Part of what demonstrators are paying for when going to a conference is an audience. The best form of marketing—producing your own buzz amid your own industry and getting the word spread as quickly as possible. This year’s DEMO conference will be charging up to $300 to watch demonstrations streamed live ($250 if pre-registered.) This may end up doing more to stifle the usefulness of DEMO to the presenters than it will profit the conference, Allen Stern argues at CenterNetworks,

During the spring version of DEMO, I wrote a column that infomercial conferences (those where companies pay to present) should always be streamed live. In today’s search market, it’s critical that companies can gain the bonus exposure of a potential trending topic on the different social networks or on Google’s new realtime search. By posting the videos a day later, that buzz will have already evaporated.

It also makes it hard when people at the conference share how excited they are about one of the companies because those on the receiving end of the message, can’t easily jump into the presentation to watch for themselves.

What DEMO seems to have forgotten also is that they’re not the only game in town. Other infomercial style conferences will be able to leverage free online streaming against costly streaming. Those who sign for DEMO then will be able to see for themselves how it affects their impact on the media when basic consumers and niche blogs cannot see their demonstrations up front.

Stern continues to argue that DEMO could instead provide a value-added model, permitting live streaming for presentations (i.e. what the presenters basically paid to be publicized by being at the conference) but locking down live streaming of discussion panels and other elements that would be unique to the DEMO conference and not replicated at other conferences.

Presenters already pay a great deal of money to reach their audience at these sorts of conferences, why hinder them by limiting the people who get to involve themselves in the buzz?