Media conferences vary widely in purpose and scale, from broadcast technology exhibitions to advertising festivals and content markets. The figures below compare attendance, international participation, exhibitors, programming, and measurable digital or business activity across NAB Show 2024, Cannes Lions, IBC2024, and MIPCOM 2025.
Contents
- Attendance and international reach
- Exhibitors, brands, and market presence
- Sessions, speakers, and content formats
- Space, stands, and physical scale
- Business, awards, and networking activity
- Digital reach and media amplification
Attendance and international reach
Attendance figures show the different audiences each event is designed to convene. NAB Show 2024 recorded 61,000+ total registrations, while IBC2024 reported 45,085 visitors. Cannes Lions draws 12k+ attendees, and MIPCOM 2025 had 10,600+ participants. These totals are not perfectly interchangeable: some sources describe registrations, some visitors, and others participants, so the measurement terms matter when comparing events.
NAB Show 2024 visitors and exhibitors came from 160+ countries, according to the NAB Show Media Kit. The same source reported that 26% of the event was international and that the show included 34 delegations. For the 2025 edition, the NAB Show Media Kit expected 63,000 total registrants, reach across 160+ countries, an international share of 26%, and 1,150 exhibitors. Those 2025 figures are expectations, not reported attendance outcomes.
IBC2024 welcomed visitors from 170 countries, giving it the broadest stated country reach among the events with visitor figures in this comparison. The event also drew 2,000+ more visitors than in 2023, as reported in the IBC2024 press release. MIPCOM 2025 had participants from 100+ countries. Separately, the MIPCOM CANNES attending participants information says the market brings together people from over 100 countries; the two statements describe the same broad international character but use different wording.
Cannes Lions reported 97 countries represented among attendees. Its awards program recorded entries from 86 countries, a separate measure of geographic participation. The Cannes Lions Student Academy had 30 students from 30 different countries in 2024, according to the Cannes Lions Student Academy information.
| Event and measurement | Reported scale | Geography or basis |
|---|---|---|
| NAB Show 2024 registrations | 61,000+ | 160+ countries; 26% international |
| IBC2024 visitors | 45,085 | 170 countries |
| Cannes Lions attendees | 12k+ | 97 countries |
| MIPCOM 2025 participants | 10,600+ | 100+ countries |
The figures are best read as indicators of audience structure rather than a single league table. Registrations can include people who do not attend every day, while visitor and participant counts may follow different event reporting methods.
Exhibitors, brands, and market presence
NAB Show 2024 had 1,255 exhibitors and 223 new exhibitors, according to the NAB Show Media Kit. The same media kit reported that more than 26,000 unique companies participated across exhibitors and attendees. It also identified 213 companies spanning the 2023 Fortune 500 and Global Fortune 500 lists in the event’s brand attendance. Another NAB Show source, the NAB Show Turnkey Packages material, reported 1,600+ exhibitors for the 2024 show and said 213 exhibitors were on the 2023 Fortune 500 and Global Fortune 500 lists.
Because the two NAB Show sources use different exhibitor totals, the distinction should remain visible rather than being silently combined. The media kit’s 1,255 figure and the turnkey-packages source’s 1,600+ figure may reflect different counting definitions or reporting contexts. Neither figure should be treated as independently reconciled here.
The NAB Show Media Kit expected 1,150 exhibitors for NAB Show 2025 and 125 new exhibitors. This is a forecast or expectation associated with the 2025 event, not a measured result. The same forecast expected 670,000 square feet of coverage and 550+ sessions, compared with 671,751 square feet and 700+ sessions reported for NAB Show 2024.
Cannes Lions includes 350+ brands and 550+ agencies. Its audience also includes 700+ industry-leading journalists, showing that the festival’s market presence is not limited to attending marketers or agency teams. MIPCOM CANNES has over 1,500 distribution companies and production studios on site, according to its exhibit page, and MIPCOM 2025 had 350+ stands.
IBC2024 had over 1,350 exhibitors, according to the IBC2024 press release. It also featured a new AI Tech Zone and nine innovative Accelerator projects, as reported in IBC2024 in numbers. These measures point to different kinds of presence: exhibitor count describes the commercial floor, while a technology zone and accelerator projects describe curated areas or initiatives.
Sessions, speakers, and content formats
NAB Show 2024 featured 700+ sessions and 1,050+ speakers from five continents, according to the NAB Show Media Kit. More than 200 of those speakers were women. The scale of the program suggests a conference layered onto a large exhibition, with speaker geography and gender representation reported separately from total attendance.
