Conferences: Pay To Speak? Huh?

So our experience with the conferences has been rather interesting especially when it comes to trying to raise some sponsorship funds. Apparently payola is a common practice in the conference business – a sponsor pays, a sponsor gets to speak. And we thought the whole conference business was a big scam already.

I suppose we were naive to think that conference organizers were curators of the best content available for the attendees. Turns out, that attendees are being charged a lot of money to listen to the speakers who pay the most sponsorship money.

Next time you plan to go to a conference, run a quick check to see how many of the companies who are sponsoring are also speaking.

We just wanted to state that PSFK is not going to engage in the practice. Saying that, we do have sponsors where their employees speak – but that’s because they like us and we like them.

Ticket anyone? http://psfklondon.eventbrite.com