You might already know this but niche conferences are part of some larger marketing strategies. Seeing conferences for a product can add legitimacy in the minds of people who are shopping for solutions. But over time I've realized there's more to it, almost an Inception-like quality to a lot of conference topics.
A company I worked for had a whole division dedicated to inventing conferences around products or ideas that other companies wanted to promote. A great example are conferences where there are talks on cloud-based tools. The speakers don't just go up there and say "go buy compute from vendor X". Instead, everything is structured around how to use (often free) tools or techniques that ultimately require investment in "compute or storage from vendor X".
Another, more abstract, example is a conference on programming languages or frameworks. These are great places to push ideas about "the new way" or "the right way" to do something that happen to include something you're selling. I've seen conferences make attendees into low-level developer evangelists. Those people went back to their companies to endorse programming languages and architectures that had a lot of support from particular vendors, and the cycle was complete. It may seem a bit hand-wavy the way I've explained it, but I've seen it work.
My point is, conferences may cost a lot to put on but have quite a few obscured benefits that you have to price in when considering if they're worth it.
It also helps when trying to put limits on greedy users or maintain a ban-list. Attribution is also important, like you said.
Granted, an abusive user could just keep creating new keys, but if they require something like email verification then it's a little bit costlier to circumvent than nothing.
EDIT: Based on other comments, there's no email verification.
Just checked using a camera and you're right; a person right around "conversation distance" from the camera focusing at 35mm looks pretty natural in frame for a video call. It sounds like I underestimated modern continuous autofocus. Great info from you and the sibling comments, thanks.
Amateur photographer looking to learn more here. My initial impression is that a 35mm focal length on a full-frame/35mm film equivalent sensor would have a relatively _wide_ field of view (FOV). Or do I have that backwards?
My other thought is that the suggested lens can stop down to f1.8, which would give a nice narrow depth of field (DOF) and add a pleasant background blur, but it would also be harder to stay in focus during a call. If the person on camera moves forward or backward very much at all when the lens is at f1.8, they would be pretty blurry. So perhaps they could get away with a lens that just stops down to f2.8 or so, albeit with worse low-light performance (smaller aperture, less light coming through).
But take these comments with a grain of salt. It sounds like you have a setup that works well for you.
A company I worked for had a whole division dedicated to inventing conferences around products or ideas that other companies wanted to promote. A great example are conferences where there are talks on cloud-based tools. The speakers don't just go up there and say "go buy compute from vendor X". Instead, everything is structured around how to use (often free) tools or techniques that ultimately require investment in "compute or storage from vendor X".
Another, more abstract, example is a conference on programming languages or frameworks. These are great places to push ideas about "the new way" or "the right way" to do something that happen to include something you're selling. I've seen conferences make attendees into low-level developer evangelists. Those people went back to their companies to endorse programming languages and architectures that had a lot of support from particular vendors, and the cycle was complete. It may seem a bit hand-wavy the way I've explained it, but I've seen it work.
My point is, conferences may cost a lot to put on but have quite a few obscured benefits that you have to price in when considering if they're worth it.