Most webinar no-shows say they will watch the replay. How many do, and what is a replay viewer worth?

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Live-only attendance clusters at 40% to 50%. Rates near 60% include on-demand viewers.
2. Replay-only viewing runs from about 2 to about 20 per 100 registrants, depending on what the platform counts.
3. At a 4 to 1 conversion weight, one point of live show-up equals four points of replay-only viewing.
4. Most replay views arrive within seven days. Finish replay reminders by then.

On 5 October 2026 Zoom published findings from its webinar audience behaviour report, drawing on more than 9 million sessions and a survey of 1,000 people. One line stands out. 84% of no-shows say they plan to watch the recording, and 43% admit they feel no urgency about it. Most follow-up sequences are built on the first half of that sentence. The platform data supports the second half. This article counts how many no-shows press play, what a replay viewer is worth next to a live attendee, and where the next hour of work should go.

How many registrants attend live?

Between 40 and 50 in every 100, once you separate live from on demand.

• Goldcast, 26,190 webinars from 522 B2B organisations in 2025: 40%.
• Wistia, webinars hosted on its platform in 2025: about 40%.
• Livestorm, 33,786 sessions from 3,199 organisations in 2025: 47.7%.
• Univid, more than 2,000 webinars to August 2026: 49%.

Rates near 60% count something else. ON24 reports that 60% of registrations convert to attendees. Its glossary defines that rate as registrants who attend a live or on-demand event. Contrast's 61% is stated as live or replay.

Two cautions apply. An average of each webinar's rate runs higher than the pooled total. Goldcast's own totals, 2,220,718 attendees from about 6.8 million registrations, pool to roughly 33% by our arithmetic against the 40% headline. And small hosts sit lower. Banzai's data on Demio webinars found companies under $1 million in revenue had half the attendance rate of the next revenue band.

How many no-shows watch the replay?

Far fewer than 84%. How many depends on who is counting.

The derived rows are ours, not the vendors'. Univid's and Contrast's figures may not share one base, and ON24's page gives two different on-demand shares.

Set against no-shows, Goldcast's figure is about 1 in 25. Livestorm's four views against 92 no-shows is the same order, and views are not people.

Why do the numbers range from 2 to 20?

Because each platform counts a different thing.

• Views or people. Livestorm reports views per webinar. Goldcast and ON24 report people.
• The threshold. ON24's documentation counts a registrant as an attendee once they launch the audience console, live or on demand. Marketo's on-demand webinars on Adobe Connect count a view only after one minute of watching and stop tracking 30 days after the event.
• Who can watch. Livestorm found 62% of teams limit the replay to registrants and 20% make it public. Public replays averaged 14.60 on-demand views against 3.97. That is about 3.7 times as many, though the report words it as 368% more.
• Who is a registrant. Platforms with on-demand libraries may count people who signed up after the live date. Such a person is an on-demand attendee who never missed anything. No page we read confirms or rules this out.

For the narrow question, registered and missed it and then watched, Goldcast and Livestorm are the like-for-like evidence. Plan on roughly 1 in 25 no-shows where the replay is limited to registrants. Treat 1 in 6 as a realistic upper case.

The figures are unstable even inside one vendor. Goldcast said nearly a third of live attendees re-watched on demand in its 2024 data. Its 2025 data puts the same behaviour at 10.61%.

Is a replay viewer worth as much as a live attendee?

The evidence splits by the kind of metric.

Engagement favours replay viewers. Goldcast reports a 91% average completion rate on demand against 74% live. Half of on-demand viewers in Zoom's survey said the recording was as valuable as the live session. That is partly selection. The few who press play are the keen ones, and they can skip.

Pipeline favours live. The only comparison we found comes from Visionary Marketing, a UK agency reporting on 412 webinars across 184 client accounts from January 2025 to February 2026. Live attendees became a sales opportunity within 90 days at 4.0%. Replay viewers did so at 1.0%.

That study has limits. It is one agency's clients, the underlying data is unpublished and no attribution model is stated. It is also confounded. In the same dataset, sales contacted live attendees within an hour 87% of the time and replay viewers 22% of the time. Some of the four-to-one gap is slower follow-up.

Univid reads its own data the same way: "Live is still king." The working assumption here is that a replay viewer is worth about a quarter of a live attendee, until your own CRM says otherwise.

What does the ledger look like for one webinar?

A hypothetical example. A company gets 600 registrants. Assume 4% of live attendees and 1% of replay-only viewers become opportunities within 90 days, and count nothing for people who did neither.

Baseline: 40% attend live, which is 240 people. Of the 360 no-shows, 18 watch the replay, or 3 per 100 registrants. The other 342 do neither.

• Live: 240 x 4% = 9.6 opportunities.
• Replay-only: 18 x 1% = 0.18.
• Total: 9.78.

Now compare three fixes.

Five points of show-up is worth about six and a half times a doubling of replay recovery. In the second row, the 330 no-shows still yield replay viewers at the same 5% of no-shows, which is 16.5 people.

