It’s Zoom’s world and we’re just living in it. The rise of meeting software.

This data was originally featured in the September 28, 2022 newsletter, found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2022/09/inbox-insights-september-28-2022-failure-points-in-measurement-meeting-software/

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s look at something a little offbeat, meeting software. This morning, I was having trouble with a client’s Zoom login to sign into a meeting with them, and as I was waiting for the powers that be to get sorted and smile upon the meeting, I looked at the URL. it was something like us06web.zoom.us. That got me thinking… people can sign up for public zoom meetings and webinars. They can do the same with Google Meet and WebEx. What would it look like if we visualized that data?

So – after the client meeting – I went over to our trusty SEO software and pulled all the back links for zoom.us, webex.com, and meet.google.com. What did I find?

What this tells is, unsurprisingly, is that after the start of the pandemic, usage of all three services skyrocketed. What’s telling, however, is what happened afterwards. Vaccines became available in 2021, and in many parts of the world, “business as usual” was in effect by 2022. Yet what we see in the data is that publicly-listed online meetings and webinars have skyrocketed despite these conditions.

So what? In short, the idea of going back to the way we did things pre-pandemic is a lost cause. There’s no going back, no putting the genie back in the bottle as it were. Instead, the rapid digital transformation which began in 2020 has only accelerated.

What are the most frequent domains of the pages for each service?

At first blush, it’s completely unsurprising that Cisco.com would have tons of Webex links – after all, Webex is owned by Cisco. What’s more interesting, however, is that many of the other domains only have one provider, save for WayRanks, about a quarter of the way down the chart.

Why is this interesting? Because we would expect to see more websites with multiple providers, particularly Zoom and its freemium model. Instead, people seem to have a vendor of choice and rigidly stick to it, at least in the meeting links that are publicly shared.

What should we take away from this rather casual exploration of meeting links? A few things. First, if you’re at a point where you’re choosing platforms, right now the dominant platform overall is Zoom. If you want to conduct online events and such, in terms of compatibility, that’s what most folks are using.

Second, people appear fairly rigid on their choice of platform, so if you’re moving into a new organization, the chances of them making a switch appear fairly low, given the single-choice uses we see across domains.

Third, SEO data has many, MANY uses outside of traditional SEO. If you’re considering doing some marketing with data, it should be one of your first go-to sources for interesting information.