If you need to hold a huge event, Zoom allows up to a million participants to join a webinar simultaneously. Unlike Zoom plans that let you choose between a monthly, annual, or one-month subscription, the one million participants tier is only a single-use plan and costs $100,000. In addition to a million participants, there’s also space for 1,000 panelists.
In addition to hosting one million people, the video conferencing company added a bunch of other single-use tiers for large audiences. Consumers can now book webinars for 10,000 attendees for $9,000, 50,000 attendees for $15,000, 100,000 attendees for $25,000, 250,000 attendees for $50,000, and 500,000 attendees for $75,000. For example, you can customize the speaker’s background and name tags like on a typical Zoom call.
Note that you must host the webinar within three months of buying it. Also, this single-use, newly-added offering has a three-hour time limit. If you wish to extend your webinar beyond this limit, Zoom says it will “require additional paid consulting services.”
Zoom claims that similar video conferencing platforms often suffer from a few seconds of delay but now offer a zero-latency connection and ensure that “all attendees experience the webinar in real-time.” I like that, with Zoom Analytics, the webinar hosts can later look into stats such as registration, attendance, and audience engagement. These could be powerful tools to plan future webinars using the same platform, devise new marketing strategies, or change the webinar medium altogether.
I suppose the one million people tier could be helpful in political campaigns for hosting large-scale events. In fact, according to Engadget, “This is happening after various political groups used [Zoom] to raise money for Vice President Kamala Harris’ election campaign, often by hosting calls with hundreds of thousands of people.” Zoom is hopeful that the new tiers will also help the entertainment industry by accommodating celebrity meet-and-greets, product launches, fundraisers, etc.
