Offer an Archived Webcast - Get Large Boost in Subscribers

ON24 Inc., a media marketing provider, published a report last week about webcasts and specifically the B2B industry. The report looks at webcasts under 60 minutes in length.

Mediapost has a good report summary which includes:

The report shows that registration and attendance is cyclical depending on the time of year or week:

• Forty-seven percent of all registrations occur in the 10 days before a scheduled webcast, with 10.41% registering on the day of the webcast
• The months of December, June and August registered the highest registrant-to-attendee conversion percentages of 64.71%, 58.43% and 57.14% respectively
• Most registrations occurred earlier in the week - Monday (23%), Tuesday (21%), Wednesday (19%) - with the fewest percentage over the weekend

In my 12+ years running online promotions and email campaigns, I have found that Tuesday works best for sweepstakes and Thursday works best for coupon offers. On CN, I try to think about which stories work best on which days. Outside of news, every story can be scheduled based on what I believe the reader response will be.  

The conclusions of the report include:

• There is a cyclical trend of when publishers schedule and deliver webcasts, with registration and attendee levels seeming to rise when there are a lower number of webcasts scheduled
• Archiving a live webcast contributes 15.34% of all registrations, indicating that archiving extends the ROI of the live webcast
• Forty-seven percent of all registrations occurred in the 10 days before a webcast  while most of these registrations occurred earlier in the week (Monday-Wednesday) versus later in the week and weekend

While the findings are based on B2B but I think sites (and webcasters, livecasters and podcasters) such as Justin.tv and Ustream might benefit from this information. I am sure Ustream will provide archives at some point for some of their shows.