- Startup City Brands & Highways
- Mobility and Interconnectivity
- Ideas & Narratives Shape the Startup Scene
- Startup Highways are Redefining Location
- Startup Highways Part II
- Startup Highways Part III
- Startup Highways Part IV
- Case Study Riga (Sponsored)
- City Rankings
- Accelerator Rankings
- Conference Rankings
- Conclusions
The Brand Power of Startup Conferences
Startup City brands live from the prominence of actors within their ecosystems and besides accelerators conferences are a strong source of brand power and reach.
We have asked members of the tech communities around Europe about their opinion on tech conferences, deriving a list of the strongest brands in the startup event space.
Are Conferences Overrated?
There is a never-ending discussion about the value conferences bring to the startup scene. We cannot end this discussion but offer a unique perspective, which speaks to several functions conferences could fulfill for a functioning European ecosystem:
- Conferences enable transnational personal connections, which are hard to build over email or Linkedin alone
- Conferences set the agenda for the startup scene and help actors across borders align their activities
- Conferences give orientation by celebrating personalities and organizations in certain locations boosting flows to these hubs
On a more critical note, tech conferences have to ask themselves if they already fulfill these functions to a satisfying extent. Are conferences really succeeding in bringing together international ecosystems or do they mostly pretend to do so? Are conferences setting unique topics or is their content outdated and irrelevant? Are the people coming to conferences genuinely pushing the boundaries or is stage time only given to the highest bidder?
We cannot answer all of these points, but analyzing the social media reach of 38 – by our judgement – biggest conferences, yielded some insights to consider.
How International are Conferences?
The average number of international followers on facebook for the 38 leading tech conferences in Europe is 40% (after eliminating countries that are likely to be fake followers).
However, when looking at how many countries they effectively reach, (i.e. where the conference reaches a minimum threshold of 3% of its total non-spam followers) the data shows that most of the leading conferences bring together participants from only 3-4 countries. It can be said that despite being part of the leading European tech conferences many of them remain quite regional. For example Latitude59 in Estonia gathers 63% of their followers in their home country, while 5% come from Latvia, another 5% from the US and 4% from Finland. And even though the conference has followers from more than 30 other countries, each country represents less than 3% of the total followers, indicating that there might be participants from these countries, but there is not a strong connection between the ecosystems.
Another pattern is shown by the SouthSummit in Madrid, which has 68% of their followers in Spain but also a significant reach in South American countries like Colombia (10%) and Mexico (4%) as well as Portugal (3%), showing that it is strong in connecting the European and LATAM ecosystems more effectively than for example the Southern European countries.
Only 10 of 38 conferences reach more than 5 countries effectively. The list is headed by the Europas with 12 and Pioneers with 10 countries. Unfortunately, the latter has announced to discontinue their flagship event in Vienna in 2020.
FinTech or Women in Tech - Do Conferences set topics?
To understand whether conferences are actively trying to set an agenda, we analyzed the topics mentioned in >24,000 tweets send out by them and their followers. While the average percentage of mentions is highest in the same sectors we see much more divergence within singular conferences. This seems to be in contrast to the topic setting of tech blogs and local meetups we analyzed earlier and could be a potential indicator that conferences are indeed trying to function as agenda setters and gather stakeholder around future trends.
Remarkably, the tweets around London Tech Week mention FinTech topics only in 16% of times, while a staggering 60% of tweets contain references to female entrepreneurship. Overall, 11 conferences can be found that put a high-focus on women in tech. To list just a few: The Global Entrepreneurship Summit (46%), TechChill in Riga (21%), Heureka in Berlin (21%) and WebSummit in Lisbon (19%).
The FinTech debate is hot at Pirate Summit in Cologne, that organizes also an Insurtech event, with 51% of tweets on this matter, as well as at Slush in Helsinki (32%), at InfoShare in Gdansk (28%) and Wolves Summit in Warsaw (29%).
We can therefore definitely detect some active agenda setting attempts by conferences that do not follow general trends in the news.
