---
title: "Average Webinar Attendance Rate: Every Study (2026)"
description: "Published webinar attendance rates run from about 21% to about 60%. Every benchmark with its real sample, source market and figure - plus the three widely-quoted numbers that do not survive a click."
url: "https://ainora.lt/blog/webinar-attendance-statistics-every-study-2026"
published: "2026-06-04"
updated: "2026-07-29"
author: "Justas Butkus"
---

# Average Webinar Attendance Rate: Every Study (2026)

The **average webinar attendance rate** is the share of registrants who attend the live session, and there is no single published figure for it. The numbers in circulation run from about **21% to about 60%**, and the spread is not noise - it is the result of different vendors measuring different populations, defining the metric differently, and doing the arithmetic differently. This page lists every benchmark we could verify at its primary source, with its real sample, its data year and its source market, and it names the three widely-quoted figures that do not survive a click.

> **TL;DR:** For a small operator, the defensible planning band is **21% to 34%**. It comes from the four sources that measure a comparable population: Goldcast's own averages (51 attendees against 238 registrants across 19,531 webinars = **21%**), Demio's cohort of host companies under $1M revenue (**22%**), a course-creator practitioner baseline (**25%**), and BrightTALK's syndicated network (**34%**). The famous 40-60% figures from ON24, GoTo, TwentyThree and Wistia are real, but they measure enterprise marketers promoting to their own opted-in email lists - a different population. All of these are **US and English-language vendor sources**. And the single most-cited "paid traffic" webinar benchmark on the open web traces back to a study that does not exist.

- **21-34%** - Band the comparable sources converge on (US/EN vendor data, planning assumption) (Source: Goldcast 2025 + BrightTALK 2021 - https://www.goldcast.io/reports/b2b-webinar-benchmark-report-2025)
- **51 of 238** - Goldcast average attendees vs average registrants, 19,531 webinars - headlined as 33% (Source: Goldcast B2B Webinar Benchmark Report 2025 (US/EN) - https://www.goldcast.io/reports/b2b-webinar-benchmark-report-2025)
- **22%** - Attendance where the host company earns under $1M - 800,000+ webinars on Demio, 2023 (Source: Banzai/Demio Webinar Statistics 2024 (US/EN) - https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/61967dbb50eec57a4e7fde97/65c2814c4945d76010d824fe_Webinar_Statistics_2024_FINAL.pdf)
- **34%** - Registration-to-live on a syndicated content network - no webinar count disclosed (Source: BrightTALK Benchmarks Report 2021 (US/EN) - https://assets.website-files.com/60ad434763cd9b000903a8eb/60bebfe4dfc8ae41915d539c_2021-BrightTALK-Benchmarks-Report-4-21-mod.pdf)

### Key terms used in this article

- **Attendance Rate** - The share of people who registered for a webinar and then attended the live session. Also called show up rate or registrant-to-attendee conversion. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_conferencing)
- **Registrant** - A person who completed the registration form for a webinar, whether or not they ever attend. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_conferencing)
- **Aggregate rate** - Total attendees divided by total registrants across the whole dataset. Answers "what share of all registrants showed up". (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weighted_arithmetic_mean)
- **Mean of ratios** - The average of each webinar’s own attendance percentage, treated equally regardless of size. Produces a higher number than the aggregate when small webinars perform better. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratio_estimator)
- **Evergreen webinar** - A pre-recorded session presented on a recurring or on-demand schedule rather than broadcast live once. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_conferencing)

## What is the average webinar attendance rate?

There is no authoritative single answer, and any page that gives you one without naming a sample is guessing. Every figure in this article is **vendor platform data from a US or English-language provider**, measured only on that vendor's own customers. We found no independent academic measurement of webinar attendance rates at all.

What we can say precisely is which number belongs to which population. If you are an enterprise marketer emailing an opted-in house list, the published figures cluster around **40-60%**. If your registrants came from somewhere other than your own warm list - a syndicated content network, a partner, or paid traffic - the comparable published figures cluster around **21-34%**.

> **The one sentence that matters most**
>
> A 30% planning assumption and a 55% benchmark are not two estimates of the same thing. They are two different populations. Quoting an enterprise figure next to a small-operator baseline is a category error that anyone can expose in a single click, and it is the most common mistake in this topic.

