I’d like to address the issue directly and clarify several things, as there are a lot of folks who have heard wrong information.

First, a bit of background …

In the past we have run single-stage events over one or two days. This year, we decided we needed to increase the value for attendees as much as possible, so we …

1. Doubled the number of speakers by adding an ‘Upcoming Stars’ track
2. Spent a ton of money on amazing food and snacks
3. Increased the wifi budget and provided 300 hard lines (the web connection was absolutely solid the entire show)
4. Introduced the ‘Design Clinics’ where attendees could have 1-on-1 five-minute sessions with the speakers
5. Doubled the audio-visual budget
6. Hired a proper film crew so attendees could re-watch all video, within 24 hours of the show

All of this ultimately doubled our budget from the previous year.

Paying Speakers …

We currently pay our Track One speakers £1000, cover the flight, hotel, transfers, food and hotel extras. We also pay for a chauffeur to pick them up at the airport and personally escort them to the hotel.

These are speakers who are big, established names in the industry who don’t need any more exposure. Therefore they need to be monetarily compensated for their time preparing their slides and the time away from the office. A lot of them simply won’t speak unless they’re compensated monetarily for their time and we understand that.

We could not afford to double the spend on speaking costs, so we decided to launch a second track where we would invite local speakers who were rising stars, but had not made a name for themselves. A lot of conferences have the same set of big-name speakers, without any new names being introduced. We thought it’d be cool to change that, while also giving attendees more choice of content.

It seemed like a great opportunity for people who wanted exposure to get their name out there and as they were local, they wouldn’t have any travel costs (or very small).

Anna Debenham

This morning Anna Debehnam tweeted this:

Gutted to have to pull out of speaking at FOWDNY. Just can’t afford the flights and accomodation. I’m sorry. It would have been amazing.

She wasn’t trying to start a fight – she was just saying she was sad she couldn’t speak. However, a bunch of people jumped to the conclusion that we don’t pay any of our speakers or take care of their travel and hotel.

Here’s what happened: As Anna was such a great speaker on Track Two at FOWD London, we said she’s more than welcome to speak again for us on Track Two in NYC (Track One was completely full) but in order to be consistent with other Track Two speakers, we wouldn’t be able to pay her flight and hotel. She said that was fine and tried to save the extra cash for the flight/hotel but was unable to do so.

In Summary …

There is a wide-spread belief that there is serious money to be made in the conference business. The truth is that very few events make a profit. We actually made a net loss on FOWD London this year.

We would, of course, pay Track Two speakers if the budget allowed it. But it does not, so the next best thing to do is give upcoming stars a chance to break into the spotlight while also offering more content and variety to attendees.

I hope this clarifies things a bit. We are doing the best we can to offer a ton of value to our attendees, take care of our speakers, encourage innovation on the web and make a small profit along the way.

Just wanted to let you know that I’m heading to Miami for our event The Future of Web Apps. If you’re in the area, hope you can make it!

We’ve got a killer lineup of companies speaking, including:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• FreshBooks
• Opera
• Mint.com
• Mozilla
• jQuery
• Reddit
• KISSmetrics

Topics include:

• HTML5
• Advanced JavaScript
• API’s
• Online marketing that works
• Funding strategies for startups
• Web app branding
• Functional languages
• Measuring your apps success
• How to build a successful web app business

Hope you can make it! Read more at The Future of Web Apps site.