It’s not probably a coincidence that you
guys arose or grew
right alongside of Facebook basically, right?
Right.
In addition to riding the PayPal wave, you rode sort of the Facebook wave.
Right.
Is that where like a significant portion
of your traffic comes from or your…?
It’s an interesting story.
So when we launched, we took
a pretty heavy bet on SEO.
We knew that we, much like
Yelp, produces content rich
pages on local… We knew
that our event pages would be
extremely content rich and so
we took a big effort
to make sure we were highly optimized
for search engine and discovery.
And that definitely served its purpose.
So Google search was our number one driver of traffic.
In mid-2008, we started to
see Facebook pop up to
our top 10 drivers of traffic to the site.
And when we went into
investigate what user behavior was
driving that, we found out
that organizers were were taking
their events from Eventbrite and
manually republishing those event
details in a Facebook event
templateand then linking back
to the Eventbrite site to sell tickets.
That was driving a pretty significant amount of traffic to our site.
That was right around when Facebook
Connect launched, so we were one
of the first partners to use
the event’s API to integrate
and use, you know, create a one-button push.
Is that typically people sharing with their friends?
Or is it like bands sharing with their fans?
Or both or?
It was typically people sharing it
with their friends because I think that
pages wasn’t even, I don’t even know if it was born yet?
OK.
Maybe in its infancy, but
we now certainly see that as well.
There’s actually a third-party app
that you can integrate Eventbrite into pages.
So we just immediately
capitalized on that, we understood that this
is where people were going to be sharing information.
It’s really hard to get people
to talk about clothes that
they’ve bought or appliances they’ve purchased online.
It’s extremely easy to get
people to share what events they
are going to because events are
inherently social, so you,
events are better when you have
people that you know there, your friends.
It also defines you.
You know, what kind of events are you attending?
What kind of conference, what kind of social event, what kind of concert?
And so, we just capitalized on
the fact that we ended up really
being at the core of
social commerce, and that has,
you know, if you look at
our growth, our GTS, there was
definitely and inflection point at
which we tapped into the social graph.
Which also includes Twittering.
Has that become dominant now, over Google?
Yeah.
So, Facebook is the number one driver of traffic to our site.
Twitter and LinkdIn are also in the top ten drivers of traffic.
And mobile.facebook
.com
has actually started to
creep up, which we’re really excited
about, because that obviously presents a new opportunity.
So you don’t pay Facebook?
No .
Yeah, that’s all organic.
I mean it’s primarily now news feed
shares of I purchased
an event, I registered for an
event and I want to share that
and get my friends to come along.
And, it feels a
lot like the, you know,a
decade earlier when there’s
companies just discovering algorithmic search
and learning how to
use
that properly and really
driving that traffic and now
you have that shift from a
rhythmic search to this social
site, and really what
our start up is and what
my kind of philosophy on
start ups is they’re these science
experiments, and you’re looking at
your logs and you are
looking for these trends, and where
you see them happening, you try to encourage them.
So when we saw, when we
saw Facebook creeping up
in the server logs in terms
of traffic driver, how do
we build features, just as
Paypal when they launched didn’t
know how they were going to
sell, they thought it was going
be a tool to
allow people settle their restaurant bills.
Originally it was a mobile.
Originally it was a mobile app,
and they pivoted and saw
it take hold, saw Ebay merchants
really gained value in that
and built toolsjust to enable
that and better work with eBay and it just shot up.
In the same way we’ve really
worked to understand Facebook and
how to leverage that to help
sell more tickets for organizers.
What’s interesting is I’m
sure you’re…obviously everyone open to
Tech World’s aware of the Google
Facebook battles going on
and Google turning inter social and…You
know, sometimes people question, like, why is Google even worried about Facebook?
But it seems…you know…and sometimes
people say, “Well, Facebook, you know,
obviously is popular, but people are
socializing and there’s no purchasing
intent the way, you know…” But
it sound like in this
example, there’s very clearly purchasing
intent, and it’s happening much
more on Facebook and that probably
should be worrisome to Google.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You know, we’ve published a series
of social commerce reports, one last
year and one at the beginning of
this year, because we wanted to
start socializing our numbers and
start a dialog with other
people in the social commerce
space and, you know,
we’re finding that there are real
dollars attached to these
behaviors of sharing.
And it’s not just that organizer sharing their event.
It’s much more actually the ticket buyer sharing where they’re going.
And that’s driving real
traffic back to the site
as well as ticket sales.
Do you observe different behaviors on
Facebook and Twitter and other social platforms?