## Why do published figures range from 21% to 60%?

Because the reports are not measuring the same thing. Six mechanics account for essentially the whole spread, and every one of them is visible inside the published reports themselves - you do not have to take anyone's word for it. We work through all six in detail below, but the short version is: who supplied the registrant, which webinars made it into the sample, whether the replay counts, whether the arithmetic is an aggregate or a mean of ratios, who paid for the report, and which year you happen to be reading.

## Which benchmarks actually apply to a small operator?

Four published sources measure a population where the registrant does *not* have a warm relationship with the host - a syndicated library, a third-party audience, or a small company with a thin list. These are the only figures we would put beside a small operator's planning number.

| Source | Figure | Sample disclosed | Data year | Source market |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| BrightTALK Benchmarks Report 2021 | 34% registration-to-live (also 46% total incl. on-demand) | "Thousands of data points" - no webinar count | 2020 | US / English-language, syndicated B2B network |
| Goldcast B2B Webinar Benchmark Report 2025 | 33% headline - but 51 attendees per 238 registrants = 21% aggregate | 19,531 webinars, 418 brands, 3.5M registrants | 2024 | US / English-language B2B |
| Banzai/Demio, Webinar Statistics 2024 | 22% where the host company earns $0-1M (41% at $1-10M, 48% at $10-50M, 46% at $100M+) | 800,000+ webinars hosted on Demio | 2023 | US / English-language, all company sizes |
| Scale For Impact (practitioner) | 25% live, about 38% evergreen | None disclosed - one operator’s book of work | 2026 | US / English-language course creators |
| Convergent band | 21-34% - a planning assumption, not a measured average | Four independent lines | 2020-2026 | All US / English-language vendor or practitioner data |

> **Why these four and not the famous ones**
>
> In every dataset that breaks attendance down, the driver is the registrant's relationship to the host. Demio's own data makes it explicit: host companies under $1M in revenue attend at 22%, while companies over $10M attend at 46-48%. Same platform, same year, same metric, more than double the rate. The variable is not the software. It is whose list the registrant came from.

## What did Goldcast find across 19,531 B2B webinars? (2025)

> **Fact box: Goldcast B2B Webinar Benchmark Report 2025**
>
> **Data year:** calendar year 2024**Sample:** "we reviewed 19,531 webinars across 418 B2B brands for the calendar year of 2024", covering 3.5 million registrants**Headline finding:** "33% attendance rate when you compare how many people signed up vs how many people showed up"**The other numbers in the same report:** "the average webinar attracted 238 registrants" and "the average number of attendees per webinar was 51"**Source market:** US / English-language B2B marketing**Source:** [Goldcast B2B Webinar Benchmark Report 2025](https://www.goldcast.io/reports/b2b-webinar-benchmark-report-2025)

### The arithmetic worth doing yourself

Goldcast publishes 33%. It also publishes 238 average registrants and 51 average attendees. Divide the second pair and you get **51 / 238 = 21.4%**. Both numbers are correct and neither is dishonest - they answer different questions. The 33% is a mean of ratios: it averages each webinar's own percentage, so a 12-registrant webinar with 6 attendees counts as much as a 2,000-registrant webinar. The 21% is the aggregate: of all the registrants in the dataset, this is the share that actually showed up.

Which one you should use depends on the question. If you are asking "what does a typical webinar in this dataset look like", use 33%. If you are asking **"of the people I paid to register, how many will be in the room"** - which is the operator's question and the one that touches your budget - use the aggregate. That is why [21%](https://www.goldcast.io/reports/b2b-webinar-benchmark-report-2025) is the figure we carry into the planning band, not 33%.

## What did the BrightTALK Benchmarks Report find? (2021)

> **Fact box: BrightTALK Benchmarks Report 2021**
>
> **Data year:** 2020**Sample:** platform engagement data plus an annual user survey - "thousands of data points". **No webinar count is disclosed anywhere in the report.****Figure we publish:** **34%** live conversion (with 15% on-demand conversion and 46% total conversion on the same chart)**Why this source matters:** BrightTALK registrants arrive through a syndicated content library rather than the host's own mailing list, which makes it the closest published analogue to registrants you did not personally warm up**Source market:** US / English-language B2B (46% North America, 34% EMEA, 14% APAC, 6% LATAM)**Source:** [BrightTALK Benchmarks Report 2021 (PDF)](https://assets.website-files.com/60ad434763cd9b000903a8eb/60bebfe4dfc8ae41915d539c_2021-BrightTALK-Benchmarks-Report-4-21-mod.pdf)

