Insight: Free is the way...
Sunday, June 10, 2012
To everybody who has just returned from the EAGE in Copenhagen, I hope you enjoyed yourselves, especially considering how much it cost you and your company:
By David Bamford, OilEdge
So, you took what, 4 days away from the office? Call that a week and let’s divide the typical built up cost of a FTE of 200-250,000 Euros (do we still have them!) by 50 to get a cost of 4-5,000 plus your hotel and travel – hmm, another 1000 at least – plus registration, somewhere between 500 and 750 depending on your timing. So let’s agree on ~ €7000 in total?
Of course if your company wanted to exhibit; well, my brain isn’t agile enough to figure it all out but I did hear that one well-known oil field services contractor figured that all-up it was going to spend ~$800,000 on the EAGE in Barcelona, and decided to give it a miss!
And apart from having a ‘good time’ what do you expect to get out of it that you couldn’t find by browsing companies’ web-sites where all their papers, products and services appear anyway, and for free?
Before I go any further, I should say that I don’t mean this as an attack on the EAGE. There are plenty of other entities, noticeably commercial companies, that charge amounts getting well into four figures – in €, £ or $ - to attend one of their events.
My point is, to repeat:
We are increasing living in a world where you can download more or less anything, certainly more or less anything that conference presenters and exhibitors are willing to stand up and talk about and put on a slide, for free, more or less instantly – well, if you have decent broadband that is. And from the comfort of your own desk or study at home – without having to fight your way through LHR, ABZ or IAH!
As the author of this article in the Telegraph points out “All sorts of things we used to pay large sums of money for are now nearly or completely free.”
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