Sorry, that's 5 hours in addition to reading through each abstract, spending time checking linkedin, github and other profiles, watching videos of other talks t

Sorry, that's 5 hours in addition to reading through each abstract, spending time checking linkedin, github and other profiles, watching videos of other talks they've done, doing due diligence to make sure the speaker's presence isn't going to cause the conference problems and that's pretty much for each person on the CFP panel (as far as they're willing to do it. I do the whole thing on each and every submission we receive). I do this because it's easy to have a snappy title and a good sounding abstract that pushes the right buttons, only to end up with someone that doesn't live up to it because they're bad at communicating, or they wrote the abstract before doing the research and didn't get round to it until the night before the conference and so on. And while we're more around the $500 mark than $1000 your point is absolutely valid. If you can't take pride in your work and do a proper job then you shouldn't really do it at all, whether it's running a conference or cleaning windows.