Long tail ticketing company Eventbrite is continuing to make it simple to get tickets for events that are too small for Ticketmaster to bother with, in hopes it can eventually compete with the none-too-popular giant of event ticketing for bigger events.
To tempt new users and woo smaller Ticketmaster venues, Eventbrite has released new tools that let organizers see more information about attendees, as well as analyze ticketing and traffic trends.
"We're democratizing that ticketing regime that's usually very closed off -- we're opening that up," said Eventbrite president Julia Hartz. "Ticketmaster in most cases doesn't even share that data [with event promoters], which we find mind-bending," continued her husband, Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster pretty much own the primary ticket market at large venues in this country, but they can't be bothered with yoga classes, hobbyist gatherings, knitting classes, wonky conferences or free events at small venues.
And these small events add up. The average ticket price to an Eventbrite's payment-required event is $50, and the company expects to ticket $100 million-worth of events this year, with over ten million registered users.
The company was founded in 2006, but its sales didn't take off until more of the population signed on to social networking services.
Unlike Ticketmaster, Eventbrite clearly lists convenience fees alongside the price of tickets from the beginning of the transaction (screenshot to the right). Eventbrite charges 2.5 percent of the price of each ticket plus 99 cents for payment-required events, which comes to about $2.25 for a $50 ticket.
Ticketmaster's 'convenience' fees, which are generally split with the venue, promoter, manager, merchandise company, vendors and/or the band, appear towards the end of the ticketing process and often range between $10 and $20 per ticket.
But perhaps more significantly, Eventbrite charges nothing for free events, which constitute the majority of listings on the site.
"If it's a free ticket, our service is free with all the bells and whistles, which is a great way to introduce people to the service," said Julia Hartz. "We kind of call it our open-source model -- you let a ton of people in, and then we have a specific number that convert to [a] paid [event]."
To attract event organizers, Eventbrite counts on word-of-mouth marketing, and organizers finding out about the service as attendees at other events. About 20 percent of the organizers who use the site were previously attendees, according to Kevin Hartz.
Events on the site include this past summer's Justice Ball with the late DJ AM, Wired's upcoming wine tasting in New York, a naked cooking show, religious events, five-person classes and the 10,000-person Sea of Dreams New Year's Eve party in San Francisco. Some of Eventbrite's events don't take place anywhere -- or they take place everywhere, depending on your point of view. Mark Miller sells tickets through the service to his online classes on how to use Microsoft SharePoint servers, which he decided to start holding virtually, after Skyping his three-year-old kid from Singapore on his birthday.
Having seen social networks help turn his company's $75 million of sales in two years into $100 million in one year, Hartz plans to try to weave Eventbrite into social networks more closely than the competition does. The site's registration pages include prominent links to alert the attendee's friends via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Digg, Delicious and Reddit. Social networks are better at spreading the word about events than Google searches are, according to Hartz.
The Hartzes, along with CTO Renaud Visage, built the service on their own dimes, and they relied heavily on open-source software. They recently took on a $6.5-million investment from Sequoia Capital and now employ 35 people in the hope of turning their $100 million in gross ticket sales this year to billions.
Eventbrite only handles general admission events, so it doesn't compete with Ticketmaster when assigned seating is involved. But the proposed merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster presents an opening for Eventbrite to compete for smaller venues, because those companies, which wish to merge, are eager to demonstrate that competition exists in the ticketing market.
"There is a general feeling that the market is opening up, [because] Ticketmaster and Live Nation are somewhat locked in," said Kevin Hartz. "We're not out to grab the big Shoreline Amphitheaters and reserved seating venues, but it is an opportunity and we are picking up a lot of these smaller venues."
"We're not afraid of [the larger venue market], but it's just a slice of the pie," added Julia Hartz. "There's so much else in the pie -- classes, conferences, trainings, and those smaller venues, fairs and festivals that are directly in our wheelhouse right now, and we're also really excited about the enabling and the empowering of those who aren't [currently] using anything [to ticket their events]. You asked about our competition -- it's actually 'nothing,' because it's people who are still using Excel and e-mail, with invites and checks."
Nonetheless, Kevin Hartz said expanding Eventbrite's sales force in order has allowed the company to spend more time on the phone with Ticketmaster's less-digitally-connected customers, which has helped it make inroads there.
Ultimately, this can only increase the chance that the next time you buy a ticket for an event, you'll see a low convenience fee up front, or that the next time you organize a free or paid event, you'll have access to the ticketing data from your own show. For the moment anyway, Ticketmaster's happy to have the competition -- but probably not as happy as fans would be to see its convenience fees go away.
See Also:
- Live Nation and Ticketmaster Prepare to Merge
- Live Nation/Ticketmaster Merger Faces Obstacles Here and Abroad
- Live Nation, Ticketmaster Merger Risks Antitrust Scrutiny
- Ticketmaster/Live Nation Merger Could Raise Ticket Prices
- Ticketmaster May Have Had Fake Facebook Friends Created (Updated)
- Ticketmaster Chief: Billing Glitch Caused Springsteen Fiasco
- TicketMaster and Live Nation Face the Music in Congress
Photo courtesy of Eventbrite
