Webinar Statistics 2026: Attendance and Conversion Data

Registration and Attendance Rates

Across the platforms that published 2025 data, between about 40% and 48% of registrants attended live. Goldcast measured a 40% average attendance rate across 26,190 webinars, up from 33% in 2024. Wistia put live attendance at about 40%, and Livestorm’s 33,786 sessions averaged a 47.7% show-up rate, slightly below 48.9% in 2024. Univid’s live rate, over January 2023 to August 2026, is 49%.

ON24 reports a higher figure, 60%, but its attendee counts include people who watched on demand. Univid’s and Contrast’s rates for live and on-demand viewing combined (57% and 61%) sit closer to ON24’s. When you compare your own numbers, compare a live rate with a live rate and a total with a total.

How Big Webinar Audiences Are

Average audiences differ widely by platform: ON24 averaged 239 attendees per webinar in 2025, Goldcast 102 and Livestorm 83 live attendees, and Univid 102 live attendees over 2023 to 2026. A few very large events pull averages up. On Univid, 71% of webinars had fewer than 100 live attendees, and Contrast’s average webinar drew 128 registrants while its top tenth drew 288 or more. Bigger audiences attend at lower rates: Contrast webinars with more than 1,000 registrants averaged 37% live attendance, against 44% for those with 100 to 1,000.

Live vs On-Demand Viewing

Live viewing still outweighs replay on each platform checked here that publishes the split. In ON24’s 2025 data, 67% of attendees joined live and 43% watched on demand, and ON24 says the on-demand share has risen by about 1% a year since 2022. On Goldcast, on-demand viewers made up 15.9% of total viewership; Contrast puts on-demand at 42% of views, down from 47% the year before.

Replays still add reach. Goldcast made 89.1% of its 2025 webinars available on demand, and on-demand viewers completed 91% of the recording against 74% for live attendees. Livestorm found that 31% of no-shows later watched the recording, and that public replays drew 14.60 views per session against 3.97 for replays restricted to registrants. A third of Wistia-hosted webinars were still being played three months after the event.

Industry-Specific Benchmarks

Few platforms publish industry cuts. ON24’s 2026 industry editions give 271 average attendees for manufacturing webinars, 260 for professional services and 190 for technology, with registration-to-attendee rates of 53% for manufacturing and 51% for technology. Goldcast publishes average length and the best-attended time slot by industry: finance webinars ran 74 minutes on average, and manufacturing reached a 63% attendance rate on Fridays between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. ET. Goldcast notes that the per-slot samples are small, so treat them as slots to test.

Conversion and Pipeline Measurement

None of the webinar platforms or surveys checked for this page publishes a rate from attendee to qualified lead, opportunity or revenue. The conversion rates the platforms do publish stop at the webinar itself. ON24’s professional-services customers turned 45% of visitors to personalized landing pages into registrants in 2025, against 36% on standard pages, and ON24 counts 60% of registrants as attendees once on-demand viewers are included. Across Univid webinars with a call to action, 22% of attendees clicked it, rising to 29% for afternoon webinars and 33% when polls, reactions, chat and Q&A were all switched on. ON24 reports demo bookings up 73% in 2025 and four times as many meetings booked during webinars, but gives no conversion rate.

Measurement explains the gap. In Contrast’s survey of 524 B2B marketers, 39% track leads as their main webinar metric, while 17% track pipeline influence and 12% revenue. In TwentyThree’s 2026 survey, 87% measure attendees and 29% sales or revenue, and 49% have their webinar tool integrated with a CRM or marketing automation platform. Connecting webinar engagement to CRM records is the work of our CRM automation team; for funnel benchmarks across channels, see our conversion rate benchmarks.

Webinar Length and Watch Time

The 60-minute webinar remains the default. Goldcast’s median webinar ran 60 minutes in 2025, with 50.5% of webinars at exactly an hour, and 37% of Univid webinars were 60 minutes long. Shorter formats are growing slowly: webinars of 30 minutes or less made up more than 18% of Goldcast’s total.

Attendees watch less than the full slot. Livestorm’s viewers stayed 26 minutes on average, 38% of a 68-minute webinar, and Contrast sees engagement start to fall around minute 22. ON24’s average engagement time is longer, at 49 minutes. Longer webinars did not lose attendance: Contrast’s 90-minute webinars had a 67% live attendance rate against 44% for 30-minute ones, and Univid’s 60-minute webinars had the highest total attendance, at 62%.

