in person?
Digital when the goal is leads or knowledge transfer, the audience is scattered and you need to reach it several times a year. In person when the goal is a business relationship and the audience meets once a year anyway. 70 per cent of attendees name in-person events as their primary learning source (Freeman Trends Report, April 2026), while 53 per cent plan to attend more webinars (Bizzabo, March 2026): both formats grow, for different goals.
Conclusion: digital is a format, not a compromise
The 2026 overview shows where digital events can make a useful contribution. A third of events take place online, webinars reach almost half of their registrants, virtual trade shows are the largest market segment, and hybrid has become a deliberate exception. In-person events grow at the same time because they serve a different goal. Choose each format to suit your objectives, and use those objectives to explain the decision in the next budget discussion.
The decision rests on five questions, the execution on the choice between staging and process. For the process, above all pre-scheduled 1:1 meetings between attendees, exhibitors and buyers, Converve has run a B2B matchmaking platform for more than twenty years, built on a rule-based meeting matrix that schedules digital, hybrid and in-person formats alike. Talk to us if you want to know how your digital event can create opportunities for participants to meet.
