Pay to Play: What It Costs to Be Seen at the AAO

I wanted to know what it costs a company to be visible to us.

Not in a sinister way. Every trade association sells access to its members and every one of them should be judged on whether it tells you the price. So I went looking for the AAO’s price list the way a company would.

Some of it is right there. Some of it took a while. And one part of it I could not get at all, which turned out to be the most interesting answer of the three.

The part that is published, and published well

The exhibitor prospectus for the 2027 Annual Session in Vancouver is a normal web page. No login. Here is the floor.

That is clear, and I want to say so before I say anything else. A company can work out its cost in about ninety seconds.

What decides who stands where

The floor plan is not first come, first served. It runs on priority points, and the prospectus states the qualifying line verbatim:

“Companies with 30 priority points or more OR total spend in 2025 is greater than $10,000 in sponsorship”

Those companies choose their booths in tiered windows through October 2026, sorted by how many points they hold. Thirty and up goes first, then 27 to 29, then 25 to 26, then 22 to 24, then 20 to 21. Everybody else contracts starting October 19, by which point the good positions are gone.

So the answer to who stands at the front of the hall is: whoever spent the most with the AAO last year.

Points come from sponsorship, from advertising in the Bulletin and the AJO-DO, from booking staff rooms in the AAO hotel block, from exhibiting at constituent meetings, from corporate contributions to the AAO Foundation, and from serving on the Exhibitor Advisory Committee.

What one point costs

The AAO’s supplier terms for the 2026 Annual Session put it plainly: “1 priority point is worth roughly $2500 in sponsorship & advertising dollars.”

Thirty points at that rate is $75,000, though the $10,000 sponsorship route is the cheaper door and most companies presumably use it.

Worth noting that the exchange rate is in the terms document and not on the prospectus page. The web page tells a company the threshold. The document tells it the price. Those are different pieces of information and only one of them is easy to find.

Now the part where the AAO comes out looking fine

This is completely normal, and I would rather say that myself than have somebody say it to me.

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons runs the same system and its rate is one point for every $1,000 spent. That is three times more aggressive than the AAO’s $2,500. Paid booth placement is standard practice across the entire trade show industry, medical and otherwise.

If this bothers you, be bothered at the model, not at the AAO specifically. On this one they are on the mild end and they publish the rules.

And the part you cannot price at all

Two things I could not find a number for anywhere.

What a sponsored session costs. At Winter Conference a company can buy a “Lunch n’ Learn” and present to a room during the break. The AAO is upfront that the product exists. The price sits behind an exhibitor console that requires a signed contract, so a member cannot see it and neither can a company that has not already committed.

What the endorsement logo costs. The mechanism is published on the AAO’s supplier page: a royalty “typically calculated as a percentage of sales to AAO members,” plus a $5,000 annual minimum on AAO advertising, plus a booth. The percentage itself is not published. Not by the AAO, not by any endorsed partner, not in any filing. I went looking at other associations for a comparison figure and could not find a published rate for any of them either, so this looks like a gap across the whole sector rather than something the AAO invented.

The thing I ran into myself

I tried to pull the AAO’s supplier terms document with an ordinary automated web tool, the same way a search engine would.

It refused, and told me why: the AAO’s robots.txt instructs automated readers to ignore every PDF on the site.

The documents are still there. A person who has the link can click it and read it. But a search engine will not index them, which means if you go looking for the AAO sponsorship prospectus the way anyone actually looks for anything, you will not find it.

I do not think that is a cover-up. My guess is it is an old setting somebody configured years ago for a reason that made sense at the time and nobody has revisited. The effect is the same either way, and it is the reason the price list was harder to assemble than it should have been.

What you cannot buy, which matters

I had heard you have to pay to speak at Annual Session. That is not true, and I am glad to be able to say so.

The AAO runs an open Call for Speakers with published criteria, judged by its Committee on Conferences and Meetings. Applicants complete a conflict of interest disclosure. There is no fee to apply and no fee to speak. Industry people can apply too, but it is an application, not a purchase.

I looked for evidence that companies can buy their way into the clinical program itself, because at least one peer society sells exactly that. If the AAO does it, it is not visible in the published agenda and I could not find it.

So: the floor is for sale, positioned by spend, at industry-standard rates, with the rules published. The podium is not. That is a meaningful line and the AAO is holding it.

The questions I would actually like answered

Not accusations. Things I do not know.

What does a sponsored session cost?

What percentage does an endorsed company pay, and is there a range?

Why are the PDFs excluded from search, and would the AAO consider removing that line?

And the one underneath the rest of it. The companies selling to us can see this entire price list, because it is written for them. We are the product being priced and we have to go digging. Why is the supplier-facing version the clear one?

I would rather print their answers than my guesses. If someone from the AAO wants to explain any of this, I will run it in full and unedited at the top of this article.

About this series

I am an AAO member. I am not against the association and I am not alleging wrongdoing by anyone. Everything here comes from the AAO’s own published pages, its IRS Form 990 filings, or documents published by other associations, and all of it is linked. If any of it is wrong, tell me and I will correct it within a few business days and mark the correction clearly.

Earlier in this series: Follow the Money: Who Funds the AAO Now? and Investor. Endorser. Award-Giver. When the AAO Does All Three.

Next in this series

What the AAO board pays itself. It is public record, and almost nobody has read it.