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What does the competitive landscape in the webinar market look like?
Marcelo Ballvé
Head of Research at Sacra
See the link to our dataset at the bottom.
We completed a high-level survey of competitors in the webinar market to narrow the field to gauge basic trends and identify benchmark products and companies. In the final report, we will dig into differentiators and key features for the leading products and categories. Here, we outline:
- The basic structure of the market
- Indicators of product resonance and commercial strength
- Broad areas in which webinar products are seeking to stand out
A handful of companies are clearly setting the pace in the market, while as a whole products are pushing further on themes already identified in the main memo. Namely that is in-event engagement features, deeper analytics encompassing the webinar lifecycle, and data-enabled post-event content generation. The latter is increasingly being paired with gen AI capabilities.
Background: roots of the webinar market
The history of webinars is closely tied to the larger story of networking and the internet.
In 1996, XeroxPARC released a webinar software called PlaceWare — later named PlaceWare Auditorium — in 1996. This application allowed one or several users to give an online, audio presentation, with slides, to hundreds or even thousands of listeners worldwide. It included features that were to remain webinar mainstays, including surveys, private chat, and toggles to allow other participants to speak during the broadcast. PlaceWare Auditorium found early adopters in university and scientific settings.
Three years later, Cisco launched WebEx Meeting Center, with a focus on business users. In 2004, around the time of its acquisition by Citrix Systems, GoToMeeting introduced webinar video. In their first couple of decades, webinars remained a subset of an industry geared to networking and workplace communication. While there were a number of new entrants during the dot-com boom, the webinar space did not change radically until more recently.
Today’s landscape: market map
Today, WebEx and GoTo continue to be names of note in the webinar space. But the market has expanded in new directions. This expansion includes several broad trends and entrants:
- Rise of Internet-Native Video-Conferencing Tools: Companies like Zoom and the rival Microsoft Teams, initially focused on video communication, have ventured into adjacent markets as they seek to build on their already considerable market penetration. They've added webinar functionalities to their platforms, leveraging their core video-communication technology and product ubiquity.
- Virtual Event Platforms: New applications have emerged to create immersive virtual event experiences. These apps are designed to simulate comprehensive in-person events like conferences or offsites, catering to remote attendees. But customers of these solutions can easily adapt them to the webinar use case.
- Web-Based Webinar Solutions: Relative newcomers like Livestorm have introduced web applications enabling users to host high-quality webinars and other live experiences easily, and with minimal frills. These solutions often allow hosting directly from the browser and require no additional software downloads, simplifying the webinar hosting process.
- Live Streaming specialists: Companies like Restream and Streamyard niched down in the simultaneous live-stream experience, offering software that allows companies to easily embed live streams in their own pages and social channels like Facebook and LinkedIn, but especially geared to streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube Live.
- Entry of Video Hosting Companies: Video-native companies with deep expertise in online video infrastructure like Vimeo and Wistia are now entering the webinar market. Their strategy hinges on integrating webinars with their all-in-one video hosting and editing capabilities, aiming to offer customers more control over the video, higher-quality visuals, and the ability to use webinars more effectively as marketing tools thanks to deeper back-end integrations with marketing technology.
This is, roughly, where the market stands today.
Competitive overview
Product acceptance
When looking at the competitive cohort through the lens of prominent online review sites, Wistia emerges as the best-rated all-around product. However, the picture changes when only nine webinar-specific metrics and ratings are considered.
The reviews underscore the importance of in-video engagement and event analytics for standing out.
Here are the rankings for the overall product.
Here are the same rankings shown when averaging scores given on G2 for the webinar product only.
While the rankings remain consistent for the other peers, Wistia drops in the webinar-specific metrics.
It is true that Surveys & Polls is one of the metrics. Wistia only launched the feature for webinars in December 2023, and so there was no score for this feature in the Wistia column. However, the webinar score we calculated is an average across the nine metrics and so does not unduly penalize Wistia for the feature gap.
Instead, the difference between Wistia and its higher-ranked competitors is in the ratings for in-video interactions, specifically chat, and webinar analytics (see chart, below). Again, Wistia improved Q&A and chat in an April 2023 release, and this is not fully captured in these reviews. But the market is clearly expressing the importance of these two dimensions in boosting product acceptance.
