You asked a speaker for a virtual fee expecting roughly a quarter of their stage rate, and the number that came back was closer to two thirds. Either they are overcharging or your assumption about what you were buying was wrong.
Usually it is the assumption. Virtual should cost less than in-person, and it does. But the saving comes from a specific place, and once you know where, the quote stops being mysterious and starts being negotiable on the right terms.
The saving is travel, and only travel
An in-person booking is not a 45-minute purchase. It is a flight, a hotel night, an airport transfer at both ends, and one to two working days the speaker cannot sell to anybody else. For a speaker whose calendar is their inventory, those lost days are the largest cost in the transaction, and they are priced into the fee whether or not anyone itemizes them.
Take the travel out and that cost disappears. What remains is the talk.
What does not change is everything that makes the talk good. The research, the tailoring to your sector and your audience, the pre-event call with you, the rehearsal, the revision after you say the third section is not landing for your people. That work is identical whether the delivery is from a stage in Chicago or a desk in Lagos.
So the honest formula is: virtual fee equals in-person fee, minus travel time, plus remote production. That last term is the one people forget.
Why remote adds cost back
A speaker who is genuinely good on camera has spent money to get there. A proper key light, a decent microphone, a wired connection, a background that is not a bookshelf, and usually a second machine so that a crash mid-session does not end the event. Some run a producer on a second line to handle chat, polls and the moment when your platform decides to update itself.
There is design work too. A room forgives a talk that builds slowly to a payoff at minute forty. A remote audience does not, because leaving is silent and free. A talk that works on screen has to be restructured, not just relocated: shorter arcs, interaction built in throughout rather than saved for the end, and a plan for what happens when the first Q&A prompt is met with nothing. The mechanics of that are in our virtual keynote guide.
And there is a tech check, which should happen on your platform, with your security settings, before the day. That is an hour of the speaker's time that an in-person booking never needed.
None of this is padding. It is the difference between an event and a meeting with worse production.
What the numbers actually look like
Our virtual packages are published rather than quoted on request:
| Package | Starting fee | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Virtual keynote | $2,500 | A single live keynote built for remote audiences, with moderated Q&A |
| Keynote + workshop | $5,000 | A keynote plus an interactive session your team applies the same day |
| Virtual series | $7,500 | Up to three connected sessions, with an edited highlight reel |
Those are starting fees, our 17.5% commission is inside the number rather than added afterwards, and recording rights are included from the keynote-plus-workshop package upward. Speakers with a large public profile quote above the band, sometimes far above it, for the same reason they do in person.
For comparison, most in-person keynotes we place sit in the $10,000 to $30,000 range once travel is accounted for. The full breakdown of what pushes any quote up or down, virtual or not, is in our 2026 speaker fee guide, and the whole of our commission model is on the pricing page.
If your budget is genuinely fixed, the useful move is to ask for both numbers side by side. A speaker quoting $18,000 in person and $6,000 remote is telling you something coherent about their travel cost. A speaker quoting $18,000 in person and $16,500 remote is telling you they do not really want to do it remotely, which is worth knowing before you book them.
What a virtual package should include
Get these in writing. Every one of them is a place where a cheap quote turns out to be expensive.
A pre-event alignment call. Thirty minutes with you, before the material is finalized, so the talk references your actual situation. A speaker who will not do this is selling you a recording with a live camera on it.
A tech check on your platform. Zoom, Teams, Webex, or whatever your enterprise runs, with your SSO and your restrictions in place. Not a check on the speaker's preferred platform. This is where most virtual events break, and it breaks in the first four minutes when three hundred people are watching.
A named fallback. What happens if the speaker's connection dies at minute twelve. Dial-in audio, a producer who can hold the room, a slot moved to later in the agenda. Ask. The answer takes ten seconds and saves an event once a year.
Tailoring, specified. How many slides get changed for you, and whether examples are drawn from your industry. "Customized" without a number attached means the title slide.
Interaction, designed. Moderated Q&A as a minimum. Chat monitored throughout by someone who is not the speaker. Polls and breakouts if the format supports them. The package structure on our virtual page sets out which formats include what.
The recording terms. Covered below, and worth its own conversation.
Recording rights are a separate negotiation
The single most common post-event dispute is about the recording, and it is entirely avoidable.
If the contract does not mention rights, assume you have none. The speaker owns their performance and their material by default, and "we recorded it for the people who could not attend" is not a defense if you then put it on your intranet for two years.
Settle four things before signing:
- Scope. Internal only, or external publication too. Internal is usually granted without argument. Public distribution is a different product and is sometimes refused outright, because a free recording of a paid talk competes with the speaker's next booking.
- Duration. Thirty days, twelve months, perpetual. Twelve months of internal access is a reasonable ask and a common landing point.
- Clips. Whether you can cut it into segments for social or training. Some speakers are happy to be clipped and some consider it a rights issue, and the ones who mind, mind a lot.
- Edits. Whether the speaker gets to review before you publish. If you are putting their face on your public channels, they usually should.
Our packages include recording rights from the middle tier upward, which exists precisely so that this conversation happens at quote stage rather than three weeks after the event when your comms team wants a clip.
What to refuse to pay for
Some line items are legitimate. Others are stage-booking habits that survived the move to remote and should not have.
Travel on a virtual booking. Obvious, and it still appears. If there is no travel, there is no travel line.
A platform licence fee. You have a platform. Use it. A speaker who insists you buy access to their webinar tool is selling you their preference at your cost.
Per-viewer or per-seat pricing on a live session. A live keynote is one delivery. Charging by headcount treats it like a software licence. If your audience is unusually large, that is a fair reason for a higher flat fee, negotiated as a flat fee.
Separate charges for the tech check or the alignment call. These are part of doing the job properly, not extras. Any package that unbundles them is quoting you a low headline number and rebuilding it in the small print.
"Studio production" you did not ask for and cannot see. If a fee includes production, ask what specifically. A multi-camera setup and a live-switched feed is real and worth paying for on a flagship all-hands. A ring light is not a production budget.
A rush premium on a date you booked four months ago. Short-notice premiums are legitimate when the notice is short. Check the calendar before accepting one.
The way to actually get a good number
Ask three speakers for a virtual quote against the same written brief, and ask each of them what is included rather than what it costs. The spread in what is included is almost always wider than the spread in price, and it is the part that determines whether the session works.
Then look at what the fee is doing. A cheaper speaker who has never held a remote room and will not rehearse on your platform is not a saving. It is a three-hundred-person event with a dead Q&A and a quiet exodus at minute eighteen, which nobody will tell you about because leaving a virtual session is silent.
We treat virtual as its own format rather than a discounted version of the stage booking, and remote-native delivery is one of the things we check individually before a name reaches you. Anyone can claim to be an AI expert. We check that, and we check whether they can hold a camera, which is a separate skill entirely. What that checking involves is set out in how we verify a speaker.
If you want real numbers against your actual event rather than a range, four questions gets you a shortlist within 24 hours, with the speaker fee and our 17.5% on the same line.