### The same report gives three different numbers for the same metric

This is worth stating plainly, because we are asking you to trust a figure and you should be able to check it. The BrightTALK report publishes registration-to-live conversion in three places and gets three answers:

- The **Audience Conversion** chart reads **34% Live Conversion**, alongside 15% on-demand and 46% total. [source](https://assets.website-files.com/60ad434763cd9b000903a8eb/60bebfe4dfc8ae41915d539c_2021-BrightTALK-Benchmarks-Report-4-21-mod.pdf)
- The **Benchmark Your Success** page reads **Avg. Reg to Live 36%** for the same metric in the same report. [source](https://assets.website-files.com/60ad434763cd9b000903a8eb/60bebfe4dfc8ae41915d539c_2021-BrightTALK-Benchmarks-Report-4-21-mod.pdf)
- The prose says "an average of **33%** of professionals who register for your webinar will attend live, another 15% of registrants will watch on-demand". [source](https://assets.website-files.com/60ad434763cd9b000903a8eb/60bebfe4dfc8ae41915d539c_2021-BrightTALK-Benchmarks-Report-4-21-mod.pdf)

We publish **34%**, the charted figure, and we disclose the other two rather than quietly picking whichever suited us. If you prefer the benchmark page's 36%, the top of our planning band moves up by two points and nothing else in this article changes. The report's job-level breakdown is also useful and internally consistent with the low-thirties reading: C-level 32%, VP 33%, Director 35%, Manager 32%, Practitioner 37% live conversion.

## What does an 800,000-webinar dataset say about small companies? (2024)

> **Fact box: Banzai/Demio, Webinar Statistics 2024**
>
> **Data year:** 2023**Sample:** "In 2023, Banzai customers hosted more than 800,000 webinars using Demio" - the largest disclosed webinar sample we verified**Attendance by host company revenue:** $0-$1M **22%** · $1M-$10M 41% · $10M-$50M 48% · $50M-$100M 48% · $100M+ 46%**In the report's own words:** "Start-ups with less than $1 million in revenue have half the attendance rate of companies with $1--$10 million in revenue"**By industry:** pharmaceuticals highest at 50%; Internet Software & Services 28%, Diversified Capital Markets 20%, Education Services 20% at the low end**Source market:** US / English-language**Source:** [Banzai/Demio, Webinar Statistics 2024 (PDF)](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/61967dbb50eec57a4e7fde97/65c2814c4945d76010d824fe_Webinar_Statistics_2024_FINAL.pdf)

This is the single most useful row in the whole literature for a solo operator or a small info-product business, and almost nobody quotes it - because it is the least flattering number in a report published by a webinar platform. The **$0-1M cohort attends at 22%**, less than half the rate of the $10M+ cohorts on the same platform in the same year.

It also quietly settles an argument. If you have ever been told that your show up rate is a software problem, or a reminder-sequence problem, note that all of these companies are running the same software with the same built-in reminders. The gap is the list.

## What do course-creator practitioners report?

One published figure in the entire literature is specific to course creators and info-product businesses rather than B2B software marketing, and it comes from a practitioner rather than a platform. [Scale For Impact](https://scaleforimpact.co/average-webinar-show-up-rate-stay-rate-and-conversion-rate-2026-benchmarks/) publishes **25% as the live baseline** and **around 38% for evergreen**, plus a stay-rate target of "70% or above".

> **Label this one honestly**
>
> **No sample size and no methodology are disclosed.** The author's stated basis is personal experience - "Over the last 10 years, I've built and optimised 114 webinars and helped generate over $100M in webinar sales". That is a practitioner heuristic from a US/English-language operator, not a measurement. We include it because it is the only course-creator-specific figure that exists and because it lands inside the band the measured sources produce - not because it carries the same weight as an 800,000-webinar dataset.

The same source adds a diagnostic that is more useful than the benchmark itself: "Below 20% on a live webinar is a signal. It doesn't mean the content is bad. It almost always means the email sequence between registration and event day is underperforming." If you want the ranked list of what actually moves that number, we set it out in [how to increase webinar attendance](/blog/how-to-increase-webinar-attendance).

