A webinar is a scheduled online presentation delivered to an audience that has registered in advance, in which a small group of presenters speaks and everybody else participates through restricted channels: a text chat, a question queue, a poll. The word contracts "web" and "seminar". The format exists because the seminar had an obvious digital analogue, and because the sign-up sheet turned out to be the commercially valuable part of it. Registration converts an anonymous audience into a list of named individuals carrying job titles, company names and email addresses. That is why the webinar settled into business-to-business marketing rather than general broadcasting.

How a webinar is assembled

Three roles run the session. The host owns the event and controls recording, attendee promotion and the end of the broadcast. Panellists present, sharing camera, microphone and screen. Attendees are view-only, interacting through the question queue, chat and polls.

Capacity is sold in bands and is the primary pricing axis across the category. Standard Zoom Webinars subscriptions cover 500 to 10,000 attendees, extend to 100,000 with support approval, and reach 1 million through single-use licences, with up to 100 interactive video participants as panellists. List pricing in September 2026 starts around 79 dollars per licence per month at 500 attendees, billed annually.

The registration form is the conversion mechanism, and its length is a deliberate trade: each additional field raises the value of a captured record and lowers the number captured. Consent language sits on the same form, because the registrant agrees both to attend and to subsequent contact. What follows is automation. Newsletter platform beehiiv, which added native webinars on April 23, 2026, illustrates the standard sequence: up to five scheduled reminder emails, an automatic calendar invitation carrying the join link, capacity for 1,000 live attendees, and ticket sales in 10 currencies.

During the session the platform records telemetry rather than just video. Time in session, poll responses, questions submitted, resources downloaded and calls-to-action clicked are logged per attendee, often combined into a single engagement score, then pushed into a customer relationship management system. That export, not the broadcast, is what most marketing teams are buying.

Sessions of 30 to 60 minutes account for most webinars, and LinkedIn research across more than 13,000 business video advertisements found live streams and webinars performing best at 30 to 45 minutes.

From PlaceWare to a generic noun

The Oxford English Dictionary records the earliest known use of the word in 1997, in the trade publication DM News. The technology preceded it: Microsoft shipped NetMeeting with Internet Explorer 3.0 in May 1996, providing application sharing, chat and multi-user data conferencing. PlaceWare Auditorium, commercialised from Xerox PARC research around 1997, carried audiences of up to 1,000 with polls, private chat and presentation sharing, and is generally treated as the first dedicated product for the format. ActiveTouch launched WebEx Meeting Center in February 1999 and took the WebEx name that year.

Ownership of the word was contested and then abandoned. Eric R. Korb registered WEBinar in 1998 under United States Patent and Trademark Office serial number 75478683, a mark later assigned to InterCall. Learn.com filed for the lowercase form, serial number 78952304, on August 15, 2006, and that application was recorded as abandoned on August 9, 2007. The term has been generic since.

Consolidation followed. Microsoft acquired PlaceWare in 2003 and rebuilt it as Live Meeting, Citrix launched GoToWebinar in 2006, and Cisco bought WebEx in 2007. ON24, founded in 1998, moved from financial webcasting into marketing software and became the reference enterprise platform.

Then came the pandemic and a valuation cycle that has since unwound. ON24 revenue rose from 89.1 million dollars in 2019 to 156.9 million in 2020 and 203.6 million in 2021. The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange on February 3, 2021 at 50 dollars a share, closing its first session at 70.82 dollars and a valuation above 2.2 billion. Revenue for 2025 came in at 139.3 million dollars, down 5.9%, with 1,566 customers in June 2025 against more than 2,100 four years earlier.

What the benchmarks actually say

Two datasets published in 2026 describe the same year and disagree. ON24 reported an average of 239 attendees per webinar during 2025, up 11%, a registration-to-attendance conversion of 60%, and average engagement of 49 minutes, with on-demand viewing accounting for half of all attendees. Goldcast, analysing 26,190 webinars run by 522 business-to-business organisations in 2025, covering 6.8 million registrations and more than 2.2 million attendees, put the average attendance rate at 40%, up from 33% the previous year.

Twenty points separate those conversion figures. Neither is wrong: each measures one vendor's customer base, and enterprise programmes carrying paid promotion behave differently from the long tail. Blended compilations put median live attendance nearer 42%.

Interaction remains thin. Goldcast found polls used in 19% of sessions and resource links in 35.1%, placing most of the engagement scoring platforms sell on a narrow behavioural base. Recordings work harder: a Wistia survey found nearly nine in ten companies repurposing webinar recordings into clips, email content, blog posts and social graphics, with replays generating plays for up to 12 months and a third of webinars still drawing views three months after the live date.

Why the format matters to marketers

It is one of the last reliable ways to collect declared first-party data at scale. In Content Marketing Institute survey data, gated assets, webinars and interactive tools accounted for 68% of first-party data collection, behind only subscriptions and communities at 77%. As third-party identifiers decay, a form filled in voluntarily by a named buyer is worth more than an inferred segment.

Length of purchase cycle explains the rest. Dreamdata benchmarks covering more than 3.5 million journeys put the average business-to-business buying journey at 272 days, involving 10 stakeholders and 88 touchpoints. A 45-minute session attended by a named individual is an unusually dense touchpoint inside that span. LinkedIn's event playbook, published on July 23, 2026, assigns webinars a promotional runway of two to four weeks against up to six months for a flagship conference, and defines success narrowly as marketing qualified leads, cost per lead, and on-demand views with dwell time. A companion framework claims a strong webinar supplies leads for six to twelve months on demand.

