The difference in clear. As reported by eName, the auction in the 2016 Global Domain Industry Summit held in Hangzhou, China brought in over 300m CNY of domain sales. That is about 46m USD!
I think Namescon is the largest domain conference in the US. Namescon 2016 had over 1200 attendees. According to the January 13, 2016 blog post by Konstantinos Zournas, NamesCon 2016 auction made $1.5m USD...
Read MoreLet’s compare these two figures: 46m vs 1.5m. The difference is massive.