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Originally Posted by gonzo
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Largely on the mark, but I think you missed some origins...
The shows really didn't start out as "party shows". The origins are really with two shows:
1) IA2000 is what we now know as Internext. It started out as an audiotext show. It evolved into an adult internet show partially as a natural progression of that industry. In fact, many of the original big players in the business, such as CE, have their origins in the 900 biz.
2) Adultdex. Sharpie could comment more here, but basically you put 150-200K geeks in Vegas for Comdex, they are virtually all porn consumers, so it's a natural to setup a consumer oriented porn show somewhere in town at the same time and that's what Faye did. It too evolved to the web focus and more of a B2B show as Comdex died, spanwing what we know as Cybernet Expo.
Both of these shows had focus, had a purpose for being. I attended the first web oriented version of IA2000 back in 97-98 at the Monte Carlo. That was when we really learned who was who, discovered a lot of new programs, and bought a ton of content. At that time, the show saved me weeks of research on the tools I needed to launch pay sites, etc. Epoch and ccBill were just coming into being. at this time. DMR was the big processor then...I learned enough at that show to know not to use them.
Adultdex was a chance to do consumer marketing with a captive audience.
But now, ask yourself what exactly is the purpose of many of these shows?
There isn't one other than to get everyone together to see friends, party a bit on sponsor tab and make money for the show producer. This model dies as soon as people have to watch ROI...and we're there.