That durability is the argument against pure paid media. B2B Institute research published in December 2025 contrasted "rented prominence" with "owned prominence" built from assets an organisation keeps, and a webinar sits across that line: the promotion is rented, the recording owned. Platforms have chased the owned half. LinkedIn's April 28, 2026 overhaul of event advertising added off-platform event ads, embedded lead generation forms and event clipping.

Limitations and disputes

The attendance number is the weakest link. Vendors publish conversion rates drawn from their own platforms, and no neutral body audits webinar attendance the way the Media Rating Council accredits advertising measurement. Planning assumptions rest on marketing collateral.

What a registration is worth is contested too. The marketing qualified lead, the unit a webinar is usually judged by, is under sustained attack: Intentsify launched a product in August 2026 designed to move revenue teams beyond the metrictoward buying-group context, arguing that a single named attendee misrepresents a decision made by ten people. Forrester research cited by LinkedIn in June 2026 found 64% of business-to-business marketing leaders distrusting their own measurement methods.

The data captured carries legal exposure that registration pages tend to understate. On May 28, 2026 the 42nd Chamber of the Verwaltungsgericht Berlin decided case 42 K 56/25, upholding a regulator's finding that scoring inbound leads through a credit bureau before any commercial contact lacked a lawful basis. The reasoning applies to any funnel where a submitted form triggers automated enrichment. Consent to attend does not automatically cover onward processing, a live question since the General Data Protection Regulation was drafted and the subject of industry webinars in April 2018, a month before it applied.

The tooling has also been commoditised. Zoom and Microsoft Teams bundle webinar capability inside subscriptions organisations already hold, compressing what a dedicated platform can charge for the broadcast itself.

Not the same as

A webcast is one-way broadcast video with no expectation of audience response, though the distinction is disputed: ON24's own documentation states there is no difference between the two.

A virtual event is multi-session and multi-track, with an agenda, concurrent rooms and often networking. A webinar is one session.

An online meeting inverts the permission model: everyone can speak by default, there is usually no registration, and no attendee data is exported.

A live stream is public and ungated. LinkedIn ended unscheduled live streaming on June 22, 2026, moving the format closer to the webinar without adding a registration gate.

Recent developments

The independent webinar platform is disappearing into the events stack. Cvent, taken private by Blackstone for 4.6 billion dollars in 2023, acquired Goldcast on December 15, 2025 for a reported sum just under 300 million, then agreed on December 30 to buy ON24 for 8.10 dollars a share in cash, valuing it at roughly 400 million. That was a 62% premium to ON24's close on November 10, 2025, and a fraction of its post-listing peak. Shareholders approved on March 26, 2026 and the stock was delisted on April 1.

The stated rationale in both deals was automated content production: turning recorded sessions into clips, summaries and recaps without manual editing. Goldcast reported that 97.8% of video clips its customers created during 2025 were generated by artificial intelligence. Whether that repurposing layer, rather than the live broadcast, comes to define the category is the open question for 2027.

Timeline

  • May 1996: Microsoft releases NetMeeting with Internet Explorer 3.0
  • 1997: Earliest recorded use of the word "webinar", in DM News; PlaceWare Auditorium commercialised from Xerox PARC research
  • 1998: Eric R. Korb registers the WEBinar trademark, USPTO serial number 75478683, later assigned to InterCall; ON24 founded
  • February 1999: ActiveTouch launches WebEx Meeting Center and adopts the WebEx name
  • 2003: Microsoft acquires PlaceWare, relaunching it as Live Meeting
  • 2006: Citrix launches GoToWebinar; Learn.com files USPTO serial number 78952304 for the lowercase mark on August 15
  • August 9, 2007: The Learn.com application is recorded as abandoned, leaving the term generic
  • 2007: Cisco acquires WebEx
  • 2020: ON24 revenue rises 76% to 156.9 million dollars during pandemic restrictions
  • February 3, 2021: ON24 lists on the New York Stock Exchange at 50 dollars a share, closing at 70.82 dollars
  • 2021: ON24 revenue peaks at 203.6 million dollars
  • December 15, 2025: Cvent acquires Goldcast
  • December 30, 2025: Cvent agrees to acquire ON24 for 8.10 dollars a share
  • March 26, 2026: ON24 shareholders approve the acquisition
  • April 1, 2026: ON24 is delisted
  • April 23, 2026: beehiiv adds native webinars to its newsletter platform
  • April 28, 2026: LinkedIn adds off-platform event ads, embedded lead forms and event clipping
  • June 22, 2026: LinkedIn requires all live events to be scheduled in advance
  • July 23, 2026: LinkedIn publishes a segmented event playbook assigning webinars a two to four week promotional runway

Summary

Who. Marketing and demand generation teams host webinars; platform vendors including ON24, Zoom, Goldcast, GoTo, BigMarker and Livestorm supply the software; Cvent now owns two of the largest; registrants are typically employees evaluating a purchase on behalf of an organisation.

What. A scheduled online presentation to a pre-registered audience, with presenters holding speaking rights and attendees restricted to chat, polls and a question queue, producing a recording, an attendee list and per-person engagement telemetry exported to a CRM.

When. The word first appears in print in 1997, was trademarked in 1998 and abandoned as generic in 2007; the format peaked commercially during 2020 and 2021 and has since consolidated, with ON24 delisted on April 1, 2026.

Where. Predominantly business-to-business marketing in North America and Europe, distributed through vendor platforms, promoted mainly on LinkedIn and by email, and consumed increasingly on demand rather than live.

Why. Registration produces declared first-party data at a moment when inferred identifiers are decaying, and a 45-minute attended session is a dense signal inside purchase cycles that now average 272 days. The unresolved problem is that attendance and conversion benchmarks come almost entirely from vendors measuring their own customers, with no independent audit of the numbers that budgets are built on.