The day that draws the biggest webinar audience is not the day people are most likely to show up. In Livestorm’s 2026 benchmark, built from 33,786 webinar sessions held in 2025, Tuesday had the highest show-up rate at 51.7%. Wednesday drew the largest crowds, averaging 94 live attendees. Those two facts sound like a contradiction until you realize they measure different things: one counts the share of registrants who arrive, the other counts heads in the room.
That gap is a good preview of what you will find in almost every set of webinar statistics. Vendors measure attendance in different ways, report different averages, and draw on very different customer bases. Read one report and you get a clean answer. Read three and you get a range.
This guide pulls the 2026 benchmarks from Livestorm, ON24 and BigMarker into one place, explains why their numbers disagree, and gives you a single metric that cuts through the noise.
What is the average webinar attendance rate?
Somewhere between 40% and 60% of registrants, depending on whose numbers you use and what counts as attending.
Livestorm’s 2026 Webinar Benchmark Report puts the average live show-up rate at 47.7% for webinars held in 2025, down slightly from 48.9% in 2024. That is about 83 live attendees for every 175 registrants, across 33,786 sessions and more than 7 million registrations.
ON24’s 2026 Digital Engagement Benchmarks Report, covering 2025 activity on the Cvent and ON24 platform, reports that 60% of webinar registrations converted to attendees, up from 57% the year before. ON24 counts live and on-demand viewers together, which is the main reason its figure runs higher.
BigMarker’s 2025-2026 B2B Webinar Benchmark Report defines show-up rate as live attendees divided by registrants and says the rate trends around the 50% mark, with high performers above average.
So the honest headline is this: plan on roughly half your registrants showing up live. If your platform counts replays, the total rises toward 60%.
The trap is comparing your own number to the wrong benchmark. A team that measures live-only attendance and gets 45% might panic after reading ON24’s 60%. In fact, they are close to Livestorm’s live average. Before you judge your results, check whether your benchmark includes on-demand viewers and over what window.
How many people attend a webinar?
The average audience is larger than most first-time hosts expect, and it varies widely by platform.
ON24 reports an average of 239 attendees per webinar in 2025, an 11% increase over the prior year. Its fourth quarter was the strongest, at 254 attendees per webinar.
BigMarker reports an average of 322 registrants and 171 attendees per webinar across all events in its 2025-2026 report, with high performers averaging 375 registrants and 214 attendees. BigMarker notes that registrant counts in its data ranged from zero to more than 10,000, so the average hides a lot of spread.
Livestorm’s averages are smaller: 175 registrants and 83 live attendees.
Industry matters too. Livestorm’s public webinar statistics page, which draws on its customer data, shows the pharmaceutical industry with the highest participation rate at 63% and advertising with the lowest at 33%. Audiences who need the information for their jobs, such as clinicians earning credits or compliance teams tracking new rules, show up. Audiences who are being marketed to, and who know it, are easier to lose.
The differences come down to who uses each platform. ON24 and BigMarker skew toward enterprise B2B marketing teams running large programs. Livestorm serves a wider mix that includes smaller teams and internal sessions. If you are a 20-person company, Livestorm’s numbers are a closer match for your first year. If you run a marketing department at a large software company, ON24’s are the fairer comparison.
One more point: all three vendors report averages, not medians. A few webinars with thousands of attendees can pull an average up a long way. Your typical webinar may sit well below the published figure even if you are doing well.
What is the best day and time to host a webinar?
Midweek, in the middle of the working day.
Livestorm’s 2025 data gives Tuesday the highest show-up rate, at 51.7%, and Wednesday the biggest audience, at 94 live attendees on average.
BigMarker’s report shows how concentrated scheduling has become. Tuesday hosted 26% of B2B webinars, Wednesday 28% and Thursday 26%, which means those three days account for 80% of all sessions. Monday held 10% and Friday just 6%. BigMarker says that while Wednesday was the clear winner in its two previous annual reports, the gap between the top three days has narrowed.
On time of day, BigMarker found 1:00 p.m. was the most popular start time, used for 15% of B2B webinars, followed by 2:00 p.m. at 12% and 11:00 a.m. at 11%. It also reports that midday sessions continue to draw the highest registration and show-up rates.
There is a strategic wrinkle here. Because 80% of B2B webinars land on Tuesday through Thursday, your audience’s inbox and calendar are most crowded on those days. A Monday or Friday slot puts you up against far fewer competing events. It will likely draw a smaller audience. For a niche topic with a loyal following, that trade can be worth testing.
Time zones also matter more than the averages suggest. A 1:00 p.m. Eastern start reaches the US East Coast after lunch, the West Coast at 10:00 a.m. and much of Europe in the early evening. If your audience spans continents, run two sessions or put real effort into the replay.
The safest default for a North American B2B audience is a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday session that starts between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Eastern. That window lines up with where both Livestorm and BigMarker see their strongest results. Test outside it only after you have a baseline to compare against.
When do people register for webinars?
Late. Much later than most promotion plans assume.
Livestorm’s analysis of more than 7 million registrations found that 49.7% arrived in the final seven days before an event, and 15.3% came in on the day of the event itself. Livestorm’s breakdown shows 16.4% registering three or more weeks out, 26.2% registering two to six days before, and 8.2% the day before.