I mean…
Well, just in terms
of value per share, Facebook is
still higher and we think
that is…
hit the share button, as opposed to a tweet Yes.
weet.
I guess in equating a tweet and a share.
But I don’t think that
means that Twitter is any less valuable.
It just means that in the
case of Facebook you tend
to have your social graph geographically
concentrated and in our case it’s events.
I see.
So maybe if it
was a physical good that you
were buying on Amazon and you
were tweeting it, maybe it would
be more equivalence but in our
case where they tend
to be local events you are going to have a higher likelihood of conversion.
That, well I
guess they were paying for ads, but then suddenly
Facebook said hey, we want 30%.
Do you worry about that?
No, because people are sharing
their real life events, which is
exactly how Mark wants
to populate the news feed.
So, people sharing where
the are going, what they’re seeing, what they’re doing.
And that’s Eventbrite, so
we’re sort of setting event
discovery free wherever it
may happen, which right now
it’s happening, you know, on
places like Facebook, Twitter and
LinkedIn so it’s an organic behavior.
It’s certainly be big enough they’re
going to look at you as a possible revenue source or something.
But, I guess, is your
goal to have enough
sort of That’s a
very valuable start up lesson
just as Wall Street public
companies have to always
be careful not to be reliant
ona single source, you
lose that and you lose a big part of your business.
We think about it in
terms of different channels
so Twitter, LinkedIn is
actually growing as they
improve the platform for conferences
professional still the largest,
single largest percentage of events on our system.
There is also, you know, search is not gone away.
Search will be around for a
long, long time and is still very important.
We look to diversify ourselves,
in fact, we continue
to experiment and what many
people don’t realize is that
Eventbrite has a free service so
you can actually command to
and including a ticket
type, that is, like, you
know, student $10 or
general $20, you can create a zero dollar value ticket type.
That’s immensely popular, there’s actually
moreoptions that are free, that are paid.
And that’s actually been this
caused this flywheel of growth
of momentum of awareness.
So many people find
out about Eventbrite and sign
up for accounts and learn about
it, through all these
different channels that we very meticulously groom
guys arose or grew
right alongside of Facebook basically, right?
Right.
In addition to riding the PayPal wave, you rode sort of the Facebook wave.
Right.
Is that where like a significant portion
of your traffic comes from or your…?
It’s an interesting story.
So when we launched, we took
a pretty heavy bet on SEO.
We knew that we, much like
Yelp, produces content rich
pages on local… We knew
that our event pages would be
extremely content rich and so
we took a big effort
to make sure we were highly optimized
for search engine and discovery.
And that definitely served its purpose.
So Google search was our number one driver of traffic.
In mid-2008, we started to
see Facebook pop up to
our top 10 drivers of traffic to the site.
And when we went into
investigate what user behavior was
driving that, we found out
that organizers were were taking
their events from Eventbrite and
manually republishing those event
details in a Facebook event
templateand then linking back
to the Eventbrite site to sell tickets.
That was driving a pretty significant amount of traffic to our site.
That was right around when Facebook
Connect launched, so we were one
of the first partners to use
the event’s API to integrate
and use, you know, create a one-button push.
Is that typically people sharing with their friends?
Or is it like bands sharing with their fans?
Or both or?
It was typically people sharing it
with their friends because I think that
pages wasn’t even, I don’t even know if it was born yet?
OK.
Maybe in its infancy, but
we now certainly see that as well.
There’s actually a third-party app
that you can integrate Eventbrite into pages.
So we just immediately
capitalized on that, we understood that this
is where people were going to be sharing information.
It’s really hard to get people
to talk about clothes that
they’ve bought or appliances they’ve purchased online.
It’s extremely easy to get
people to share what events they
are going to because events are
inherently social, so you,
events are better when you have
people that you know there, your friends.
It also defines you.
You know, what kind of events are you attending?
What kind of conference, what kind of social event, what kind of concert?
And so, we just capitalized on
the fact that we ended up really
being at the core of
social commerce, and that has,
you know, if you look at
our growth, our GTS, there was
definitely and inflection point at
which we tapped into the social graph.
Which also includes Twittering.
Has that become dominant now, over Google?
Yeah.
So, Facebook is the number one driver of traffic to our site.
Twitter and LinkdIn are also in the top ten drivers of traffic.
And mobile.facebook
.com
has actually started to
creep up, which we’re really excited
about, because that obviously presents a new opportunity.
So you don’t pay Facebook?
No .
Yeah, that’s all organic.
