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DEMO Ups The Ante Against TC50 – Offers $1 Million To Winners
Last month I discussed presenting at the DEMO and TC50 conferences later this year. In the comments, Techcrunch50 founder Jason Calacanis noted that one of the big differences between the two startup-infomercial conferences is that his Techcrunch50 offers $50,000 to the winner.
Now it appears DEMO has stepped up the prize pool bigtime by offering two $1 million dollar prizes. The prizes will be awarded to the best enterprise startup and the best consumer startup. The prizes are basically ad buys over the six month period following the conference.
Update 5:30PM: It appears that the total prize is $1 million, not two million as I previously noted. I am not sure if I got it wrong or if they changed it. I thought it read that two winners (one consumer, one enterprise) would each receive $1m.
Conference organizer Matt Marshall notes regarding the prize, “The campaign will include print advertisements, web banner placements, text link promotions, email newsletter promotions, and video ads. The package includes the development of creative content that is to be featured on IDG media properties – another huge value proposition to the winning companies.”
I assume the ads will be priced at the rack rate so the $1m is probably worth less had you bought the ads yourself and negotiated a better rate (probably 30% at best). No matter what, it’s good to see the winners get some publicity past the few posts they will get from the conference buzz.
How many of the companies that presented at either conference last year can you name? Can you name 10 of the 50 that presented at TC50? This huge ad buy should help two companies stay top of mind for at least six months and could give them a lift to build from.
wow that’s some prize pool, i wonder what TC50 will come back with?
I guess TC50 will say that they don’t charge and you get better coverage and they have better industry experts on panels etc
cue Jason Calacanis to say just that ;)
[...] not already) corner their respective niches – in what Center Networks editor Allen Stern calls – “startup-infomercial” [...]
Oh Snap,
What is Erick gonna say now? DEMO is evil? Or this:
“2 million dollars? We have 2 million readers so don’t worry, we’ll cut down on the Twitter news… just for you! But you have to agree that all future news of your company goes to us or your SOL. Happy coding :)”
I love competition.
I think that this is false promotion. The value is in unsold print ad inventory. Print magazines are shutting down and getting smaller. It comes across a bit cheezy. Demo should have at least put up $100k in cash to top TC50 but the cross promotion unsold print ad inventory comes across like a gimmick.
Just keeping it real.
In the end, I go to a conference to learn and to meet new people, and I think TechCrunch50 is the best place to do that. I’ve gone to the last two big TechCrunch conferences, and they both have been more then fantastic. The people that attend, and the speakers has always been fantastic. (Disclosure: I work part time at TechCrunch as of June 22nd).
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