The rule that falls out: at these weights, one point of live show-up equals four points of replay-only viewing. Replay recovery wins only when it can move four times as many people for the same effort.

At the top of the range the answer changes. With 20 replay-only viewers per 100 registrants, the same company has 120 of them. They produce 1.2 opportunities, as much as five points of show-up, and faster follow-up could add another 1.2.

The general form is opportunities per 100 registrants = L x l + R x r, where L and R are live and replay-only counts and l and r are your own opportunity rates.

One group is missing from every sum. The 342 who did neither are the largest group, 57 of every 100 registrants. We found no public data on what a summary email converts them at, and no controlled test of sending or withholding a replay.

What should you do first?

Do not choose between live and on-demand formats on vendor comparisons. One on-demand vendor sets a 40% live attendance rate beside 83% for its own on-demand sessions, with no method. A session someone starts when they choose is not comparable with turning up at a fixed time. Marin Software's 2020 split test, which divided its email list at random between a live invitation and an on-demand one, favoured the live invitation.

A seven-step method

1. Pull three counts from the webinar platform for the last three to five webinars: registrants, live attendees and people who watched the replay without attending live. If the platform reports views, record that it is views.
2. Set the rule for watched. Use a minimum watch time and a 30-day cut-off. Count people who registered after the live date separately.
3. Write the ledger per 100 registrants. Pool the totals across webinars. Do not average the rates.
4. Check the CRM. Live, on demand and no-show should be three values. HubSpot's Zoom integration page lists attendance and duration but does not say on-demand views sync. A click on a replay link should not mark someone as attended, for the reasons in bot clicks in email.
5. Attach your own opportunity rates to live and replay-only. Until you have them, use 4 to 1 as a placeholder and label it.
6. Compare the fixes in opportunities, as in the table above. Pick the largest.
7. Rebuild the sequence around seven days. Zoom's data puts 72% of replay views in the first week. The agency dataset found 79% within seven days and 96% within 30. A replay reminder on day 10 is talking to an empty room.

Where this stops

The pipeline weight rests on one agency dataset. The replay range rests partly on our subtraction of vendor headline rates. Zoom's survey dates are not given in its summary, and we read the summary, not the full report. Use the method, and replace every borrowed rate with your own within three webinars.

A replay viewer is still a lead who needs an answer. Our note on demo request follow-up makes the same point about coverage. If you want the ledger habit applied to how AI engines and search describe your brand, the waitlist is open.

Questions

What is a good webinar attendance rate?

Live-only benchmarks for B2B webinars sit between about 40% and 50% of registrants. Goldcast reports 40% across 26,190 webinars in 2025, Wistia about 40%, Livestorm 47.7% and Univid 49%. Figures near 60%, such as ON24's 60% and Contrast's 61%, include people who watched on demand.

How many webinar no-shows watch the replay?

Far fewer than say they will. Goldcast measured 2.62% of registrants watching only on demand. Livestorm reports about four on-demand views per webinar against 92 no-shows when the replay is limited to registrants. Univid and Contrast figures imply 8 to 17 per 100 registrants. Measure your own.

Is a replay viewer worth as much as a live attendee?

On the one pipeline comparison we found, no. An agency dataset of 412 webinars put live attendees at 4.0% to a sales opportunity within 90 days and replay viewers at 1.0%. In the same data replay viewers got much slower sales follow-up, so part of the gap is treatment.

When should the webinar replay email go out?

Within a day, and replay reminders should finish inside a week. Zoom's 2026 data puts 72% of replay views in the first week, with a median of 3.7 days. A separate agency dataset found 41% of replay views in the first 24 hours and 79% within seven days.

Sources

1. Marketing Dive (sponsored content by Zoom), The 2026 webinar audience behavior report marketingdive.com
2. Goldcast, 2026 B2B Webinar Benchmark Report goldcast.io
3. Goldcast, 2025 B2B Webinar Benchmark Report goldcast.io
4. Livestorm, Webinar Benchmark Report 2026, The Pipeline Truth livestorm.co
5. Univid, Univid Webinar Insights 2026 univid.io
6. Contrast, Webinar Benchmarks from 1M+ Registrants (2026 Data) getcontrast.io
7. Contrast Help, HubSpot marketing events help.getcontrast.io
8. ON24, Key takeaways from the 2026 Webinar Benchmarks Report on24.com
9. ON24 Glossary, Attendance conversion rate on24.com
10. ON24 Support, Webcast Intelligence Report Audience Tab support.on24.com
11. Wistia, 2026 Industry Benchmarks for Your Webinar Analytics wistia.com
12. Visionary Marketing, Webinar Marketing Statistics 2026, 412-Webinar Benchmark Study visionary-marketing.co.uk
13. Adobe Experience League, Marketo Engage, On-Demand Webinars experienceleague.adobe.com
14. HubSpot Knowledge Base, Use HubSpot and Zoom webinars knowledge.hubspot.com
15. Banzai, Banzai Unveils 2024 Webinar Insights Guide banzai.gcs-web.com
16. Marin Software, Live vs on demand webinar marinsoftware.com
17. eWebinar, Marketing page ewebinar.com

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