It's worth noting that many prestigious genuine conferences do not reimburse speakers and charge them for a full price ticket as well.
For example, all the ACM conferences.
I actually like this - everyone contributes to the costs, and speakers are just attendees like everyone else.
I've seen people get extremely irate when they see this, saying it's a scam, but at many conferences speakers are just normal attendees like anyone else.
But for most conferences, interesting speakers provide the whole value of the conference - it is what attracts attendees. Therefore, organizers make decent money off of speakers, so no, they are not like regular attendees.
Really? My mental model is that the value of the conference lies entirely in network effects. That is, it's valuable for people deep in topic X to go to a conference for X because they expect many other people who are also deep in topic X to go to that conference. The speakers are just a means to an end, to get the initial core group interested and start the quadratic snowball going.
I think the organiser of the conference is providing the value to the speaker, not the other way around. They're providing a platform for the speaker to talk about their project.
For example, all the ACM conferences.
I actually like this - everyone contributes to the costs, and speakers are just attendees like everyone else.
I've seen people get extremely irate when they see this, saying it's a scam, but at many conferences speakers are just normal attendees like anyone else.