My guess is they’re cheaper and there’s just so much pressure to add more things to your CV. “Publish or perish” as the also-predatory and exploitative Academy says.

I guess it only requires a few "recommendable" people to get lured into those conferences just because the occasion made them lower their guard (like Loren in the article). Add to that some people just fake-attending for the CV or the occasion to travel to touristy destination, and you can make quite a few bucks for a relatively low investment, I guess? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In my experience, there are some niche conferences that have no name recognition, but are amazing. A lot of people haven’t heard of the Gordon conferences, and some of the other top ones in my field are open source package user group meetings and company hosted conferences, which could easily appear low-value at first glance.

The 10K+ attendee conferences have lots of name recognition, but I found them to be effectively useless for accomplishing any goal (they’re not even that great for networking), and they could easily be a series of recordings for what you get.

So, I think it’s reasonable for folks to roll the dice on some conferences, because some of them are really hidden gems (and if they suck you can always audible it to a free vacation).