Top 20 Tech Conference Brands in Europe
The question of how effective conferences are in topic setting is definitely connected to their brand power. To offer another glimpse on the popularity of startup conferences, we asked the members of the European tech community including founders, investors, tech talent and community builders, to name up to 3 conferences they would recommend to a new startup founder.
| 1 | WebSummit | 30.74% |
| 2 | Slush | 25.95% |
| 3 | London Tech Week | 19.49% |
| 4 | Viva Technology | 12.74% |
| 5 | Pioneers* | 12.69% |
| 6 | Mobile World Congress | 11.72% |
| 7 | CEBIT* | 9.12% |
| 8 | NOAH Conference | 9.06% |
| 9 | StartupFest Europe | 9.04% |
| 10 | Lisbon Investment Summit | 9.01% |
| 11 | TNW Conference | 8.98% |
| 12 | PIRATE Summit | 8.87% |
| 13 | Bits&Pretzels | 8.70% |
| 14 | Entrepreneurship Summit | 8.65% |
| 15 | NEXT Conference | 8.12% |
| 16 | 4FYN | 6.64% |
| 17 | Nordic Startup Conference | 6.38% |
| 18 | Wolves Summit | 5.94% |
| 19 | DLD Conference | 5.46% |
| 20 | TechOpenAir | 5.20% |
*Pioneers and CEBIT are discontinued, but were nevertheless mentioned by a large amount of survey takers, showing that their brand still is recognized
Regional Champions
| 1 | WebSummit | 29.07% |
| 2 | Viva Technology | 24.40% |
| 3 | Slush | 24.21% |
| 4 | Bits& Pretzels | 21.73% |
| 5 | NOAH Conference | 19.83% |
| 6 | PIRATE Summit | 13.78% |
| 7 | London Tech Week | 11.83% |
| 8 | CEBIT | 10.01% |
| 9 | Lisbon Investment Summit | 9.77% |
| 10 | NEXT Conference | 9.75% |
| 1 | London Tech Week | 40.89% |
| 2 | WebSummit | 32.28% |
| 3 | Entrepreneurship Summit | 17.36% |
| 4 | Slush | 16.50% |
| 5 | TNW Conference | 11.05% |
| 6 | StartupFest Europe | 9.47% |
| 7 | Pioneers | 7.89% |
| 8 | Newcastle Startup Week | 7.89% |
| 9 | Mobile World Congress | 7.03% |
| 10 | TechOpenAir | 7.03% |
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| 1 | WebSummit | 31.14% |
| 2 | Slush | 24.48% |
| 3 | Pioneers | 20.82% |
| 4 | Wolves Summit | 17.90% |
| 5 | London Tech Week | 15.81% |
| 6 | infoShare | 14.30% |
| 7 | StartupFest Europe | 13.06% |
| 8 | Lisbon Investment Summit | 10.21% |
| 9 | Entrepreneurship Summit | 9.64% |
| 10 | Nordic Startup Conference | 8.71% |
| 1 | TNW Conference | 43.95% |
| 2 | London Tech Week | 29.38% |
| 3 | Slush | 27.64% |
| 4 | StartupFest Europe | 23.76% |
| 5 | WebSummit | 22.10% |
| 6 | NEXT Conference | 18.38% |
| 7 | CEBIT | 16.64% |
| 8 | Entrepreneurship Summit | 16.55% |
| 9 | Mobile World Congress | 14.65% |
| 10 | PIRATE Summit | 12.99% |
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| 1 | Slush | 51.04% |
| 2 | London Tech Week | 18.74% |
| 3 | Arctic15 | 18.74% |
| 4 | Latitude59 | 14.99% |
| 5 | TechChill | 13.73% |
| 6 | Nordic Startup Conference | 12.89% |
| 7 | TechBBQ | 12.80% |
| 8 | CEBIT | 11.86% |
| 9 | WebSummit | 9.77% |
| 10 | TechOpenAir | 7.06% |
| 1 | WebSummit | 37.56% |
| 2 | Slush | 24.46% |
| 3 | London Tech Week | 22.47% |
| 4 | Mobile World Congress | 21.35% |
| 5 | 4FYN | 19.53% |
| 6 | Pioneers | 17.11% |
| 7 | South Summit | 15.50% |
| 8 | Viva Technology | 13.84% |
| 9 | CEBIT | 11.97% |
| 10 | Lisbon Investment Summit | 10.59% |
The divergence between the regions is considerably smaller than with accelerators, showing the success of quite a few conference brands to build European wide awareness. Nevertheless, the regional rankings are dynamic and not dominated by WebSummit or Slush. We again see regionally strong players like TNW Conference in Amsterdam leading the Benelux ranking with 44% or Wolves Summit in Poland coming in at 18% of CEE. Arctic15 is on par with London Tech Week in the Nordics & Baltics and Munich-based Bits&Pretzels is in close quarters with Slush and Viva Technology in Western Europe.