How my visit to AnimeCon changed my view on WordCamps

I was lucky enough to visit AnimeCon at London’s Olympia on Saturday night. I had an hour or so to walk the exhibitors and the vendor stalls, and I came away having actually bought a picture, which I then managed to leave behind. I am going back today to collect it, and I suspect I will stay rather longer than I planned to.

I was also lucky enough to have dinner with the owner of the event. Somewhere between the donut stalls, the Japanese food, the plants and the flowers, the many hundreds of people dressed exactly as they pleased, and a hall that was absolutely rammed at the point most exhibitions are quietly winding down, something occurred to me that I have not been able to put down since.

We have been running WordCamps inside a box, and we have stopped noticing the walls.

The sponsorship maths that does not work

Let me start with the thing I get asked about most, because it is the thing that quietly decides who gets to be visible in our industry.

Sponsoring a WordCamp is expensive. It is not expensive if you are a hosting company with a marketing department and a budget line that renews whether or not anybody measures it. It is expensive if you are a four person agency, a plugin developer with a few thousand active installs, or a freelancer who has had a decent year and wants to put something back while also, quite reasonably, getting something out.

For that business the decision is brutal. The money is real and it comes out of this year. What it buys is a table, a logo on a sponsors page, something in a tote bag, and a stack of leaflets that will mostly still be on the table at the end. You are not buying a market. You are buying adjacency to one, and you are hoping that enough of the right people walk past at the right moment.

I am not going to quote you figures, because the tiers move and I would rather you went and looked at the real ones than took a number off me. But do the exercise honestly. Take a mid tier package at a flagship WordCamp, add travel, add a stand that does not look apologetic, add two or three people off billable work for three days, add the hotel. Then ask what that same money would do if you spent it on something else entirely. For a lot of small businesses in our space the answer is uncomfortable, and I think a fair number of them have quietly stopped asking the question and simply stopped coming.

Now put that next to AnimeCon. There are over 250 artists and vendors in that hall. Not 250 corporate sponsors. 250 small businesses, sole traders and makers, sitting alongside much larger operations, all of them selling. A table in the Artist Alley is within reach of someone who draws for a living. The event has an enquiries route and an open registration process rather than a closed conversation with a sales team. The entry rung is low enough that the ladder actually has people on it.

That is the difference. Their small vendors are the product. Ours are a rounding error on a sponsor deck.

Even a packed hall has a ticket problem

Here is the part that surprised me most, and it is the part I think our organisers would find most useful.

This is a well organised, well established, properly run exhibition. It still has a ticket sales situation. Everybody does now. I watched the event’s own social accounts pushing Sunday tickets while Saturday was still going on, and that is not a sign of a problem, it is simply how events work in 2026.

Three things are going on at once, and they compound.

The first is that the audience has learned to decide late. People hold off, partly because they can, partly because they are waiting to see what the weather does and who else is going. The second is fear of missing out, which is the same behaviour pointed in the opposite direction, and which produces a surge of sales so close to the doors opening that no sensible person could have planned the catering around it. The third is the one nobody in our community wants to say out loud, which is that organic reach on social media is at an all time low and is not coming back. You can have thirty thousand engaged followers and reach a few hundred of them with a post about your own event. The platforms broke the one distribution channel that volunteer run events were relying on, and they broke it for everyone at the same time.

So when a WordCamp finds itself nervous about numbers three weeks out, that is not evidence that the WordCamp is failing or that the community has lost interest. It is the same headwind a commercial exhibition at Olympia is fighting with a professional marketing budget behind it. The difference is that they have accepted it and built for it. They run a newsletter, they run a podcast, they run a blog, and they keep a reason to come back in front of people all year rather than waking the list up six weeks before the doors open.

What it costs to fill a hall like that

Olympia is not a cheap room, and I say that as someone who has spent a working lifetime around print, production and large scale marketing spend.

I have no inside knowledge of this event’s numbers and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But I know what it costs to put an exhibition of that scale into central London and then tell enough people about it to fill the place twice over in a weekend. The venue hire, the stand build, the power, the rigging, the security, the stewarding, the insurance, the licences, the accessibility provision, the paid media across every channel that still works, the out of home advertising, the talent fees, the staging, the sound. Once you add all of it together, an event like this can stretch into the hundreds of thousands. That is before a single ticket is sold, and every one of those costs is contracted whether eight thousand people turn up or three thousand do.

That is a genuinely frightening amount of exposure for a privately run event, and it reframes something for me. We talk about WordCamp budgets as though they are large. Against a commercial exhibition in the same city in the same month, they are modest. What we actually have is an enormous amount of goodwill and a very small amount of money, which is a lovely position to be in right up until the moment you need to reach anybody who is not already in the room.

Over fifty volunteers, and the whole thing stands on them

This was the detail that landed hardest.

An event of that scale, in that venue, with that much money committed, still relies on over fifty volunteers to be viable. Not as a nice gesture or a community touch. As a structural requirement. Take the volunteers out and the commercial model does not close.

I have written before that WordCamps only happen because people give up their evenings and their weekends to run them, and I meant it as a point about our community being unusually generous. It turns out it is not unusual at all. It is how exhibitions work, full stop, including the ones with a professional organiser and a serious budget behind them. The volunteer model is not a charming WordPress quirk we should be slightly embarrassed about. It is the standard operating model for live events, and the people doing it at AnimeCon deserve exactly the same recognition ours do.

The sheer variety of it

This is where I think we have the most to learn, and it is the easiest thing to copy.

A WordCamp is, structurally, a room with talks in it, a sponsor area, and a corridor where the actually valuable conversations happen by accident. That is it. We have been iterating on that same shape for the better part of two decades.

