WordCamp attendance as community health indicator
At WordCamp Europe 2025 in Basel it was pretty obvious that it turned out to be way smaller than in the previous years. Even without looking at the numbers. The question of why that was bugged me, so I investigated a little bit.
Let’s get the basic fact out at the beginning: According to the official stats there were 1723 attendees. That was only ⅔ of the year before and less than any in-person WCEU in the last 10 years.
People usually mostly care about WordPress market share when thinking about the health of the WordPress ecosystem I always felt like that only covers the business side of things.
WordCamp attendance in contrast to me appears to be a much better indicator of the state of the community. And I also suspect it reacts faster than the market share.
Why so few people at WCEU?
Hence, people already voiced concern and did speculate as to why during the event. There were two main explanations I heard:
- The general community sentiment due to the ongoing WP Drama
- Switzerland being prohibitively expensive
Although one can argue about the extent of the impact the WP Drama clearly did have an impact. This has been discussed enough already, so I am not going to go into this much more. Please read what Patricia, the local team lead, had to say about this specifically.
She comes to the conclusion that the price level of Switzerland obviously did have an impact but probably not enough to explain that sharp drop in attendance numbers on its own. Which aligned with my first gut feeling.
My completely subjective impression was that something was off but of course things like that are hard to objectively explain. So I did let it go.
Last week this post made me aware of the fact that the ticket sales from WordCamp US are looking quite bleak as well. They’d need to at least double in the final month before the event to at least get in the range of previous years.
It takes place in the exact same location so a difference in price level can be ruled out there. To be fair, like other people mentioned, the current political situation in the US might have a deterring effect.
Still all of that reminded me of this old saying:
Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is a pattern.
WCUS hasn’t yet happened and even if we already count that as a downward trend we’re at “twice” at best. Still it got me interested enough to have a closer look at the numbers.
Collecting the data
If you’re just looking for the numbers you can skip this section straight to the charts.
I then went out to hunt down as much data as possible for the previous flagship WordCamp events. Which turned out to be much harder than I had hoped and expected.
The best and most detailed source was the Ticket Revenue Report on WordCamp Central. From 2020 on it had very detailed numbers about tickets sold.
So I started aggregating all of that into a table and on thursday with still very spotty data I posted a first graph. But that still had gaps in the data.
Over the weekend I then did some more searching and found some more data. For a lot of years there were posts on wordpress.org or the event sites themselves with some statistical data. For more historic data there were some posts on WordCamp Central with yearly recaps that highlighted the flagship events.
I also found some third party websites that had otherwise missing data although for some of those I am not sure about the reliability.
Nevertheless, for some events, especially more historic ones, I still could only find partial data. So if anyone has more data let me know, and I’d love to add that.
I also had the idea that it could make sense to factor in the price level of the hosting country since that had already been a concern before, e.g. for WCEU 2017 in Paris.
Finally, I took the chance to freshen up my dataviz skills and build a nice chart using D3.
So without much further ado…
Plotting the data
Ticket/attendee chart
This is the main chart. The solid dots are actual attendees, the rings are tickets sold. The areas represent the difference between tickets sold and actual attendees if both are available. Otherwise the area collapses to a line.
enable JavaScript to see graphs
Data for WCUS 2025 got updated as of today. Ticket sales moved from 690 to 954 in about 2,5 weeks. Data for WCUS 2025 got updated with the final numbers. I couldn't find any numbers for actual attendance, but ticket sales moved from 954 to 1200 in the final 2 weeks.Price level adjusted ticket/attendee chart
The second chart is an attempt to relate the numbers to the price level of the host country. An attendee/ticket in an expensive host country costs more than one in a cheap country. So it “counts” more than one in a cheap country. Since the values do not represent any actual number of tickets/attendees I removed the values in the scale.
enable JavaScript to see graphs
Data for WCUS 2025 got updated as of today. Data for WCUS 2025 got updated with the final numbers.I am not a data scientist and I know that this is a very rough attempt with a lot of flaws:
- price level differences inside countries
- changes in price level over the years
- general price level not directly relating to travel, accommodation and food expenses
- …
So please take this with a big grain of salt.
Also, if you have a better idea about how to factor in the price level I’d be happy to hear from you.
Still I personally found it useful for considering this effect since it was often brought up. And indeed in this chart things look quite different for WCEU showing a slow but steady growth after the post-COVID drop.
Personal thoughts
I have to admit that my subjective impression during WCEU was that community sentiment together with attendance is going downhill. Yes, Switzerland is expensive, but I didn’t feel like that could really explain the much lower numbers, at least not all of it. On first look the numbers seemed to support that.
As usual, it is a good idea to sleep over things and revisit first impressions. When I looked at the second graph, despite its methodical flaws, the picture is much less clear now.
Maybe it indeed was mostly the expensiveness of Switzerland in the end. For WCUS there are still some weeks to go.
For WCUS there are now less than 2 weeks to go. Ticket sales have improved but there are still less than 1000 tickets sold. In the meantime it looks like I am not the only one seeing this as disappointing: Mary Hubbard published a 50% discount code on LinkedIn. I doubt that the ticket price, whether it is 50$ or 100$ is much of a factor though.
And even if the numbers stay low maybe people not wanting to go the US right now also is a big factor which is totally unrelated to WordPress and its community.
Still it was interesting to look at the numbers and as they may be interesting to others as well I’d thought I’d still share them. We’ll see what happens in the final month until WCUS.