Every year it’s the same story, you go to CES, you run around making sure you don’t miss any of your booth appointments and try to hit every other booth on the way. That said, every year news hits the wire that CES is smaller than the previous year.

This year was no different. We made a whole bunch of booth appointments and hit the ground running, but even we were a little surprised to hear how much attendance at CES had fallen in ’09. Sure, we knew it would be smaller than last year, but that’s a given, right? One of the biggest challenges at CES is that you have so much to see, in such a short amount of time. The show gets flak every year for being so big. There was a time when there were two Consumer Electronics Shows a year, and now that it’s all rolled into one, the size makes it physically impossible to see everything.

The current economic crisis has affected everyone but a lot of people are still in denial. It’s not really a crisis, just a hiccup. We expected that there’d be a drop in attendance of between 10 and 15 percent and that people would flip out over it. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the CEA has said that based on preliminary estimates, just over 110,000 people attended the show last week--130,000 was expected.

That’s 20,000 less than the estimated number for this years attendees and 23 percent less than last year’s 141,150, which saw a drop of just 2,545 from the previous year (total number of attendees in 2007 was 143,695).

The drop in attendees proves once again that no industry is untouchable when it comes to financial downturn. Sure, Sir Howard Stringer can say that, when it comes to technology and innovation, the show must go on no matter what the economic climate; but the show can’t go on without a fist full of dollars. In Las Vegas last week they were already selling off space for 2010. Right now, people just don’t have the money to buy it. With next year’s attendance set to drop even further, who knows what will happen to CES.

What do you think? Do you think that companies should participate in these shows or host their own?