I mean it’s primarily now news feed
shares of I purchased
an event, I registered for an
event and I want to share that
and get my friends to come along.
And, it feels a
lot like the, you know,a
decade earlier when there’s
companies just discovering algorithmic search
and learning how to
use
that properly and really
driving that traffic and now
you have that shift from a
rhythmic search to this social
site, and really what
our start up is and what
my kind of philosophy on
start ups is they’re these science
experiments, and you’re looking at
your logs and you are
looking for these trends, and where
you see them happening, you try to encourage them.
So when we saw, when we
saw Facebook creeping up
in the server logs in terms
of traffic driver, how do
we build features, just as
Paypal when they launched didn’t
know how they were going to
sell, they thought it was going
be a tool to
allow people settle their restaurant bills.
Originally it was a mobile.
Originally it was a mobile app,
and they pivoted and saw
it take hold, saw Ebay merchants
really gained value in that
and built toolsjust to enable
that and better work with eBay and it just shot up.
In the same way we’ve really
worked to understand Facebook and
how to leverage that to help
sell more tickets for organizers.
What’s interesting is I’m
sure you’re…obviously everyone open to
Tech World’s aware of the Google
Facebook battles going on
and Google turning inter social and…You
know, sometimes people question, like, why is Google even worried about Facebook?
But it seems…you know…and sometimes
people say, “Well, Facebook, you know,
obviously is popular, but people are
socializing and there’s no purchasing
intent the way, you know…” But
it sound like in this
example, there’s very clearly purchasing
intent, and it’s happening much
more on Facebook and that probably
should be worrisome to Google.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You know, we’ve published a series
of social commerce reports, one last
year and one at the beginning of
this year, because we wanted to
start socializing our numbers and
start a dialog with other
people in the social commerce
space and, you know,
we’re finding that there are real
dollars attached to these
behaviors of sharing.
And it’s not just that organizer sharing their event.
It’s much more actually the ticket buyer sharing where they’re going.
And that’s driving real
traffic back to the site
as well as ticket sales.
Do you observe different behaviors on
Facebook and Twitter and other social platforms?
I mean…
Definitely.
Well, just in terms
of value per share, Facebook is
still higher and we think
that is…
Per share meaning they
hit the share button, as opposed to a tweet Yes.
weet.
I guess in equating a tweet and a share.
But I don’t think that
means that Twitter is any less valuable.
It just means that in the
case of Facebook you tend
to have your social graph geographically
concentrated and in our case it’s events.
I see.
So maybe if it
was a physical good that you
were buying on Amazon and you
were tweeting it, maybe it would
be more equivalence but in our
case where they tend
to be local events you are going to have a higher likelihood of conversion.
That, well I
guess they were paying for ads, but then suddenly
Facebook said hey, we want 30%.
Do you worry about that?
No, because people are sharing
their real life events, which is
exactly how Mark wants
to populate the news feed.
So, people sharing where
the are going, what they’re seeing, what they’re doing.
And that’s Eventbrite, so
we’re sort of setting event
discovery free wherever it
may happen, which right now
it’s happening, you know, on
places like Facebook, Twitter and
LinkedIn so it’s an organic behavior.
It’s certainly be big enough they’re
going to look at you as a possible revenue source or something.
But, I guess, is your
goal to have enough
sort of That’s a
very valuable start up lesson
just as Wall Street public
companies have to always
be careful not to be reliant
ona single source, you
lose that and you lose a big part of your business.
We think about it in
terms of different channels
so Twitter, LinkedIn is
actually growing as they
improve the platform for conferences
professional still the largest,
single largest percentage of events on our system.
There is also, you know, search is not gone away.
Search will be around for a
long, long time and is still very important.
We look to diversify ourselves,
in fact, we continue
to experiment and what many
people don’t realize is that
Eventbrite has a free service so
you can actually command to
and including a ticket
type, that is, like, you
know, student $10 or
general $20, you can create a zero dollar value ticket type.
That’s immensely popular, there’s actually
moreoptions that are free, that are paid.
And that’s actually been this
caused this flywheel of growth
of momentum of awareness.
So many people find
out about Eventbrite and sign
up for accounts and learn about
it, through all these
different channels that we very meticulously groom
Chris Dixon resumes his Founder Stories conversation with Eventbrite’s Kevin and Julia Hartz by asking questions about their strategy for attracting customers. Not surprisingly Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all factor in to the mix.