Best Day and Time to Run a Webinar

There is no single best day. Each platform’s data points somewhere different: Monday had the highest attendance rate on Goldcast in 2025 (47.2%) and on Contrast (53.26%, on fewer registrations), Tuesday on Livestorm (51.7%, just ahead of Monday’s 51.5%), Wednesday on Univid (51%) and Thursday on TwentyThree (64%). The margins are often small, and the busiest days are not the best attended: Wednesday and Thursday hosted about 61% of Goldcast webinars but had its lowest weekday attendance rates.

Start times show the same spread. Contrast’s best-attended start time was 2 p.m., mostly CET (55%), Univid’s 3 p.m. local time (58.3%), and noon ET was Goldcast’s busiest start hour. Test two slots with your own audience before settling on one.

Registration Timing and Promotion

Most people register late. Livestorm found that 49.6% of 2025 registrations came in the final week and 15.3% on the day of the webinar; Contrast reports 49% in the final week and 14% on the day. Keeping registration open until the start and concentrating reminders in the last week matter more than an early launch.

Email led Livestorm’s 2026 promotion-channel findings at 86%, ahead of organic social at 43% and paid ads at 20%. In Contrast’s survey, social posts were the most used promotion channel (94%), but 91% of B2B SaaS marketers named email as the channel that brings the best-quality leads. In TwentyThree’s survey, 75% expect to spend most of their webinar budget on promotion, against 53% on creating content. Series titles did slightly better: Goldcast webinars with “series” in the title averaged 42.1% attendance, against 40.1% overall. For paid promotion, see our paid media work.

Formats and In-Session Engagement

Most webinars are live: 77.7% on Goldcast and 91% on Contrast, though pre-recorded sessions rose to 21.5% of Goldcast webinars in 2025. Chat and Q&A were the most used engagement features on Goldcast, and live reactions on Univid; polls are used far less, in 19% of Goldcast webinars, 40% of Univid’s and 46% of Contrast’s. On ON24, poll responses were the most common interaction in 2025, averaging 150 per webinar, and attendees averaged 1.8 interactions each.

Budgets, Cadence and Repurposing

Webinar budgets are small for most companies. In Wistia’s survey of 900+ professionals, 43% of companies spent under $1,000 on webinars in all of 2025 and 9% spent $30,000 or more. Most of TwentyThree’s respondents expect budgets to stay the same (55%) or rise (25%); for B2B events more broadly, Forrester found budgets flat or down for two-thirds of event teams for a second year.

Volume is rising. Goldcast customers ran 4.7 webinars a month in 2025, up from 3.9 in 2024, and 45% of TwentyThree’s respondents ran more webinars than the year before. Repurposing is routine: 68% of TwentyThree’s respondents turn webinars into other content, and 97.8% of the clips made in Goldcast’s Content Lab in 2025 were generated by AI. In CMI’s survey of 1,015 B2B marketers, 52% named speaking events and webinars as one of the most effective channels for thought leadership, third after LinkedIn and email newsletters. For wider context, see our B2B marketing statistics and lead generation statistics.

Platforms, Capacity and Market Changes

The webinar market consolidated in 2026. Cvent agreed to buy ON24 for $8.10 a share, about $400 million in total, and completed the deal on April 1, 2026. ON24’s last annual results as a listed company showed 2025 revenue of $139.3 million, down from $148.1 million in 2024. Zoom reported total revenue of $4,868.8 million for the year to January 2026, up 4.4%, but does not break out webinars.

Platform limits sit far above typical audiences. Zoom Webinars scale to 1 million attendees with an expanded single-use license, and Microsoft Teams events take 1,000 attendees with full interaction, 10,000 in view-only mode, or 100,000 with an add-on license.

How to Use These Benchmarks

Compare like with like: live attendance with live attendance, and averages with averages. A 45% live show-up rate is above Goldcast’s and Wistia’s 2025 averages, close to Livestorm’s 47.7% and inside Contrast’s 44–50% range. ON24’s 60% includes on-demand viewers and TwentyThree does not define its 58%, so neither is a like-for-like comparison. Platform users also differ: Univid’s data are mostly European, and each platform’s customer base differs in company size and industry mix.

Then track what the benchmarks cannot show: how many attendees become qualified leads, opportunities and revenue in your own CRM. For benchmarks for software companies, see our SaaS marketing statistics.

Widely Quoted Figures, Checked

Several webinar statistics circulate without a source, or with a source that says something different. Each one below is checked against the publishers’ own pages.

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from one of the sources below.