## Why do the ON24, GoTo and Wistia numbers not apply to you?

These are the figures everyone quotes, and they are real, verified and published by serious companies. They are also measuring **enterprise and mid-market marketers promoting webinars to their own opted-in email lists**, often for training or internal communications rather than for selling. That is a different population from a small operator running an offer webinar, and the difference is worth 20 to 30 percentage points.

- **55.9%** - ON24 overall registrant-to-attendee, 2018 - every webinar in the sample had 100+ attendees (Source: ON24 Webinar Benchmarks 2019 (US/EN) - https://communications.on24.com/rs/848-AHN-047/images/on24_benchmarks_assessment.pdf)
- **43.3%** - Same ON24 report, events with more than 100 attendees (Source: ON24 Webinar Benchmarks 2019 (US/EN) - https://communications.on24.com/rs/848-AHN-047/images/on24_benchmarks_assessment.pdf)
- **44%** - GoToWebinar marketing webinars, 250,000 webinars across 17,000+ businesses (Source: GoToWebinar Big Book of Webinar Stats (US/UK/DE/CA/AU) - https://logmeincdn.azureedge.net/gotomeetingmedia/-/media/pdfs/gotowebinar-big-book-webinar-stats.pdf)
- **154 of 308** - TwentyThree own averages = 50%, against a 58% headline on the same page (Source: TwentyThree State of Webinars 2026 (US/EN) - https://3076550.fs1.hubspotusercontent-eu1.net/hubfs/3076550/State%20of%20Webinars%202026.pdf)

| Source | Published figure | Sample disclosed | Data year | What it is actually measuring |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| ON24 Webinar Benchmarks Report 2019 | 55.9% overall; 43.3% for events over 100 attendees; Comms 67.05%, Training 44.79%, Marketing 39.10%, Continuing ed 30.79% | 22,922 webinars, 1,600+ organisations - and "all webinars had at least 100 attendees" | 2018 | Enterprise-to-SMB marketers, mostly to owned lists; small webinars excluded by design |
| ON24 2023 Digital Engagement Benchmarks | 53% total registration-to-attendee conversion - no live source link; we hold the 2019 PDF but not a reachable 2023 one | "Thousands of digital experiences" - no webinar count | 2022 | Same platform four years later; disclosure much thinner |
| GoToWebinar, Big Book of Webinar Stats | Corporate communications 65%, training 53%, marketing 44% | 250,000 webinars, 17,000+ businesses | 2017 | Mostly internal comms and training, where attendance is quasi-mandatory |
| TwentyThree, State of Webinars 2026 | 58% average attendance rate - beside 308 average signups and 154 average attendees | 133 survey respondents plus "1000s of webinars" on its own platform | 2025 | Its own customers; the headline and its own averages disagree by 8 points |
| Wistia | About 40% of registrants attend live - COULD NOT RELOCATE AT SOURCE | The 900+ professional survey is corroborated on the Wistia site; the attendance rate itself was not present when we re-checked, so treat it as unverified | 2025 | Wistia customers - marketing and media teams |

> **Read ON24 methodology page before you use its headline**
>
> The ON24 2019 report is the best-documented dataset in the category, and its own methodology says: "All webinars had at least 100 attendees." **Every webinar that flopped was excluded before the average was taken.** The same report also tells you, in its own words, that "a 35 to 45 percent conversion rate is typically considered to be good" - roughly ten to twenty points below its own headline. Sources: [ON24 Webinar Benchmarks Report 2019 (PDF)](https://communications.on24.com/rs/848-AHN-047/images/on24_benchmarks_assessment.pdf).

## Six reasons the same metric produces different numbers

Every one of these is checkable inside the published reports. None of them requires assuming a vendor is lying.

