European Summit interview with Andreas Bischoff
Posted by Paffg in the Interviews, section.
Share some details about the next European Summit and why everyone should attend.
The next The European Summit will take place from March 5th until March 8th, 2012 in the beautiful Spanish city of Barcelona. Reasons for attending there are many, and everyone has a different motivation: Web designer, hosting companies, payment provider, legal companies, telco companies, bad dept collection services and the like are looking to close deals with the present affiliate programs. Affiliate programs are presenting their new products to exisiting and potential affiliates, and are buying traffic. The affiliates are interested in new products and affiliate programs to promote, and to mingle and exchange ideas and opinions with the other affiliates. And when you work all year around in front of a computer, people love to take the chance and socialize and have fun with their industry colleagues.
Every year your conferences seem to get bigger. Tell us how the first one got started.
I had not been going to “Adult Online” conferences for a few years. When I started going to those events again in October 2008, most of my former business friends told me that they were missing a “truly international conference in Europe with new faces and a higher participation of affiliates and webmasters”. So I thought about it, and as I had always worked internationally, I did not see the problem to organize a truly international conference in Europe. So in February 2009 I just started to invite all my business friends from around the world to meet me for what was called back then “The Barcelona Summit”. 306 people from 27 countries suprisingly showed up. That was in June 2009 – only 4 months after we started with the promotion. After the event I asked the participants how they liked the event, and if we should repeat it, or if we should keep it a one-time thing. After receiving an overwhelming amount of positive response, I decided to plan another one. And then another one… And that is how we got where we are today: Being one of the two largest events in our Industry worldwide. We will continue doing events as long as the Industry enjoys our conferences and supports us.
The online adult industry has changed plenty in the past 5 years, give us your thoughts on the current state of the industry and how you think the future will look like.
I think the Industry had a – self-produced – hard time the past 5 year. We all know that tube sites and free cam sites made the overall market size shrink. More and more people give more and more things away for free, so the Industry educated the end user that “porn on the Internet is for free”. Which does not help anyone. But those are the facts. And they will not change. I think the Industry has been shrinking over the past 5 years to the size it has today. That is the bad news. The good news is: I do not expect the Industry to shrink much more. I think the bottom has nearly be reached and I expect the next couple of years to be quite “stable”. So companies which have manage to survive until today, I expect to survive also the next years. So, as I said, that is good news, I guess.
Tell us about the online dating summit and why you think this is an event that is important enough to be on it’s own.
Basically because the target groups of the 2 events (European Summit vs. Online Dating Summit) have little to do with each other. The Online Dating Summit is a show for mainstream and casual Online Dating Companies with no or a very limited amount of companies from the “adult online industry”. The European Summit in contrary is a show nearly exclusively dedicated to the “adult online industry”.
Since you let affiliates go for free, are you noticing more affiliates attending the events?
Definitely yes. It is not that good affiliates do not have the 279 Euro to get into the event as a paying participants, it is rather that the free affiliate passes are a sign for affiliates saying “Look, you are welcome at this conference. This conference also caters to the interests and needs of the affiliate – not only to the CEOs of the big companies”. Currently about 30% of our clients hold free affiliate passes, and the other 70% corporate (paying) passes. At the last conference in Prague we had over 200 (!!!) affiliates. Which was a great success, as everyone keeps on telling me “that it is impossible to bring affiliates and webmasters to a conference nowadays”. So we did prove a lot of people wrong here.
More information:
www.onlinedatingsummit.com
02-05 March 2012
Hotel Miramar, Barcelona, Spain
The leading B2B and Affiliate Conference for the Online Dating Industry.
www.theeuropeansummit.com
05-08 March 2012
Hotel Miramar, Barcelona, Spain
Europe’s leading B2B and Affiliate Conference for the Online Entertainment Industries with over 700 attendees from over 50 countries world wide.
Contact info:
Andreas Bischoff
andreas@onlinedatingsummit.com
andreas@theeuropeansummit.com
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