Zoom ups webinar cap to 1 million attendees

Zoom has raised the webinar attendee limit to one million users to enable large-scale events on the video meeting platform.

Zoom has proved an effective fundraising and voter engagement tool for Democratic political groups in the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election, with several celebrity-led events held in support of candidate Kamala Harris pushing the limits of the app.

One call, targeting white women, was so popular that it exceeded Zoom’s pre-existing 100,000 attendee cap, prompting the vendor to raise the limit to 200,000 on a temporary basis. Another three-hour event held last month, “White Dudes for Harris,” was even more popular, with almost 200,000 attendees, according to reports, raising over $4 million.

On Monday, Zoom announced that it has officially raised the webinar limit to 1 million attendees for all customers. Event organizers can now select the intended size of an event, with a cap of 10k, 50k, 100k, 250k, 500k, and 1m attendees, the company said in a press release. Webinars can last up to 30 hours and feature up to 1,000 “interactive” video panelists.

Zoom made no specific reference to the Democratic political group fundraisers in the press release. It said that it envisages a range of uses for such large-scale, one-off events, including massive internal corporate “all-hands” meetings, celebrity-hosted events such as fan “meet and greets,” brand product launches, and crisis communications for government agencies.

“Now event organizers have the flexibility and power to host truly interactive experiences on an unprecedented scale and the ability to purchase large single-use webinars,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom.

Holding such large events isn’t cheap, however, with reports that a webinar with 1 million attendees will cost around $100,000.

Zoom also stated that webinars that last longer than three hours may require “additional paid consulting services” from its Event Services team.