| # | Mechanic | The evidence, inside the reports themselves |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | Who supplied the registrant | Demio: host companies under $1M attend at 22%, over $10M at 46-48% - same platform, same year. ON24 and GoTo serve enterprise marketers mailing owned lists; BrightTALK registrants come from a syndicated library. |
| 2 | Which webinars made the sample | ON24 2019 states in its methodology that all 22,922 webinars had at least 100 attendees. Its own figure for events over 100 attendees is 43.3% against a 55.9% headline. |
| 3 | Whether the replay counts | BrightTALK publishes 34% live, 15% on-demand and 46% total on one chart. A live-only figure and a live-plus-replay figure are not comparable, and both get quoted as "attendance rate". |
| 4 | Aggregate versus mean of ratios | Goldcast headlines 33%; its own averages are 51 attendees per 238 registrants, which is 21%. TwentyThree headlines 58%; its own averages are 154 attendees per 308 signups, which is 50%. |
| 5 | Who paid for the report | Every figure on this page is published by a company selling webinar software or webinar consulting, measured only on its own customers. We found no independent academic measurement of webinar attendance rates. |
| 6 | Which year you happen to read | ON24 published 55.9% on 2018 data and 53% on 2022 data. BrightTALK gives 36%, 34% and 33% for the same metric on three pages of one report. Treat any single-year, single-page figure as unreliable. |

> **The practical consequence**
>
> Do not average these numbers. An average of 21% and 60% is not a better estimate; it is a number that describes nobody. Pick the source whose population matches yours, then plan with a band rather than a point.

## Is there a webinar attendance benchmark for paid traffic?

**No. There is no published show-rate benchmark segmented by traffic source.** We checked every platform dataset in this article, and not one of them splits attendance by paid versus organic versus email versus partner. That gap matters more than any single figure on this page, because traffic source is plainly one of the strongest drivers of whether a registrant shows up - and it is the one variable nobody has measured in public.

We are stating this rather than filling the gap with an estimate, because the only page on the open web that claims to fill it is fabricated, and we cover it in the next section. If you run cold paid traffic to a webinar, the honest position is that the closest published analogues - BrightTALK's syndicated network at 34% and Demio's under-$1M cohort at 22% - are analogues, not measurements of your case.

## Which webinar attendance statistics are fabricated?

Three of the most-quoted webinar attendance figures on the internet do not survive being followed to their source. We traced each one by hand.

| Claim in circulation | Where it actually comes from | Status |
| --- | --- | --- |
| "Across roughly 12,400 B2B webinars analyzed by ON24, GoTo, and BrightTALK between Q3 2025 and Q1 2026, the median live attend rate is..." | digitalapplied.com, April 2026. The page gives no hyperlink, no report title and no publication date for the study it describes. | No such joint study exists. ON24, GoTo and BrightTALK publish separate reports, on separate samples, from separate years, and none of them is a 12,400-webinar joint analysis. |
| A median live attendance benchmark "from paid traffic" | beknownonline.com, May 2026. Its cited source is "12,400+ B2B webinar data points - Digital Applied" - i.e. the claim above. | Launders the non-existent study, then adds a "paid traffic" framing the source never claimed. Re-checked July 2026: we could not reproduce the traffic-source claim on that page, so treat our May observation as dated rather than current. This is the only paid-traffic webinar show-rate benchmark on the open web. |
| "Live webinars 25-30%, evergreen 60-70%" - introduced as "According to Statistics" | StealthSeminar. The word "Statistics" hyperlinks to a blog post by one marketing consultant. | That post gives no citation, no sample and no study for the figures; they are presented as the author’s own view. An evergreen-webinar vendor relabelled one person’s opinion as statistics. |
| "The average webinar attendance rate ranges from 35% to 45%" | Demandsage cites WebinarNinja; WebinarNinja cites RingCentral; RingCentral footnotes a PDF at insidesales.com. | That PDF returns HTTP 404. The chain ends in a dead link, so the most-quoted number in the category has no reachable primary source. |

> **Why we do not reprint the fabricated percentages**
>
> We have named the claims and their origins, but we deliberately do not restate the invented median and quartile figures from the first two rows. Numbers get lifted out of context; sentences describing a non-existent study do not. If you have those percentages in a deck or a pitch, the honest fix is to delete them rather than to hedge them - and if you got them from an AI assistant, that is exactly the circular-citation trap this page exists to break.

## Which figures could we not verify at source?

Three commonly-cited attendance figures failed our own citation check, so they are absent from the tables above. We list them rather than silently omitting them, because "we could not confirm this" is information too.

- **ON24's 2026 benchmark blog figure.** The page returned HTTP 403 to us and we could not read it. ON24's figures in this article come from the 2019 and 2023 PDF reports, which we did read.
- **Contrast's live-attendance range.** The getcontrast.io statistics page returned HTTP 403. We have dropped the figure entirely rather than repeat it from a secondary source.
- **Livestorm's 2026 benchmark rate.** The public landing page discloses the sample - 7,062,572 registrations across 33,786 sessions, plus 850+ go-to-market leaders surveyed in November 2025 - but the attendance figure itself sits behind a gated download. On re-check the landing page we used no longer resolves, so treat the sample as reported-by-us rather than independently checkable, and the rate as unverified.

