If you've been following any conference organisers at all, you'll know that we have a much tougher job than ever before and complain loudly. Tickets are more difficult to sell these days — not only because fewer people buy them, but also because they buy them much later.
Until a year ago my conferences were exempt from this trend, but starting with performance.now() 2025 ticket sales became a lot more difficult. perf 25 didn't sell out, not even close, and that was a first. It was the sponsors that pulled the conference through — thank you for that!
Now that we're at the half-way point for CSS Day 2026 I can say we're definitely behind CSS 2025, though the situation is not as disastrous as for perf 25. It's quite conceivable sales will become better — these last three weeks are already better than the previous seven, and there will be late sales, no matter what. Still, my (as-yet unexplained) immunity to industry trends is over.
There are several lessons to be drawn from this.
From 2022 to about a year ago my theory was that CSS Day and performance.now() are focused, specialised conferences, while most of the complaining conferences were general ones. It seemed logical to me: specialise, and you'll attract specialists who won't go to a general web conference, and your ticket sales will remain strong. Now I find that this theory is not necessarily correct.
This year I'm implementing a solution that I've been talking about for ages with other conference organisers: more expensive late tickets. As an example, currently CSS 26 tickets are €675, but on 14th of May, a month before the conference, that price will go up to €750. See it as a lateness tax. I'm planning something similar for perf 26, but probably even more aggressive with three tiers instead of two.
I'm not very worried about sales effects: the number of people for whom €750 is a serious financial issue but €675 is not is probably negligible compared to people who have the budget anyway but are just late. (Or these might be famous last words, we'll see.)
Still, in addition to the total sales there's also the issue of sales timing. Right now I do not dare to order a barista or captioning for CSS Day. Attendees tend to really like them, but strictly speaking they're luxuries. When ticket sales are as unpredictable as they are now I balk at spending the extra ~€9K they would cost, though. If sales pick up considerably (or I find sponsors) I'll do it, but there's a practical time limit as well.
From about a month before the conference it's no longer really possible to place an order, since my favourite captioners and baristas will have accepted other jobs. So it's not just about the size of the cash flow, but also about its timing. And that's what makes late ticket orders such a problem. It's quite possible that, in hindsight, I could have afforded a barista and captioning, but the ticket sales just came too late.
It's hard to find CSS Day sponsors. Fortunately that does not go for performance.now(): barista and captioning are already covered by sponsorship contracts — and it's possible that once more it's the sponsors, and not the ticket sales, that will pull the conference through.
The problem here should be obvious: more reliance on sponsors means they'll get a bigger say in the conference. My conferences don't do sponsored talks at all, and I hope that continues to be the case. The perf sponsors are a great bunch, and they're typically driven by the engineers in the company, not the marketing people. That helps. A lot. I don't see them trying to influence the schedule.
But ... well, I don't have to draw you a picture of what would happen if that changes.
One of the things I worry about is that whatever extinction event took out the US web conference circuit will also take place in Europe. But I'm not entirely sure what happened, so I'm not sure how to avoid it.
Fact is that there are WAY fewer web conferences in the US than there used to be. When I worked for the ILF I did some research for sponsorship purposes, and I found few survivors. In fact, this is how my first round of research on the Socials went:
The joke is, of course, that Smashing Conferences is a European organiser. And they don't do a 2026 US conference.
I heard two explanations for the extinction that sort-of make sense to me. First, Covid. In general, Americans are much more worried about diseases than Europeans, and where Europeans flocked back to the conference circuit in 2022, Americans did not; or not to the same degree, I'm not sure.
Second, even before Covid the US conferences had become over-reliant on sponsors (read: VCs), and they basically only treated topics the sponsors wanted to see treated. Nowadays that means a lot of AI, some AI for diversity, supported by a solid helping of AI. In contrast, my two conferences (28 speakers) will probably see a single talk about AI.
(A third factor could be Trump, but that only explains why non-Americans don't want to go to the US. It shouldn't affect internal US conferences, and the extinction took place well before 2025.)
I can't speak for the truth of these theories. The last time I was in the US was at Smashing New York 2024, and that seemed like a perfectly normal web conference with happy attendees and only a single talk about AI — but it was organised by Europeans, not Americans, so it's probably not representative.
Or is it? Is it the destiny of the Europeans to ride to the aid of our beleaguered American colleagues, for rescue or revenge? Or am I being overly dramatic and in love with my own words after my blogging break? Questions, questions...
For a while now I've been thinking about organising something performance-related in North America. I even did a little bit of work. But it all depends on how ticket sales go in the next few months. If they're bad I just don't dare to order (and pay for) anything.
The conference circuit is in a slump these days. That won't change as long as people don't buy tickets. And a good conference circuit is typically something that you start to miss only when it's too late.
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