Over the past decades, we’ve seen an evident and stable growth in the use of videoconferences and webinars. But as numbers show, when the COVID-19 pandemic started early this year, things have really taken off like never before.
We decided to take a closer look at the “new normal” when it comes to how people are using videoconferencing tools today and turned our findings into a report. Read on to see what we found out.
What’s in the report?
How the pandemic affected webinar and remote work trends worldwide;
How the number of webinars and attendees changed, and which countries saw the most significant growth;
What webinar tools gained popularity;
Which industries are the most active when it comes to using webinars and online meetings;
Key business goals for webinar organizers and how they evolved;
What the future holds when it comes to the use of webinars and videoconferencing tools when the pandemic is finally over.
Download the report
The new normal vs. webinars and online meetings
Nobody expected the COVID-19 pandemic. So, when it came, it disrupted our lives, education, and the way we work and run our businesses. Everything around us changed, socially, and economically.
March 2020 brought social distancing rules, border closures, and travel limitations, which affected pretty much every aspect of our lives. Companies, schools, and even doctors’ offices went remote. And this caused a surge in demand for webinars and videoconferencing software.
We just had to get on with our lives, work, and school curriculums somehow. And that demand translated directly into the massive increase in the number of ClickMeeting users and webinars that took place using our platform.
But let’s put concrete numbers on it (coming from our internal database). In March 2019, there were almost 60,000 webinars on our platform that brought together 870,579 attendees. But a year later, the number of webinars was five times that (nearly 300,000), with 3,203,035 attendees.
Countries that saw the biggest growth were:
Poland – 1,156% growth compared to before the pandemic;
Greece – 868%;
Germany – 519%;
France – 423%.
What’s changed besides the volume of online meetings was the specific software features that gained popularity:
Presentation tools rose by 546%;
User interaction tools by 600%;
Automation tools by up to a whopping 1,310%.
Industries and business goals that dominated the webinar market
The key part of our report are the answers to a survey we ran amongst businesses in May 2020, two months after the pandemic exploded. They helped us analyze how webinar use has changed. We asked our respondents if they used webinars before the pandemic and if they did – how their business goals evolved over the past couple of months.
We wanted to know:
The landscape of webinar organizers when it came to the size of the company;
The industries that found webinars most useful;
The key business goals before the pandemic and in the new COVID-19 reality.
And let us let you in on a couple of stats related to the latter: business meetings and meetings with employees grew from 45% to 50% and project collaboration from 37% to 42%.
An interesting find was related to paid webinars. It turns out they’re also growing as the main or additional source of revenue, according to 44% of our respondents.
We also took a look at security – an essential aspect of online meetings, especially when you consider things like zoombombing, which popularity rose along with the popularity of webinars and videoconferences. 51% of our respondents said they were in favor of securing webinars and online meetings with passwords or unique tokens.
The location of the servers where organizer and participant data is stored is also crucial when it comes to online meeting security. 20% of people who responded in our survey said it was a vital aspect for them.
The report’s highlight is the answer to the last question in the survey – what are the plans when it comes to using webinars and online meetings when the pandemic is finally over.
Will the trend continue?
Download the report to find out what our respondents declared.
And let us know about your plans!
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