Finally, users rate the ability to brand videos on Wistia with a score that closely tracks the average for the competitive cohort, which means there may be room for improvement in this dimension.
Commercial strength
We collected a few data points in seeking to build an indicator of where each competitor stands in terms of commercial and financial traction. These included, where available, number of customers, number of employees on LinkedIn, funding and revenue, and number of live sites using the technology detected by Builtwith. The last proved extremely noisy, and was left out of the resulting indicator, but the numbers are included for reference.
While imperfect, in tandem these data points offer a fair sketch of overall momentum. However, it makes no sense to compare companies that are stand-alone virtual-event software products to those that offer a portfolio of products, with webinars being just one among them. So the below analysis will focus only on Airmeet, Brandlive, Livestorm, ON24 and Crowdcast.
Competitive quadrant
Combining webinar-specific reviews with commercial traction, we can begin to see how a few of the webinar-focused competitors stack up across a couple of dimensions.
*Crowdcast score is shown for the overall product across several sites, others are for webinar-specific product scores on G2 only
Other competitors Two companies that offer comprehensive virtual-event platforms also are worth watching. BigMarker, founded in 2011, and Goldcast are highly rated across review sites and boast significant logos as customers.
BigMarker has a good amount of market presence, with customers including Webflow and Figma. Goldcast, a Series A-stage company, is more of an up-and-comer but count investors well-known in the marketing and tech worlds, including Scott Belsky, Adobe’s chief product officer, Andrew Wilkinson of Tiny, and Lenny Rachitsky, former product leader of AirBnB who is well-known for his product-management newsletter.
Crowdcast, while making some noise in the market, is a 12-person Oakland, Calif-based seed-stage company. While worth keeping an eye on, it is not a market leader or contender as of yet.
Conclusion: Webinar leaders to watch
Livestorm, Airmeet, and Zoom emerge as product leaders when looking specifically at products that have zeroed in tightly on enabling webinar experiences. Vimeo is of interest considering its parallel roots in video hosting.
In the case of Zoom, it’s notable that as a large company with a focus on video meetings they have gained a significant measure of product acceptance and positive customer sentiment around their webinar solution. Airmeet and Livestorm, companies specializing in live events that were founded in 2019 and 2016 respectively, also are generally reviewed higher than the rest of the competitive set.
Companies in the virtual-event bucket, including ON24 on which more data is available given it is publicly-traded, have sought to innovate in the area of event interactivity and post-event content generation. There are likely discrete lessons to be learned and feature ideas to be gleaned from this set of companies with ON24 as the core case study.
Competitive themes to explore further
- Gen AI content generation: As mentioned, the quick rollout of gen AI-aided post-event content creation tools, a closer look at these is warranted. Also: concretely, how do these tools tie in with audience analytics and other data and mesh with MAPs and other marketing-engine infrastructure.
- Post-pandemic commercial resilience: Many of the “full-service” virtual-event platforms, including ON24, have seen pullbacks in customer traction and commercial success post-pandemic, after noticeable run-ups in revenue and customers in the 2020 and 2021 calendar years. Livestorm and Airmeet, focused more on the webinar use case, have shown signs of continued growth. This contrast may be a sign of the webinar category’s popularity post-pandemic (as opposed to the fading of large virtual events). But for this reason as well it may prove worthwhile to explore Livestorm and Airmeet’s 2022 product profile performance more closely.
- API richness with regards to webinar data and actions are an area where webinar and live-event specialists such as Airmeet may have an edge over broader “all-in-one” products with less made available in terms of webinar-related endpoints. Among other product-depth “spikes,” API breadth and functionality is a promising area.
- In-event mechanics are another area where there is product-release velocity among competitors and differences in overall offerings. Here, backstage interactions and live in-meeting mechanics are of interest. Also worth a glance: live-stream companies’ (e.g. Restream) borrowings from the world of video-game live streams and YouTube live culture.
- Revenue-per-customer and monetization potential: The fact that virtual-event focused ON24 is a public company — albeit tilted toward enterprise customers and sizable virtual events — allows for more detailed exploration for insights into cost and revenue trends for a webinar-like product. This includes upper bounds in implied pricing and monetization potential for webinar products.
