Webinars have become a broad presentation format: organizations use them for lead generation, product demonstrations, training, sales presentations, and internal communication. The figures below show how marketers use webinars, what typical attendance and engagement look like, and how AI and personalization are changing webinar programs. Measurement periods vary by source, so each study is identified where its timing matters.
Contents
- How organizations use webinars
- Budgets, confidence, and the market outlook
- Attendance and audience engagement
- Calls to action and lead generation
- AI, personalization, and follow-up
- Promotion and scheduling
How organizations use webinars
Webinars are used across the marketing funnel and beyond it. Zoom reports that 62% of marketers use webinars for lead generation, making it the most common use in the supplied set. Product demonstrations follow at 60%, while 45% use webinars for customer training or onboarding. These figures describe reported use cases, not the share of all webinars devoted to each activity; one organization can use webinars for several purposes.
The next group of uses centers on expertise, communication, and education. Zoom reports that 44% of marketers use webinars for thought leadership, 43% for internal communication or training, and 39% for customer education. Lead nurturing is reported by 37% of marketers. Product launches and sales presentations each account for 36% of reported uses.
Webinars also support relationship and community work. Zoom reports that 34% of marketers use them for customer or partner events, 30% for user conferences, 28% for employee training, and 27% for customer retention. Market research is reported by 26%, while brand awareness is reported by 25%.
Less common uses still show that the presentation format reaches specialized audiences. Zoom reports use for investor relations at 24%, recruitment at 23%, community building at 22%, and customer support or success at 21%. Channel partner training accounts for 20%, executive communications for 19%, analyst briefings for 18%, demand generation campaigns for 17%, and educational content distribution for 16%. Franchisee or dealer communication is reported by 14%.
Reported webinar use cases
| Use case | Marketers reporting use |
|---|---|
| Lead generation | 62% |
| Product demonstrations | 60% |
| Customer training or onboarding | 45% |
| Thought leadership | 44% |
| Internal communication or training | 43% |
| Customer education | 39% |
| Lead nurturing | 37% |
| Product launches | 36% |
| Sales presentations | 36% |
The spread between lead generation and specialized uses suggests that a webinar presentation can be designed around a direct commercial objective or a longer-term communication goal. For public speaking teams, that distinction affects the presentation’s call to action, audience questions, pacing, and follow-up plan.
Budgets, confidence, and the market outlook
Zoom reports that 82% of businesses believe webinars are an effective marketing strategy. Separately, 47% of marketers say webinars generate the highest-quality leads compared with other content formats. Together, these figures indicate strong reported confidence in webinars, although they measure belief and perceived lead quality rather than a common conversion test.
Budget plans are generally stable or expanding. Zoom reports that 78% of companies said they were either increasing their webinar budget that year or keeping it the same. In a separate figure from Zoom, 22.8% of webinar-creating organizations planned to spend more on webinars going forward, while 56.4% planned to spend about the same amount. The two budget findings should not be combined: their wording and reported populations differ.
The broader virtual events industry is forecast to reach about $1.03 trillion by 2032, at a compound annual growth rate of about 14% from 2023 to 2032, according to Zoom’s cited market outlook. This is an estimate or forecast, not a measurement of current webinar revenue. It also covers the virtual events industry, which is broader than webinar presentations alone.
Webinar programs are not necessarily new experiments. Zoom reports that more than half of webinar makers had been creating webinars for four or more years. At the same time, nearly 20% said they started their webinar program in 2023 or 2024. These figures point to a mixed market of established programs and relatively recent adopters.
Attendance and audience engagement
Zoom reports that webinars attract an average of 307 sign-ups with a 58% attendance rate. The attendance rate describes the relationship between sign-ups and attendees in that source’s dataset; it should not be treated as a universal benchmark for every subject, audience, or event type.
