Virtual events are events held online. Depending on the purpose, they can be hosted in the form of invite-only webinars, publicly available live streams, online conferences requiring paid passes or informal social media events, e.g. live tweeting or AMA (ask me anything) sessions.

Virtual events are typically hosted on a video conferencing platform, which uses the internet to stream or record audio and video. Live-streamed events are experienced by audience members synchronously (at the same time) while recorded events are experienced asynchronously (not at the same time).