The only reason why any conference needs sponsors is to help bring ticket prices down, besides that there's no real reason for sponsorship. Well, except maybe increasing profits for organizers (there are several strings of conferences organized by companies that do it for profit. Can't blame them either, the only costs involved in a lot of dev conferences are the venue, food and drink, and travel/lodging expenses for the speakers - usually the speakers do it for free or for marketing reasons (recognisable by the "evangelist" job title)
You have never organized a moderate or large conference. Your list doesn't even cover all major areas. No logistics? No electricity, network and video recording? None of the legally-required (depending on venue + number of attendees) professional personnel (event technicians, medical, fire, maybe an electrician. optionally security, cleaners). Not even insurance? Not even gaffer tape (not kidding, it's expensive)! (And I'm assuming your volunteers have enough time for all the time-intensive tasks.)
Attracting visitors is hard. Getting good speakers is harder. You can't just let the "evangelists" speak, or your talks will be advertisements. Worse than sponsors!
Low-cost, single-track, single-evening events for fifty people or so (= small event) are possible. They'll just not have any significant impact. (They'll definitely not have an impact without lecture recordings.)
I can say from experience that low-cost, non-profit, moderate (500+ people) events are possible even without listed sponsors or paid talks but have to be grown over many years and require goodwill from everyone (venue + various organizations and student groups) around.
And Congress is special, you can't duplicate it easily. It's grown over decades, it's the largest European hacker conference now (and btw: so that niche is filled now). They know in advance that they'll sell all tickets. It's prestigious. It attracts top-notch speakers. That would have attended anyway, of course. _Everyone_ _wants_ to help (time, money, equipment, and favors you can't just buy with money). It's not for profit. Dozens of volunteers begin working on it days to months before the Congress, a select few full time. Some are experts; you couldn't afford to pay them. Multiple hundreds of visitors volunteer on-site, working for the fun of it, free water and a special t-shirt. And it still costs 90€/ticket.
Thanks. I was about to chime in with how ridiculous events of all kinds are... They're just so hard and nothing ever goes according to plan.
One of my favorite phrases is "You can't spell 'party' without 'disaster'" which is something people only understand if they've thrown a big thing before.
> largest European hacker conference now (and btw: so that niche is filled now)
There are quite a few European hacker conferences and CCC's ties to hackers (in the computer security sense) are getting weaker as it gets more political and less technical.
Please name at least one conference which has a similar number of participants, ah forget that even 10% would surprise me. The CCC was political since its beginning.
Obviously nothing of the same scale, and yes it was always political, but the balance is shifting away from security to all of their other tracks, I counted up the talks from last year and only 25% were in the Security track vs 45% from 23c3.
There were 67 hacking talks at 23c3, and 29 Security tracks at 32c3, it's very clearly on the downhill as there are less talks, and people become less interested in submitting and attending.
The second largest European IT-related conference is FOSDEM (5000 participants); of course it has a different focus. But it's more productivity, less party.
Then there are conferences like HITB Sec Conf that are much smaller, but focus exclusively on security - many (probably most) Congress attendees don't really have a security/hacking background, so I'm not sure the total number of attendees is a good metric for "is it a good security conference?".
Though Congress does get all the high-profile talks. And there is no European hacker conference with nearly as much visibility as C3.
you speak of "the only costs" as if that's negligible. The eurucamp - a small to moderately sized nonprofit conference - had an operating budget of close to 90.000 euros in 2015. If you're interested in a breakdown of costs, they did a blog post about it http://blog.eurucamp.org/2015/05/24/eurucamp-finances/
The CCC tickets are about €90. Which is considerably cheaper than many other conferences, incl the CPDP conference. So why are sponsored-conferences so expensive?
CCC is so cheap because a ton of people put a ton of their time in without receiving compensation (or on a sponsoring companies time) and on top of that, other things are donated by companies (what do you think where the bandwith for the network comes from). Asking your question is akin to "The linux kernel is available for free, why does photoshop cost 1000 USD?" The congress is an outlier, so far out that it's off the chart.
