Zoom Announces Support for up to One Million Webinar Attendees

• Zoom has announced it will now support up to one million attendees simultaneously.
• While political campaigns may have driven Zoom’s move, it may see various applications across different industries.

Zoom, the popular video communications platform, has announced that its webinar calls can simultaneously support up to one million participants. The announcement comes against the backdrop of Vice President Kamala Harris’ election campaign, where various political groups used the platform to host calls with hundreds of thousands of people to raise money. A few fundraising events included Win With Black Women, White Dudes for Harris, and White Women for Harris, some hosting up to 200,000 viewers.

Before this change, Zoom offered official support for up to 100,000 attendees. However, it announced support to a higher capacity to support the events such as those mentioned above.

Zoom now offers multiple tiers to accommodate various event sizes in addition to its monthly and annual webinar subscription options. As such, customers can choose from webinars with capacities of 10K, 50K, 100K, 250K, 500K, and 1 million attendees. However, these are single-use packages with support from Zoom’s Event Services team. Further, these packages are currently available only in the US.

In a statement, Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom, said, “Zoom’s expanded capacity webinar offering is revolutionizing the way organizations can seamlessly connect and engage with massive audiences.” She said, “Now event organizers have the flexibility and power to host truly interactive experiences on an unprecedented scale and the ability to purchase large single-use webinars.”

Although recently used for political campaigns, Zoom’s large-scale webinar packages may be used for massive enterprise, public sector, and entertainment events. For example, entertainers and celebrities can use these massive-capacity webinars to host fan meet-and-greets and other virtual events.

However, running a webinar for a massive audience doesn’t come cheap. Booking a one-time webinar for one million people costs $100,000. Comparatively, the cost of a webinar for 10,000 attendees is $9,000. This means the higher the capacity of attendees, the lower the cost. Besides these prices, the company offers various plans for single-use events, such as pay-per-event, pay-per-attendee, and pay-per-month.

These new packages and pricing plans can be a new revenue source for Zoom, whose shares tanked recently from $560 to $60 per share as more companies moved from virtual to in-office meetings post-pandemic.

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