## Which webinar attendance studies agree, and which do not?

Every source we verified at its primary URL, in one table, sorted by data year. All of them are US or English-language vendor or practitioner data. There is no comparable European, Lithuanian or non-English dataset in the public record, and we are not going to invent one.

| Source | Data year | Sample | Headline figure | Population | Confidence |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| GoToWebinar, Big Book of Webinar Stats | 2017 | 250,000 webinars, 17,000+ businesses (US, UK, DE, CA, AU) | 44% marketing / 53% training / 65% corporate comms | Enterprise and mid-market, owned lists | Medium-high (large, disclosed sample; vendor) |
| ON24 Webinar Benchmarks Report 2019 | 2018 | 22,922 webinars, 1,600+ orgs, all with 100+ attendees | 55.9% overall; 43.3% for 100+ attendee events | Enterprise-to-SMB, owned lists; failures excluded | Medium-high (best-documented method; selection bias disclosed) |
| BrightTALK Benchmarks Report 2021 | 2020 | "Thousands of data points" - no webinar count | 34% live (36% and 33% also appear in the same report) | Syndicated content network - third-party registrants | Medium (right population, weak disclosure) |
| ON24 2023 Digital Engagement Benchmarks | 2022 | "Thousands of digital experiences" - no count | 53% registration-to-attendee (no reachable source link) | Enterprise, owned lists | Low-medium (disclosure dropped vs 2019) |
| Banzai/Demio, Webinar Statistics 2024 | 2023 | 800,000+ webinars hosted on Demio | 22% for $0-1M hosts; 46-48% for $10M+ hosts | All company sizes - the only clean small-company cut | High for the cohort split (largest verified sample) |
| Goldcast B2B Webinar Benchmark Report 2025 | 2024 | 19,531 webinars, 418 brands, 3.5M registrants | 33% headline; 21% aggregate from its own averages | B2B marketing | High (strong disclosure; do the aggregate yourself) |
| Wistia | 2025 | Wistia-hosted webinars; no webinar count for the rate | About 40% attend live - we could not relocate this figure at source on re-check | Wistia customers - marketing and media teams | Unverified (we could not reach a live source) |
| TwentyThree, State of Webinars 2026 | 2025 | 133 survey respondents plus "1000s of webinars" | 58% headline; 50% from its own averages | Its own platform customers | Low-medium (small survey; internally inconsistent) |
| Scale For Impact | 2026 | None disclosed | 25% live, about 38% evergreen | Course creators and info-product businesses | Low (practitioner heuristic, but the only one for this population) |

## What attendance rate should you plan with in 2026?

**Use 30% as a planning assumption, and label it as one.** It is not a measured average and there is no source you can cite for it as a fact. What it is: a round number sitting inside the 21-34% band that the four structurally comparable sources produce, which makes it defensible for budgeting and indefensible as a claim.

> **How to use a planning assumption properly**
>
> Model the band, not the point. If you need 100 people in the room and you are planning at 30%, you need roughly 333 registrants - but the honest version of that sentence is "between about 295 and about 475 registrants, depending on where your list actually sits in the 21-34% band". Then measure your own first three webinars and throw all of this away, because your own number beats every benchmark on this page.

### Three things that are true regardless of which number you pick

- **Your list beats your software.** Demio's cohort split - 22% for hosts under $1M against 46-48% for hosts over $10M on the same platform - is the largest single effect in the verified literature.
- **The replay is a competitor to your live session.** Anyone who knows a recording is coming has a rational reason not to clear their calendar. We work through the ranked reasons in [why webinar registrants do not show up](/blog/why-webinar-registrants-dont-show-up).
- **Attendance is a means, not the goal.** A higher show up rate is only worth what the attendees do afterwards, and the work of converting attendees and no-shows happens in the days after the session - the subject of our page on [post-webinar follow-up calls](/post-webinar-follow-up-calls).

