•  52% of all registrations occur in the ten days before a scheduled webcast, with 15% registering on the day of the webcast.
• Given average registrant-to-attendee conversion ratios, 33% attended during the live webcast, while an additional 25% viewed the archived webcast.
• Webcasting is an effective and popular way to reach audiences year-round, including during holiday and summer months.
• The average viewership per webcast is 38 minutes

ON24 Webcast Center next-generation social webcasting

ON24’s open, next-generation webcasting application delivers social webcasting capabilities and enhanced interactivity. It enables our customers to create completely custom experiences for their audiences and to integrate applications developed by third-party developers. Combining advanced virtual event technology with a highly reliable and scalable platform for webcasting, ON24 delivers immersive, measurable solutions to more effectively engage audiences.

ON24 Webcast Center provides the necessary tools to build and deliver live and on-demand webcasts, with detailed reporting and analysis. Extend your reach by delivering webcasts to users on all platforms—your audience can access your content directly through the web, with no need for dial-in numbers or conference calls. The ON24 Webcast Center platform is offered in a SaaS model, enabling you to access the tools from any browser. The ON24 cloud webcasting platform remains the industry’s most reliable and secure solution for all your webcasting needs.

ON24 social webcasting features and benefits

•Powerful social media capabilities
•Highly customizable
•Reliable platform
•Enhanced communication and interaction with your audience
•Advanced measurement and performance tools
•New group chat feature to drive interactivity between presenters and attendees

Brand yourself through customized social webcasting
ON24 Webcast Center provides extensive customization of your virtual events. From branded audience consoles to custom registration pages and HTML emails, your events are designed to your specification and to strengthen your brand.

Social media engage your audience
Social media are critically important to online marketing and communications initiatives. By opening the Webcast Center platform to third-party components, the possibilities are limited only by your imagination. Social webcasting capabilities include Twitter, group chat, moderated Q&A and sharing tools.

Live video webcasts, on-demand training and podcasts
ON24 supports multiple platforms and media formats and a wide range of virtual events you can use to reach your audience. Live webcasts are automatically archived and can be leveraged as on-demand events, delivered to users as podcasts, or used as powerful rich media advertising content in your web and email marketing campaigns.

Performance-based engagement
ON24 leads the industry in reporting capabilities to help you measure the success of your events and capture the best leads. Easily track ROI of your lead campaigns, measure the effectiveness of your content and analyze the engagement level of your audience.

Presenters–take control
ON24’s unique Presentation Manager interface makes it easy to manage a successful event alone or in a geographically dispersed team. The streamlined interface runs in any browser, enables control to be shared among presenters, and allows you to dazzle your audience with video, audio, slides, Flash media, demos and web tours. You and your team can easily manage live Q&A, push polls and surveys to your audience and gather statistics in real time.

To read the press release click here.
To see it in action, check out ON24′s demo.

This comparison website has been assembled by a company named Publicare, an online marketing agency based out of Frankfurt Germany. Publicare has taken 22 web conferencing platforms and ranked them on a scale of 1-10, on various categories: User friendliness, Number and scope of features, Pricing/cost transparency, etc. In addition to a numbered ranking, Publicare posts comments about their testing of the product and provides links to the vendor website, or free trial. Publicare’s efforts have yielded a comprehensive, informed and useful comparison of platforms that can be of great benefit. First time users of Webinar technology will admire the overall ranking system to quickly identify various costs and strengths of platforms, while seasoned webinar jockeys can dig deeper to uncover specific features that may help determine future purchasing decisions.

We should point out that this comparison is aimed at the collaboration use-case of webinars – smaller, less structured environments where collaboration is key (note WebEx MeetMeNow 2.3 is tested, not WebEx Event Center; no distinction is called out between Live Meeting Standard or Professional for example). Our use of webinar technology – the “One to Many” model – therefore is not discussed or ranked. Furthermore, we feel it’s this focus on collaborative environments that has lead Publicare to not include some of the streaming platform providers who are doing business in the “One to Many” world, like ON24, Stream57 or TalkPoint. Finally, the creation and maintenance of this website is funded by affiliate partnerships – if a visitor visits one of the ranked platforms and happens to purchase the software, Publicare receives a small finders fee. Publicare is quick to stress that this financial support does not affect their rankings, but is simply a means to recover some of the cost.

Overall, this is a great comparison tool, and we are grateful to Publicare for their time and efforts. While the comparisons are not an exact match to our business model, they none the less provide valuable information and insight into an otherwise cluttered, and noisy marketplace. Take a look, enjoy, and let us know what you think.