content: Why do you need conference  Because self publishing a YouTube video or blog, no matter how good it is,  does not count as a publication in academia;  and scoring those (and more importantly scoring citations of those) is crucial to keeping your job (if not tenured) and keeping money coming in to fund your research or lab.   To some extent it also works similarly in some real life jobs as well. Besides, everybody loves the occasional free vacation,  some of these conference can be hosted in some swanky locations that you probably couldn’t afford on an assistant-prof/junior lecturer/post-doc salary... source :  academia escapee here...who naively thought the real world would be better.