# Conferences vs. side events

Main conference organizers see side events as parasites.

Side event hosts see main conferences as irrelevant.

Both are wrong, but it's not their fault.

This is a system problem. And it doesn't have to be this way.

## The mistake

In 2021 I went to Bitcoin Miami. I did everything "right." Bought my ticket early, blocked my calendar, showed up to the main stage presentations with notebook in hand.

By day two, I realized I'd made a mistake.

My colleagues—the ones who skipped the official program entirely—were having a completely different experience. While I sat in empty rooms listening to disengaged panels, they were at private dinners and product launches. They were building actual relationships, not wandering around trying to stumble their way into good connections. They met 10x the people, learned 10x as much, and had 10x more fun.

This isn't some novel strategy. It's an inside joke in the conference circuit: nobody actually buys tickets to the main event anymore. The smart money goes straight to the side event calendar.

## The scale of the shadow conference

At Sero, we maintain a list of every event in web3. We track every hackathon, summit, side event, and soiree and the scale is staggering:

→ETH Denver: 600+ side events
→Token 2049 Singapore: 700+ side events
→DevCon: Nearly 900 events by week's end

Nine. Hundred. Events. One week!

As a conference organizer how can you deliver a good experience to either your attendees or your speakers when you're competing with 900 other events for mindshare?

As a speaker, it's demoralizing. As an organizer, it's worse—you've promised speakers an audience, sold sponsors on reach, rented massive venues. And you're delivering ghost towns.

It's easy to blame the side events but the simple fact is they're failing too.

## The 10% problem

Side event hosts are drowning in their own volume. Unless you're running a name brand event, most hosts are lucky to see 15% attendance. Knowing that, what can you do? There's nothing worse than hosting for an empty room so you approve more people to try to bump up your attendance. Now the attendance rate drops to 10%.

Your happy hour venue can hold 200 people. You approve 500. 50 show up.

Why? Because attendees are playing RSVP roulette. With 900 events to choose from and no real cost to signing up, they blast out RSVPs like confetti. Eight events in the same time slot? Why not RSVP to all of them and figure it out later. After all, it's best to keep your options open.

When every event, side or main, is operating in a vacuum there's no accountability. No data persistence. And no way to predict who's actually coming.

## Why control fails

This system is poorly designed on all sides and everyone knows it. Major conference organizers are trying to minimize the pain but they can only do so much. With the tools they have, the only natural reaction is to try and limit the side event sprawl. We're seeing this play out in a few ways:

Option 1: Ignore side events. Pretend they don't exist. Try to keep attendees from ever venturing outside the building where you lose control of their experience.

Option 2: Try the "official calendar" approach. Only list side events that don't conflict with the main programming. This works until someone launches an alternative calendar (and they always will). When attendees have to choose between a comprehensive list and a censored one, they'll pick comprehensive every time.

Option 3: Build a fortress and lock the gates. EthCC took this approach this year. They moved from Paris to Cannes and worked with every casino, beach club, restaurant, and bars they could find to route all venue requests through them. If you wanted to host anything more significant than a dinner, you had to talk to them first.

It's not a terrible strategy but it only works if you're hosting in a small beach town and even then, you can only do so much. Good luck trying to convince every bar owner from turning away customers unless you've approved them in advance.

The fundamental issue that these approaches miss is when you bring thousands of ambitious people together in one city, someone will always try to coopt that density for themselves. It's not something that you can legislate away. You cannot fight network effects with control tactics.

## The blind spot

While organizers fight this war of attrition, they're missing the real tragedy: they're operating completely blind to their own ecosystems.

Think about what you know as an event organizer of any size. You know ticket sales. You know registrations. Maybe session attendance if you're sophisticated.

But what about the data from the other 900 events?

Organizers have no idea:

→Who the major sponsors are
→Which topics are actually drawing crowds
→How many people even flew in

This is data that directly impacts their ability to program, price, attract sponsors, and sell tickets. And it's happening right under their nose, completely invisible.

The sponsor problem is especially bad. Right now, you walk into sponsor meetings with one data point: "We sold 5,000 tickets."

But what if you could say: "We're bringing 50,000 people to the city. Here's what they're interested in. Here's when they meet up. Here are the products they use. Here's who they follow on X. Here's how you can be part of that entire ecosystem, not just our tent."

Which pitch wins the budget?

## The real problem

This isn't a competition problem or even a scale problem—it's a systems design problem.

Conference organizers optimize for ticket sales and venue control. Side event hosts optimize for attendance and networking value. Attendees optimize for connections and exclusive access. Sponsors optimize for reach and engagement.

Everyone is optimizing for different things, using different platforms, with zero shared intelligence.

Traditional ticketing platforms can't solve this because they're built for individual events, not ecosystems. Luma and Partiful are designed to sell tickets, not aggregate intelligence across hundreds of separate events. The infrastructure itself reinforces the misalignment.

This is exactly why we built Sero—infrastructure designed to support entire ecosystems, not just individual events. But the broader point isn't about our platform specifically. It's about the need for shared infrastructure that aligns incentives instead of putting them in conflict.

## Aligning the ecosystem

The ghost towns, the 10% attendance rates, the RSVP chaos—these aren't inevitable. They're the predictable result of a system that emerged from conflict instead of collaboration.

If instead, everyone uses infrastructure (like Sero) that is designed for ecosystem growth:

→Conference organizers get intelligence. They can see what's working across hundreds of events, program based on actual behavior, and sell sponsors on the full impact they're creating.
→Side event hosts get reliability. They can reduce no-show rates by understanding attendee behavior patterns and making informed decisions about capacity and timing.
→Sponsors get comprehensive data. They can measure engagement across the entire ecosystem, not just individual events, and invest where their audience actually spends time.
→Attendees get clarity. One calendar, complete visibility, and informed choices instead of RSVP roulette and FOMO-driven decisions.

Conferences are already competing with side events whether they acknowledge it or not. The question is whether the ecosystem they've created will thrive through cooperation or continue to cannibalize itself through competition.

The choice isn't between control and chaos. It's between systems designed for conflict and systems designed for collaboration.

I know which one we're building and I'm happy to talk if you want to join us.