Who pays speaker fees, conferences or companies?

Companies pay most of the speaker fees. Corporate rooms pay $4,500 at the median, and the top of the ladder reaches $1 million a talk. The money sits in sales kickoffs, leadership summits, and customer days at Nike, Coca-Cola, and the Fortune 500. The big festivals are the shop window. Web Summit, the world's largest tech conference, fills Lisbon with 71,000 people and brings the city about €200 million in 4 days, which is 1 in 6 euros Lisbon earns that week. SXSW, the tech, film, and music festival in Austin, brought $377 million to the city in 2024. The stages are big, but the speaker fees are small and sometimes zero. A speaker takes the festival stage to win the corporate booking that follows. When a bureau brings that booking, it keeps 15 to 25% of the fee. I run my own direct channel plus 3 to 4 signed bureaus.