Operator notes on webinar show-up rate.
Registration and the people who actually show up are two different topics. These notes are about the second one: what the attendance benchmarks really say and which of them are fabricated, why registrants don’t attend live, what the replay does to your numbers, and what US consent and calling rules require before anyone texts or phones a registrant.
The "40-45% Webinar Show-Up Rate" Benchmark Everyone Cites Is Fake
The only paid-traffic webinar show-up-rate benchmark on the open web launders a nonexistent "12,400 webinars analyzed by ON24, GoTo, and BrightTALK" study. Traced step by step, checked against what those three companies actually publish, and replaced with the sourced 21-36% range.
Why a Phone Call Beats a Reminder — and Why a Reminder Alone Won't Fix Your Show-Up Rate
A generic reminder call moved nothing in the largest field experiment ever run on this question (N=287,228). A call that got people to state a specific plan moved attendance by 4.1 percentage points among those reached. The difference is the micro-commitment, not the channel.