### Where this fits with the rest of our research

We keep this kind of teardown for the statistics that drive real decisions - the same treatment we gave the speed-to-lead literature in [lead response time: every study](/blog/lead-response-time-statistics-every-study-2026), where the famous multiplier turned out to belong to a different study than everyone credits. If you want the operational side of webinar attendance rather than the benchmarks, start with our overview of [AI webinar attendance](/ai-webinar-attendance), the evidence review behind [webinar reminder calls](/webinar-reminder-calls), and - if you are in the EU or UK - what your registration form has to say before anyone may call those registrants, on [webinar registrant consent](/webinar-registrant-consent). If you would rather talk it through, our [contact page](/contact) books a scoped conversation.

## Frequently Asked Questions

**What is the average webinar attendance rate?**

There is no single authoritative figure. Published rates run from about 21% to about 60% because different vendors measure different populations. For a small operator, the defensible band is 21-34%, from Goldcast's aggregate arithmetic (51 attendees per 238 registrants across 19,531 webinars), Demio's under-$1M host cohort (22%), a course-creator practitioner baseline (25%) and BrightTALK's syndicated network (34%). All of these are US or English-language vendor sources.

**Is a 30% webinar attendance rate good?**

For a small operator promoting to a list that is not warm, 30% is a reasonable planning assumption rather than a measured average - it sits inside the 21-34% band produced by the comparable sources. It should never be presented as an industry benchmark, because no source publishes it as one. For an enterprise marketer emailing an opted-in house list, 30% would be low: those populations report 40-60%.

**Why do some sources say webinar attendance is 55% or 60%?**

Because they measure enterprise and mid-market marketers promoting to their own opted-in email lists, often for training or internal communications. ON24's 2019 report published 55.9%, but its own methodology states that every one of the 22,922 webinars in the sample had at least 100 attendees - webinars that flopped were excluded before the average was taken. The same report puts events over 100 attendees at 43.3%.

**Why does Goldcast report 33% when its own numbers imply 21%?**

Because 33% is a mean of ratios and 21% is an aggregate. Goldcast publishes an average of 238 registrants and 51 attendees per webinar; 51 divided by 238 is 21.4%. The 33% averages each webinar's own percentage, so a tiny webinar counts as much as a huge one. Neither is dishonest, but they answer different questions - and the aggregate is the one that answers 'of the registrants I paid for, how many will be in the room'.

**Is there a webinar attendance benchmark for paid traffic?**

No. There is no published show-rate benchmark segmented by traffic source. None of the platform datasets we checked splits attendance by paid versus organic versus email. The one page on the open web that claims to publish a paid-traffic benchmark cites an analysis of '12,400 B2B webinars by ON24, GoTo and BrightTALK' that does not exist - no such joint study was ever published.

**Which webinar attendance statistics should I stop quoting?**

Three. First, anything sourced to a claimed analysis of roughly 12,400 B2B webinars by ON24, GoTo and BrightTALK - that study does not exist, and a second site launders it into a 'paid traffic' benchmark. Second, 'live 25-30%, evergreen 60-70%', presented by an evergreen-webinar vendor as 'according to statistics': the link behind that phrase goes to one marketing consultant's blog post with no citation, sample or study. Third, 'the average webinar attendance rate is 35% to 45%': the citation chain runs Demandsage to WebinarNinja to RingCentral to a PDF that returns 404.

**Do evergreen webinars really get higher attendance than live ones?**

The honest answer is that the public evidence is thin and inconsistent. The one practitioner source specific to course creators reports 25% live against about 38% evergreen, with no sample disclosed. The widely-quoted '60-70% for evergreen' figure traces to a single consultant's blog post with no data behind it. Treat evergreen attendance as unmeasured in the public record rather than as an established advantage.

**Are any of these benchmarks based on European or Lithuanian data?**

No. Every figure in this article comes from a US or English-language vendor or practitioner. GoToWebinar's sample spans the US, UK, Germany, Canada and Australia, and BrightTALK's audience is 34% EMEA, but neither publishes a per-country attendance rate. We found no European or Lithuanian webinar attendance dataset in the public record, and we will not estimate one.

**Does any independent research measure webinar attendance rates?**

We did not find any. Every figure we could verify is vendor platform data or a practitioner heuristic, measured on that vendor's own customers, published by a company with a commercial interest in the result. That is not a reason to discard the numbers - the samples are often large and the methodologies are sometimes well disclosed - but it is a reason to read the methodology page before quoting the headline.

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