CES 2022 attendance fell 73% to 45K from 2020 numbers. Was it worth it?
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CES 2022‘s attendance numbers were battered by the Omicron variant of COVID, with numbers hitting 45,000 attendees and 2,300 exhibitors.
The numbers are down from 171,000 attendees and 4,400 exhibitors at the last in-person event in January 2020, according to the Consumer Technology Association, the trade group that puts on the show in Las Vegas. There were 1,800 media, but for the first time in decades I was not among them.
The in-person show was canceled in 2021 and moved to online only, but the group made the decision to go forward with the event in the first week of January, despite the surge from the coronavirus variant. In a LinkedIn post, CTA CEO Gary Shapiro defended the decision to move forward. Back in November, Shapiro expected maybe half the usual size for the show, but it turned out that Omicron drove it even lower.
The CTA stood by that decision even as big companies like Intel, Twitter, and many others decided to pull out of the show at the last minute. When those companies pulled out, a number of my appointments canceled and that made it easier for me to decide to withdraw in the last week before the event.
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But many smaller companies couldn’t do that, as they had spent a lot of money on their booths and couldn’t get refunds at the last minute. One exhibitor told me that CTA wouldn’t let them out of the contract, so they decided not to go and then tried to power through it with an online only
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