AnimeCon describes itself as a festival, a market, an exhibition and a theatre show all rolled into one, and having been in the room I would say that is accurate rather than marketing copy. In one hall there were vendor stalls and booths of every size, an Artist Alley full of illustrators and designers and craftspeople selling one off work, hands on workshops teaching people to draw characters and build cosplay props, panels and talks with voice actors and industry professionals, a cosplay catwalk, a community stage, a silent disco where you pick your own channel, karaoke, a Lego Ninjago and Minecraft zone, a giant inflatable play park, dozens of fan meet ups organised by attendees themselves, and stamp rallies that send people hunting across the whole floor from one artist to the next.

Look at that last one for a second, because it is quietly brilliant. A stamp rally is a trail that only completes if you visit six or seven different small vendors. It is a mechanic that drives footfall to the people who can least afford to be missed, and it costs the organiser almost nothing. Every WordCamp sponsor hall in the world has a quiet corner that would be fixed by exactly that idea.

There is also a Zen Den, a deliberately calm room for when the whole thing gets too much, sitting alongside proper accessibility and carer provision. I have been at technical conferences that could do with both and have neither.

The after party, and my friend Pat Sharp

The after party was genuinely excellent, and it featured my friend Pat Sharp, who I am delighted to report has lost none of it.

I want to make a slightly serious point out of an entirely unserious evening. The after party was not an add on. It was the bit where the exhibitors, the organisers, the performers and the attendees ended up in the same room with no agenda, and it did more for that community in two hours than a schedule could. We know this. The corridor and the bar have always been the best part of any WordCamp. We just tend to treat them as a happy accident rather than something to design, resource and programme properly.

Dinner with the owner

And then there was the dinner, which I am including partly because it was excellent and partly because of who was at the table.

We had a meze type spread that kept arriving in waves. Padron peppers, done properly, with the roulette of one in ten taking your head off. Lobster bits, which is an undersell for what turned up. Nduja crispbreads that I would happily have made the entire meal out of. And a bloody mary that was, without exaggeration, phenomenal, and which did a great deal of load bearing work in keeping me upright and conversational.

Sitting across from the person who carries the risk for an event like that is clarifying. There is no committee to spread it across and no foundation underwriting the downside. He books Olympia, he commits the spend, and then he finds out. Spend an evening with someone in that position and you come away with a lot more sympathy for the decisions event organisers make, including the ones we grumble about.

What if we asked the city?

Here is the practical version of all of this, and it is the part I would most like someone on a WordCamp organising team to argue with me about.

Why do we only ever sell space to our own industry?

A WordCamp drops a few thousand people into a city for a weekend. Those people eat four or five meals there, they want coffee more or less constantly, and a good number of them have flown in from another country and would quite like to take something home that is actually from the place they just visited. At the moment almost none of that money reaches the city we are standing in. It goes to the venue’s catering contract and to a sandwich chain on the corner.

So sell mini booths. Not a sponsor stand at a sponsor price, but a small, cheap, half table pitch at a day rate a market trader would recognise. Then fill them with local vendors. The independent coffee roaster. The baker. The street food traders who already do exactly this every weekend somewhere else in the same city. The people selling things actually made locally, that somebody from Buenos Aires or Osaka would genuinely want to carry home. AnimeCon had donut stalls, Japanese food, plants and flowers in the hall and all of them were trading well, because people who are in a building for eight hours want to buy things, and there is no good reason the only thing on offer at our events is a lanyard.

The money works in both directions. The pitch fee is revenue the WordCamp did not previously have, at a price point a small local business can actually say yes to, which is precisely the thing our sponsorship tiers fail at. And the attendee gets a reason to stay in the building rather than vanishing for ninety minutes to find lunch, which is ninety minutes they were not talking to anybody.

Then the bigger idea, which costs nothing whatsoever. Ask the local community what they want.

We arrive in a city, use a venue, and leave again, and the street outside barely registers that we were there. Before the next one, somebody could go and talk to the local traders, the nearby independents, the people who run the markets, and simply ask them: we are bringing two thousand people into your area for a weekend in June, what would you like to put in front of them, and what would make this genuinely useful to you? I have never once seen that conversation happen. I would wager a reasonable sum that the answers would be better than anything we would arrive at in a planning call, and that two or three of those local businesses would end up sponsoring us without our ever having to ask.

Maybe we need to leave the bubble

So, to summarise an evening that has rather got under my skin.

It was a great event. Multiple vendors, small, medium and large, all selling their wares side by side, in a hall that was still full at the point the lights should have been coming up. It was well organised, it was warm, it was genuinely for its community rather than at them, and it was built so that a sole trader with a folding table and a hosting company with a budget could both find a reason to be there.

None of what I saw requires a bigger budget than we have. The stamp rally, the open and affordable vendor rung, the year round content so you are not cold starting your audience six weeks out, the programmed social side, the calm room, designing for people who decide late. Those are all decisions, not line items.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want to say. We send each other to WordCamps to learn how to run WordCamps, and then we wonder why they keep coming out the same shape. Maybe WordCamps need to go to events outside our own bubble to see what is possible. I went to an anime convention for an hour and a dinner, and I came back with more ideas about our events than I have had from a year inside them.

I am going back today for the picture I left behind. I will almost certainly stay for more than the picture.

And I intend to take my own advice. Their next two shows are already dated: AnimeCon Manchester at Manchester Central on 27 and 28 February 2027, and AnimeCon Birmingham back at the NEC on 12 and 13 June 2027 for its fifth show there. I plan to be at both. If any of this has landed with you, do not take my word for it. Go to one of them, and take a WordCamp organiser with you.

Banner image © AnimeCon London, reproduced here with thanks. Event details, features and links throughout this post are taken from animeconlondon.com and remain the property of the event organisers.