Europe recorded €108 billion from exhibitions and events in 2024, according to UFI’s latest data. The continent welcomed 102 million visitors to over 2,000 certified exhibitions across 17 countries; Web Summit Lisbon set a record with 71,528 attendees in November 2024, making it the largest edition to date; and Stockholm’s Techarena secured just over €1 million from VC firm BackingMinds to expand internationally. By any reasonable measure, Europe’s events space has absolutely crushed the events game. End of story. Fin. However, from where I’m sitting, the elephant is still lurking quite comfortably in the room. At the risk of being ostracized, I’ll go ahead and ask the question: Why are some of the most innovative companies on the planet still schlepping to Austin for SXSW to make their biggest announcements (Salt Lick and Stubbs BBQ’s aside)? The room vs. the world Looking at the numbers: Europe’s events spark more meaningful connections per square meter than anywhere else on Earth. In 2025, VivaTech set records with 180,000 visitors, a 10% increase from a year earlier. MWC Barcelona authoritatively anchors a circuit stretching from Kigali to Las Vegas. The continent plays host to an estimated 32,000 exhibitions annually, generating 4.3 million full-time equivalent jobs. These are numbers you cannot take lightly. But walk into any European tech conference and you’ll witness something that should make every one of us reach for the Advil: major announcements received by something akin to a boisterous golf clap from 500 or so people. And that’s it. Those announcements then usually disintegrate into the digital ether, seemingly never to be heard of again. Meanwhile, across the pond, a throwaway tweet about the same topic has the potential to garner upwards of 50,000 shares and three podcast invitations faster than you can drink your morning coffee. But data and numbers don’t lie, and when it comes to events, they’re frankly embarrassing. Europe’s events sector processes roughly €108 billion, and is extraordinarily efficient in bringing decision makers together in the same space. European startups consistently struggle with what should be the easier bit: translating those promising conversations into sustained media coverage, investor attention and market validation. The great muppet caper Picture this scene playing out roughly 847 times per week across Europe: Monday: A Finnish startup leveraging AI presents a true breakthrough in supply chain management/optimization/operations to 200 logistics executives at a specialized track. The demo is genuinely impressive. The potential is genuinely massive. The audience is the very definition of target market. All the right pieces are in all the right places. Tuesday: Three tech publications publish brief summaries, perhaps even covering the entire conference, and not just the logistics breakthrough. The fledgling company’s LinkedIn post gets 47 likes (including the founders’ mothers, university mates, and the intern). A single podcast interview is scheduled for three weeks later. It may or may not happen. Wednesday: The story is now less alive than disco was on July 13, 1979. Look that one up, kids. Now let’s compare the same actions to the American playbook, which, if I’m honest, makes me simultaneously impressed and nauseous. The same company makes the announcement at a Bay Area-based event (yep, you know it as well as I do). It generates immediate response across a variety of channels from some truly influential voices and some noise makers, but enough to garner the attention of major media (print, podcast, and pulp) outlets within 48 hours. It then spawns derivative content, and creates a sustained conversation that drives real, true, business development for the startup for weeks. The difference here isn’t the quality of the innovation; it’s how the messaging was amplified. Folks, you can hate me for saying this, but this is where Europe is getting schooled. There is no stopping in the Red Zone Take one look at today’s media landscape, and you’ll leave with a rather morbid impression. The problem isn’t structural fragmentation; it’s an endemic contraction. Leon may be growing, but European tech media is shrinking, at precisely the wrong moment. A brief reminder: TechCrunch, long the go-to outlet for European startup coverage, quietly shut down its entire European operation in 2025 when private equity firm Regent LP acquired the publication. Digital Frontier, the London-based tech publication that launched in early 2024 with a team of 20, “paused” operations just a few months ago, making all 16 staff members redundant. Business Insider cut 21% of its staff in 2025, citing “extreme traffic drops” and AI disruption. Just days ago, we all found out that The Next Web, once one of Europe’s flagship tech conferences and media brands, was shutting down its events and media operations after nearly 20 years. The Financial Times, which bought TNW in 2019, confirmed it was winding down the business by the end of September following a “strategic review.” Conference attendance had dropped to 4,500 in 2025, less than half of pre-pandemic levels. The failure to capture content The folks at Black Unicorn PR earlier this year put together a guide that reveals something anyone working in European tech media already knows but pretends isn’t true: “Unlike the U.S., which has a few dominant tech media outlets and an emerging class of star indie writers, Europe hasn’t yet consolidated its practitioners’ knowledge in one place.” Stop and think about what that really means for a second. Sure, we’ve got strong regional players, and I salute Sifted, EU-Startups, and Tech.eu doing the do. But the lack of a unified amplification machinery, by definition, puts Europe at a disadvantage over Silicon Valley stories that are destined to be heard in Phuket faster than you can finish reading this sentence. To put it bluntly, European tech events suffer from content capture failure. The most valuable insights surface within conversations, at roundtable discussions, and networking sessions that generate no permanent content. Unlike American events, which increasingly operate as content factories designed for social media amplification, European conferences optimize to create value in the room rather than post-event content distribution. All that
