Public events on Zoom: insights from data, April-June 2020
Zoom stats
As Covid-19 lockdown went into force, Zoom usage exploded. A lot of our daily activities, banned offline, moved onto Zoom, and not just work and school. We had Zoom gym classes, Zoom yoga sessions, Zoom concerts, Zoom booze parties… A whole new segment of online event rose from nearly nothing to prominence. If you wonder how big exactly this part of our life was (or can be if the pandemic strikes again) — we now have data to share.
1 At least 68000 public events took place on Zoom during Covid lockdown, between 01 April and 01 July 2020. Most of these events happened twice or more, usually repeating weekly. Most events were scheduled for weekdays. Thursday and Wednesday are the busiest Zoom days; 10 AM and 7 PM are the busiest Zoom hours. Although Zoom and event platforms (Eventbrite etc.) allow selling tickets to events, event authors more often ask for “donations” or sell tickets on their sites.
2. The lockdown period demonstrated steady growth of public Zoom events. May 2020 grew 67.5% MoM to April 2020, while June 2020 showed 110.8% MoM growth to May 2020.
The number of events increased every single week during this period. The largest recorded WoW growth — 35.2% during the second week of June, trailed by 34.1% during the second week of April. Only three weeks had single-digit WoW growth (1.1%, 4.4% and 8.3%)
3. Even in lockdown, public events in Zoom tended to happen on weekdays. This does not mean that audiences and organizers always use Zoom for needs related to full time jobs (more on that later). Zoom rush day is Thursday; Tuesdays and Wednesdays are also in demand. Wednesday popularity is rising since mid-May (probably because Thursdays are so fully booked). Zoom weekend was always a long one: Saturday through Monday.
4. So far, the largest Zoom activity is education of all sorts — about 60%. Health, business and family-oriented activities account for 2/3 of all Zoom public events.
5. This abundance of education is not coming from schools and colleges that moved online. Rather we look at fitness centers, gyms, yoga studios, language schools and many other similar businesses disrupted by Covid who moved on Zoom in order to retain their customers.
6. 50% of all events are announced in between least 3 days and 2 weeks in advance. 30% of all events are scheduled within a week, and 21% more on a second week. Just 5% of events are announced on the same day or a day before. 76% of events happen within a month (4 calendar weeks) of announcements.
7. Many Zoom event planners look forward well beyond the lockdown period. The longest streaks we saw had a 10-year schedule (then we stopped counting). Events announced during lockdown were most frequently scheduled to run throughout the summer of 2020 and sometimes into fall 2020 (streaks of 91–140 days). This may suggest either a firm belief of authors that Zoom events will survive the end of lockdown — or that many businesses are already well established on Zoom and plan in quarters.
8. Zoom rush hours are: 10–11 AM (10:00), 8067 events; and 7–8 PM (19:00), 9849 events. 32% of events (21003) happened in the morning, 68% (44277) in the afternoon. Morning peak may include school and university classes, and events for people in lockdown who are free from office schedule (ofice meetings are most likely not posted online! Evening peak is most likely after work activity.
9. Different regions of the world, however, have their own day schedules. Brits do not use Zoom in between breakfast and lunch, and then again no Zoom until the work day ends. In New York and Eastern Europe zoomers congregate mostly after work, while in Western US, to the contrary,morning is the preferred Zoom time. As per France, Germany, Italy — well, the whole day is good for Zoom.
10. A typical Zoom event is timed to last for 1 hour, less often for 1.5 or 2 hours. A smaller subset of events lasts 40 or 45 minutes, implying an “academic hour”. Events with different duration are very rare.
11. Most authors are just learning how to master Zoom. Only one author in three who started doing public Zoom events produced a second event (459 of 1167). Only one in ten (114 authors) produced 10 or more events.
But a few authors have really figured out how to do events on Zoom. 12% of events during lockdown were produced by just 10 prolific authors. The leader, an online school of Spanish language, held several thousand events (or almost 6% of all events).
12. Zoom still mostly speaks English. However, there are large national communities worldwide, including expatriate. Germans, Catalonians, Vietnamese and Philipino are a few examples.
13. If you wonder what search words might work best for driving traffic to a Zoom event…
14. …well, you get an idea now.
If you wonder how we know all this
We collected this data by parsing online announcements for events placed on event management websites. Although we surveyed a range of event management websites, over 97% of events that we analyzed were posted to Eventbrite.
We did not have programmatic access to social networks (FB, IG, VK etc) and messengers (WA, TG etc), so it is possible that events that draw audience from existing online communities were underrepresented. We also did not have direct access to Zoom events and metadata (all programmatic access to Zoom events is limited to credentialed event owner, third parties cannot read event card, logs, recordings and so on except when they are part of event owner’s organization).
US, Canada, European Union, Australia, and New Zealand are the top regions where our data comes from. Some large countries, in particular Brazil, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Japan, were underrepresented in our dataset — possibly because their online events are advertised through messengers (Wechat, Whatsapp, Telegram) and social networks, rather than on public Web bulleting boards.
The raw data was processed by text analysis tools and natural language algorithms with the following tasks:
- Determine if the event is online and takes place on Zoom;
- Determine if the event is “free” or “paid” (the majority of Zoom event authors avoid platform commissions and ask audience for “donations”, “paypal” or “contributions”);
- Extract quantitative (date, time) and verbal metadata of the event (keywords, tags);
- Determine the language of the Zoom event based on the description text.
Some key statistical facts:
- Population size: 68000
- Sample size: 36929 events
- 95% Confidence interval: 125 events
- Start date: 01 April 2020
- End date: 30 June 2020
Authors
We are AI data analysts from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and numbers are our daily bread and butter. Proudly found, processed and reported by:
- Emil Iksanov — Graduate student @ PhysTech, Applied Artificial Intelligence Program
- Galim Turumtaev — Graduate student @ PhysTech, Applied Artificial Intelligence Program
- Yuri Ammosov — Assistant Professor of Innovation Studies and Program Director, @ PhysTech, Applied Artificial Intelligence Program