For NAB Show 2025, the media kit expected 550+ sessions. Since this is an expected figure, it should not be read as a confirmed reduction from the 2024 total. The two numbers belong to different measurement statuses: 2024 is reported as an event outcome, while 2025 is presented as an expectation.
Cannes Lions’ content program features 500 speakers, 200+ content sessions, 11 stages, five content streams, and 170 hours of on-stage content. Its 2024 program announcement described more than 150 hours of content and around 500 speakers. The program-level figures are close but not identical because one set describes the festival’s content program and the other describes the 2024 program announcement.
IBC2024 in numbers recorded 11,000+ sessions attended and 588 conference delegates. “Sessions attended” measures participation in programming, whereas “conference delegates” is a people count. The difference makes it inappropriate to divide one by the other without additional attendance methodology.
MIPCOM 2025 reported 3,300+ buyers among its 10,600+ participants. The buyers figure identifies a commercially important subset of the market audience, while total participants includes a broader group.
Space, stands, and physical scale
The physical footprint of a media event provides another way to understand its capacity. NAB Show 2024 occupied 671,751 square feet of net floor space, according to the NAB Show Media Kit. For NAB Show 2025, the media kit expected 670,000 square feet. These figures are close in stated area, but the 2025 number remains an expectation.
IBC2024 increased exhibition space to 46,000 square meters, according to the IBC2024 press release. MIPCOM 2025 covered 19,800+ square meters of exhibition space and had 350+ stands, according to the MIPCOM CANNES exhibit page and the MIPCOM CANNES content market information. The different units and counting terms mean that direct floor-area ranking should be made cautiously.
The contrast between IBC2024’s 1,350+ exhibitors and MIPCOM 2025’s 350+ stands also illustrates why “exhibitor,” “stand,” and “company on site” are not interchangeable. MIPCOM CANNES separately reports over 1,500 distribution companies and production studios on site. That count describes participating companies, while the stand figure describes physical exhibition presences.
Cannes Lions does not have a floor-area figure in the supplied event information, but its program structure provides another scale marker: 11 stages, five content streams, and three areas for connecting. Those are designed spaces within the festival experience rather than exhibition square footage.
Business, awards, and networking activity
Cannes Lions combines conference programming with a major awards operation. Its awards program has 30 specialist Awards and receives 26,000+ pieces of work entered. More than 500 Jury Members participate, and 86 countries are represented in the awards program. These figures describe submissions, adjudication, and geography rather than attendee volume.
The festival’s networking figures include eight Festival Meet-Ups, five daily happy hours, and three areas for connecting. Together, these measurements show a scheduled networking layer in addition to the formal content program. They should not be interpreted as unique networking encounters or attendee counts.
IBC2024 reported 40 corporate buyers at the AV user group pitch. It also recorded 588 conference delegates and more than 1,350 exhibitors, giving a partial picture of how a technical exhibition can connect products, programming, and buyer activity. The event’s nine Accelerator projects provide another structured route for showcasing innovation.
MIPCOM 2025’s 3,300+ buyers are similarly useful as a market-specific measure. Compared with the event’s 10,600+ total participants, the published figures indicate that buyers were a defined part of a wider content-market audience. No unsupported conversion from these rounded figures is made here.
Digital reach and media amplification
IBC2024 in numbers reported 107,034 badges scanned. Badge scans are activity records, not necessarily unique people, so they should be kept separate from the 45,085 visitor count in the IBC2024 press release.
The same IBC2024 source recorded 1,908,318 IBC365 page views in September and 633,259 IBC Show page views in September. It also reported over 120,000 video views, more than 140 media partners, and an estimated 95 million PR coverage reach. The PR figure is explicitly an estimate; it should not be presented as a directly measured audience.
These digital measures extend the event beyond the venue. Page views count visits to specified pages during September, video views count video consumption under the source’s reporting method, and PR reach is an estimated potential audience. They therefore describe different forms of visibility and cannot be added together as a single reach total.
Across the events, the most useful comparison is multidimensional. NAB Show 2024 pairs 61,000+ registrations with 700+ sessions and 1,255 exhibitors in the media-kit account. IBC2024 combines 45,085 visitors, 170 countries, 1,350+ exhibitors, and an estimated 95 million PR coverage reach. Cannes Lions links 12k+ attendees with 500 speakers, 200+ content sessions, and 26,000+ award entries. MIPCOM 2025 reports 10,600+ participants, 3,300+ buyers, and 100+ countries. Each set measures a different way that a media conference can assemble people, ideas, companies, and attention.