This changes how you should plan promotion. Many teams send most of their invitations two or three weeks out and then go quiet. The data says the final week, and especially the final day, deserves the most attention. A same-day email or social post is not a desperate move. It is where about one in seven registrations come from.
Livestorm also reports that teams with show-up rates above 60% send personalized reminders three days before, one day before and on the day of the event. Late registrants and reminder timing are connected: people who sign up on the day need only one well-timed nudge to arrive.
This also shapes how you judge a campaign mid-flight. If registrations look thin ten days before the event, that is normal. Half of them have not happened yet. Hold your budget for the final week rather than cutting the event or doubling ad spend early, and measure your promotion against where registrations typically land by day, not against your final goal.
How long should a webinar be?
The typical webinar runs longer than people actually watch.
Livestorm reports that the average webinar in 2025 lasted 68 minutes, but the average attendee watched 26 minutes, or 38% of the session.
ON24 reports a much longer engagement time: an average of 49 minutes in 2025, down from 51 minutes in 2024. ON24’s figure includes on-demand viewing and comes from a platform built around long-form B2B content, which helps explain why it is nearly double Livestorm’s.
Both numbers point in the same direction. Most people do not stay for the whole thing. If your most important message, offer or call to action lands in minute 55, a large share of your audience will never hear it. Put the core idea in the first 20 minutes and use the rest for depth, examples and questions.
Interaction helps hold the room. ON24’s 2025 report, covering 2024 activity, found that webinars averaged 14 audience questions each. Questions, polls and downloadable resources give people a reason to stay and give you data on who was paying attention. A 45-minute session with a live Q&A in the middle will often hold more people than a 60-minute lecture with questions saved for the end, when half the audience has already left.
Live versus on-demand: who watches the replay?
On-demand viewing is a large part of the webinar audience, and in some datasets it rivals live attendance.
ON24’s 2026 report notes that live attendance grew faster than on-demand in 2025: on a per-webinar basis, live attendance rose 11% from 2024 to 2025, compared with 7% growth in on-demand attendance. ON24’s commentary on its earlier report described on-demand viewing as making up about half of all webinar attendees. The exact split shifts from year to year and depends on how long a replay stays available.
The practical lesson is simple. A webinar is not a one-hour event. It is a piece of content with a live premiere. Plan the replay page, the follow-up email and the clips before you go live, because a large share of your total audience will find you after the session ends.
The replay is also the part of a webinar that search engines and AI assistants can find. A recording on a public page, with a transcript, a clear title and a short written summary, keeps earning views for months. A recording locked behind a registration wall with no text around it is invisible to anyone who did not sign up. If your goal is reach, publish at least a summary and the key clips in the open.
Does the time of year matter?
Yes, and summer is the soft spot.
Livestorm’s 2025 data shows January had the best show-up rate of any month, at 50.4%. July fell to 45% and August to 42.9%, the weakest stretch of the year.
That pattern matches what most B2B marketers see in their own calendars. January is a planning month, when people are setting goals and looking for new ideas. August is vacation season in much of North America and Europe. If you have a flagship webinar, avoid scheduling it for the middle of August. If you must run something in summer, expect a lower live rate and lean harder on the replay.
The metric that matters: cost per attendee minute
Every number above has a flaw when you use it alone. Show-up rate ignores audience size. Attendee count ignores how long people stay. Watch time ignores what you spent to get them there.
So I use one combined measure that pulls the useful parts of these webinar statistics together, which I call Cost per Attendee Minute, or CPAM. The formula is simple: total spend on the webinar divided by the total minutes your attendees spent watching it, live and on-demand together.
Here is how it works with real benchmark figures. Livestorm’s averages are 83 live attendees watching for 26 minutes each. That is 2,158 attendee minutes for a typical session. If you spent $2,000 on promotion, production and staff time, your CPAM is about 93 cents. If a different webinar draws 150 attendees who each watch only 10 minutes, that is 1,500 attendee minutes, and the same $2,000 buys a CPAM of about $1.33. The bigger audience delivered less attention.
CPAM does three useful things. It rewards content that holds people, not just headlines that fill the registration page. It makes webinars comparable to other channels, since you can calculate the same number for a podcast episode or a video ad. And it gives you a single figure to improve over time, so you are not chasing whichever vendor average looks worst this quarter.
Track it for every session. After five or six webinars, your own CPAM history will tell you more than any industry report.
How to read webinar benchmarks without fooling yourself
Vendor benchmark reports are useful, but each one comes from a platform with its own customers, its own definitions and a product to sell. Livestorm, ON24 and BigMarker all publish data that tends to show their own tools in a good light. That does not make the numbers wrong. It means you should read them as a range rather than a single truth.
Three checks keep you honest. First, find out whether attendance includes on-demand viewers, and over what time window. Second, look at whose webinars are in the dataset. Enterprise-heavy platforms report bigger audiences. Third, note whether the figure is an average or a median, since a few huge events can lift an average far above what a normal session achieves.
Then compare against your own history before you compare against anyone else’s. Webinar statistics from a vendor are a starting point for your plan, not a grade on your work. A move from 38% to 46% show-up rate over a year is real progress, even if a vendor report says the average is 60%.
The webinar format is growing on every major platform, audiences are staying engaged, and the teams that measure what an attendee minute actually costs will be the ones that keep their budgets in 2027.