I have been co-organising a Theory Workshop https://sites.google.com/view/wecth/home  for some years. The current COVID-19 pandemic has implications for seminar organizers and speakers. Some thoughts. 1/13

Webinars are popping up everywhere, see e.g. https://sites.google.com/site/mcardosolopes/econwebinarscovid19. What does it mean in the long term? 2/13

Critical observation: there are large economies of scale: if you can organize a good seminar with the audience of 20, then you can do that for 200 or 2000 at a minimal marginal cost. 3/13

Therefore, instead of traveling to 5-10 different departments, speakers will just deliver a single seminar broadcasted live to many people and recorded for even more. That is a great platform if you can get invited. 4/13

Here is a conjecture: Webinars will follow the model of academic journals. What do I mean by this? 5/13

1st: There will be a few general-audience webinars that are very prestigious. Getting in will have huge career implications for junior academics. Being a gatekeeper (a member of the “editorial” board) will give you great influence. 6/13

2nd: There will be a market segmentation with dozens of good field webinars, with talks delivered by researchers in that field (perhaps very narrow), attended only by an interested audience (perhaps very small). 7/13

3rd: The “dissemination” role of the seminars will decline, and the “validation” role will increase. Exactly like the journals which are not for publishing but for signaling quality. This will play a role in recognition, promotion decisions, etc. 8/13

4th: Implications for webinar organisers: work out how an invitation decision is made, think about anonymous referees helping you with the decision (sic!) 9/13

5th: Beware of commercial entities trying to get into this market. Having control of a seminar requiring all Universities and Libraries of the world to subscribe for $1000s could be very lucrative 10/13

6th: The point is that the natural owner of such webinars will *not* be Economics Departments! Who then? 11/13

I don’t know. Maybe existing economic journals (they have the right mechanisms), maybe economic associations (they organize meetings), maybe Elseviers of this world (they have knowhow) 12/13

Innocent futurology never harmed anyone. Thanks for reading. 13/13

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Ok, a post-thought: on the other hand, an entry cost to establish a webinar seems smaller than for establishing a journal. A group of academics could do that easily... 14/14