One meaningful point: we're early-stage and we bought a booth and we seem to be getting great value out of it, but we have a very specific target audience not mentioned by the original poster: digital marketers. At least the interactive part of SXSW is now way more a marketing conference than a tech conference and if you regard it in this light you can do very well. If you need to pitch social media managers, it's awesome, if you just want to talk about something consumer-y, not so much.
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One meaningful point: we're early-stage and we bought a booth and we seem to be getting great value out of it, but we have a very specific target audience not mentioned by the original poster: digital marketers. At least the interactive part of SXSW is now way more a marketing conference than a tech conference and if you regard it in this light you can do very well. If you need to pitch social media managers, it's awesome, if you just want to talk about something consumer-y, not so much.