Partially due to NAB management but ultimately because of the expense.

You would think NAB would WANT to keep long time exhibitors around. Smaller trade shows are mostly gone and NAB is sort of the last significant one standing in the US. The value of exhibiting at tradeshows has been questionable for a long time. Attendance is down more than a third (2019: 93K, 2024: 61K) Why get confrontational with your long time exhibitors? You’re really going to look at our 21 year history at the event and go ‘meh’?

But that’s what NAB did. (more details below)  It forced us to stop and consider what the value of doing the show really is and why we do it. I think we were doing it, in part, because ‘that’s what we always do’. And this forced us to actually look at the numbers and reconsider. The reality is the cost of a booth and related expenses are no longer worth it for us, especially since most of the people we talk to are existing customers.

So now they have two less exhibitors at a time when, for both technological and economic reasons, I think it’s likely they’re going to be struggling to increase the number of exhibitors in the coming years. I’ll still be at the show doing some meetings and, you know, having drinks, but we’re done having a booth. Carla is on a GalNGears panel as well.

There’s still value in the show for doing meetings and, I’m sure for some companies, i.e. hardware companies, there’s a positive ROI. But what we’ve seen over the years is that for small-medium sized software companies, the value is questionable. That’s why the Plugin Pavilion ceased to exist.

We first exhibited at NAB in 2001 and in 2003 I started the Plugin Pavilion, which was kind of a collective of plugin companies that joined together to get a larger space. Instead of a bunch of scattered 10x10s, we had a 20×30 space. NAB was supportive of this and encouraged it.

I think the last pavilion was in 2014 as most smaller software companies just weren’t seeing any ROI on exhibiting. However, Digital Anarchy and Revision Effects continued exhibiting together as we had since 2003. Because we’d been exhibiting so long, we’d get a decent booth space. This made the show marginally worth doing. We even exhibited in the post-pandemic years, which seemed to be appreciated by the NAB folks.

Things changed last year. Despite exhibiting together for 20 years, NAB management was suddenly ‘you can’t exhibit together’. What? To make matters worse, they refused to acknowledge that Revision Effects had exhibited those years… Every year you exhibit you get ‘points’ and these determine your booth location. By a quirk of accounting, since I ran the Plugin Pavilion, Digital Anarchy had all the points. The correct and fair thing to do would’ve been to split the points or recalculate the points for both companies. Especially since NAB itself encouraged the Plugin Pavilion. But no. So Revision got screwed and neither of us exhibited this year (2025). (Revision is showing some stuff in the Dell booth but neither of us have a booth)

There hasn’t been a positive ROI on exhibiting at NAB for at least a decade (for us). There are some soft metrics like having a space to do meetings and whatnot that made it worth it to us, particularly since we’d get a booth close to the front of the hall with at least some traffic. So we kept doing it, partially out of a sense of tradition as much as anything else. Even now it feels weird to say we’re not exhibiting. We’ve been doing it for a long, long time. But a 10×10, with all the expenses, runs about $12-15K. It’s just not worth it, especially if the booth is in the back of the hall or something.

So we’re moving on. As mentioned, I’ll be walking around the show. There is still value in NAB as a meeting place. But when you add up all the costs for exhibiting, booths are increasingly looking anachronistic.