In another impressive startup milestone, Eventbrite has just updated the counter on their site and announced that they sold their 50,000,000th ticket. It's been stuck at 49.2MM for a while so this was expected. Eventbrite has emerged as the hands-down, only option for event ticketing online. They have tweaked their entire product to suit the needs of a conference/concert/event organizer and ticket buyer. I started using them a few months ago and have been extremely impressed by the customization and monitization tools they provide the event organizers. While there is no community element to the site, their payments platform makes Meetup's look like it's in the stone age.
Last summer Eventbrite raised a $50MM round of funding bringing their total to almost $80MM in funding. Founded in 2006 by husband and wife team Kevin and Julia Hartz, Eventbrite takes anywhere between 2%-10% of every ticket sale. The higher the price the lower the fee (actually they charge 105% for any $1 tickets). In December of 2010 they announced $400MM in gross ticket sales. One can assume that number is up significantly in the past 14 months.
Some of Eventbrite's greatest features include being about to easily add multiple ticket price options and packages. This is a simple but impactful differentiator that has helped set it apart and drive demand for the organizers. As basic as this sounds, they also accept all major credit cards and payment type. It's simple, but again some of their competition haven't figured that out yet.
Their success is a testament to how broken the industry that they have disrupted is, as the product still has a long ways to go. While it has a clean and simple design, it doesn't have the usability you would expect from a massive Silicon Valley giant. That said - they are Facebook to TicketMaster's MySpace, and if I'm an executive over there I'm updating my resume on the double. Congrats to this team on their amazing success thus far. IPO here we come.