ON24’s 2026 Webinar Benchmarks Report reports an average of 239 attendees per webinar, an average webinar engagement time of 49 minutes, and a 60% registrations-to-attendee conversion rate. These ON24 figures come from a different benchmark report and should be compared directionally rather than averaged with Zoom’s figures.
| Benchmark | Reported figure | Source label |
|---|---|---|
| Average webinar sign-ups | 307 | Zoom |
| Sign-up attendance rate | 58% | Zoom |
| Average attendees per webinar | 239 | ON24 2026 Webinar Benchmarks Report |
| Average engagement time | 49 minutes | ON24 2026 Webinar Benchmarks Report |
| Registrations-to-attendee conversion | 60% | ON24 2026 Webinar Benchmarks Report |
The ON24 2026 Webinar Benchmarks Report also says that 52% of attendees watched on-demand. This makes the presentation experience larger than the live room alone: the recording can continue to reach people after the scheduled event. A live presentation therefore has two audience moments to plan for, even though the source does not say that every on-demand viewer watched the complete session.
Poll participation varies substantially. Zoom reports an average of 87 responses to polls during webinars, while top performers average 375 responses. The difference shows why a poll’s placement and question design matter, but the figures do not establish that presentation technique alone causes higher response counts.
Timing also matters in Zoom’s reported results. Webinar response rates during business hours average 50% to 55%, compared with 25% to 30% outside business hours. These are ranges, so they should be used as planning context rather than as a precise expected result for a particular audience.
Calls to action and lead generation
Webinars are often evaluated by what attendees do after hearing the presentation. Zoom reports an average webinar call-to-action click-through rate of 8.74%, with top performers reaching 17.5%. The top-performer figure is a separate benchmark level, not an expected outcome for every presentation.
Zoom also reports that live webinars account for 91.3% of leads, compared with 9.7% from on-demand webinars. Because these figures describe the reported lead split, they do not mean that on-demand content has no value. ON24’s 2026 report, for example, says that 52% of attendees watched on-demand, indicating meaningful post-event consumption even when live sessions account for the larger reported share of leads.
The lead-quality finding is similarly important for presentation planning. Zoom reports that 47% of marketers consider webinars the format generating the highest-quality leads compared with other content formats. A presentation aimed at qualified leads may therefore need a clearer next step than a general awareness event, but the supplied statistics do not quantify how many attendees become customers.
AI, personalization, and follow-up
AI is becoming part of webinar planning and production. Zoom reports that 98% of marketers planned to enhance their webinars with AI in the next year. The wording describes an intention measured at the time of the cited research; it is not a claim that 98% had already implemented AI or that the plan was completed.
ON24’s 2025 Digital Engagement Benchmarks Report says engagement with AI-generated webinar content rose by more than 7X in 2024. “More than 7X” is a relative increase reported by the source, not a percentage-point change. The same report says live chat interactions with sales representatives rose 51%.
Personalization also appears in ON24’s 2025 findings. Personalized experiences produced 4X more demo bookings than generic experiences. The statistic compares relative demo-booking performance, but the supplied fact does not provide the underlying sample size or absolute booking rates.
Follow-up can affect the on-demand audience. ON24’s 2025 Digital Engagement Benchmarks Report says businesses using automated nurture sequences drove 69% higher on-demand attendance. As with the other benchmark findings, this is a reported comparison between groups using and not using the described approach; it does not establish that automation was the only difference between them.
Promotion and scheduling
GoToWebinar’s 2017 Big Book of Webinar Stats analyzed data from more than 300,000 webinars. The study reported email as the top promotion channel at 45%, 69% of registrations occurring in the week before the webinar, and 11:00 a.m. as the most popular webinar time.
These GoToWebinar figures are from 2017 and should be read as historical findings rather than current universal benchmarks. They remain useful for understanding how promotion and registration timing were reported in that study, but the supplied source does not show that the same percentages or preferred time apply today.
For a presentation team, the historical pattern highlights three planning questions: which channel drives registrations, how much demand arrives close to the event, and whether the selected time fits the intended audience. The more recent Zoom timing figures add that response rates during business hours average 50% to 55%, compared with 25% to 30% outside business hours, but they do not identify a single best hour.
The combined evidence supports a practical distinction between registration, attendance, engagement, and conversion. Zoom reports 307 average sign-ups and a 58% attendance rate; ON24 reports 239 average attendees, 49 minutes of engagement, and a 60% registration-to-attendee conversion rate; and Zoom reports an 8.74% average CTA click-through rate. Because the sources use different datasets and definitions, these numbers are separate reference points rather than inputs to one performance model.