Julia Hartz says initially Eventbrite positioned itself to be “highly optimized for search engines and discovery.” However, search eventually gave way to sharing in the form of Facebook, and now according to Julia, “Facebook is the number one driver of traffic to our site.” (It has been for a while). She notes “It’s extremely easy to get people to share what events they are going to because events are inherently social” and continues by saying with the “ticket buyer sharing where they’re going” it drives “real traffic back to the site as well as ticket sales.”
Recognizing the importance of not being “reliant on a single source” Kevin tells Chris that Twitter is also a player in their digital strategy as is LinkedIn because “conferences/professional events is still the largest, single largest percentage of events on our system.”
In the below clip, Dixon asks about competition—specifically Ticketmaster. Kevin responds by talking about the challenges of getting into the music market with some of the contracts that it requires and then lists events Ticketmaster does not necessarily service, such as “a small show, a club … attending a wine tasting event.“
Julia notes “there’s always a little bit of friction when you’re trying to democratize an industry” and speaking to “traditional ways of doing ticketing … in music and live entertainment” Julia says it requires “exorbitant fees and that is just not what we stand for.”
Make sure to check it all out in these two videos—and in case you missed episode I with Kevin and Julia Hartz you can find it here.
Past episodes of Founder Stories are here.
Who do you worry about the most in terms of competition?
You have direct competitors, you worry about?
Ticket Master, do you worry about?
You know, the music market is
challenging because of the
dynamics of the space,
long contracts, up front payments.
Is that a big percentage
of your revenues right now?
It’s not, it’s a very small
part so we are…
You know, everything when we
thinking about ticketing, and I
know we’re in New York, but I have to use the San Francisco analogy.
We think about, a week
in San Francisco of what are all the things you would do.
And yes it’s going to
a Giants game or going to
a Lady Gaga concert but it’s
also a tour on the
bay, it’s going to San Francisco drama.
It ‘s going to a small show, a club.
It’s attending a wine tasting event.
So it’s a broad range and
if we want to have
all that inventory, all those
great experiences to do, that
certainly includes the music.space
.
It’s a broken space
and we’re looking to
solve it by producing a great
product and helping people sell more.
But the reality is, there ‘s
contracts and other factors
at play that make it
a little more challenging to get into.
Problem child for [xx]
mean the artist will have these existing
contracts where they have
agreed to do all of their
ticketing or something through Ticketmasternd
, you know, I think
that there’s always a little
bit of friction when you’re trying
to democratize an industry.
You know, I think that there’s traditional
ways of doing ticketing especially in
music and live entertainment where it,
you know, it requires contracts,
it require exorbitant fees
and that’s just not what we stand for.
We want user to use our
service because they love us
not because they’re locked into a
contract and we’re not going
to inflate fees so
everybody can have a piece
of thathigh or not,
so take he long tale is extremely fragmented.
It’s made up of older
companies that have been around
much longer than us and you
know, small scrappy start
that we always butt up against.
It’s sort of just an array
of different types of ticketing solutions.
I’d say that Eventbrite is doing
a good a job of dominating in
the long tail, but we certainly
can’t look constantly coming up against new challenges.
We’ve been fortunate.
It’s not like social
networking 3 years ago where
there was Vevo and My
Space and Tagged and and
Facebook and so on.
Yeah.
But you always have a lot
of work and challenges ahead of us.
But, I mean, the bottom line is
that if you look at our
pricing, our pricing is roughly
if you compare it to the
average Ticketmaster feeit ‘s
one third of the Ticketmaster take.
So, what’s your percentage you take, or?
We don’t publish that.
Oh, OK.
It’s kind of an average.
In terms of gross
profit per ticket though,
they’re roughly And we
think over time that, despite all
the friction of entering the
music market, it’s an
inevitable fact that we’ll move upstream.
Oh, so if you don’t publish a
percentage, if I go on right now
and create a ticket for
20 dollars, there’ll be a percentage.
Sorry, there’s an average.
Our OK, so you don’t publish the net.
We don’t publish our average across all.
OK, I got it.
You have direct competitors, you worry about?
Ticket Master, do you worry about?
You know, the music market is
challenging because of the
dynamics of the space,
long contracts, up front payments.
Is that a big percentage
of your revenues right now?
It’s not, it’s a very small
part so we are…
But you see it eventually is being a big part?
You know, everything when we
thinking about ticketing, and I
know we’re in New York, but I have to use the San Francisco analogy.
We think about, a week
in San Francisco of what are all the things you would do.
And yes it’s going to
a Giants game or going to
a Lady Gaga concert but it’s
also a tour on the
bay, it’s going to San Francisco drama.
It ‘s going to a small show, a club.
It’s attending a wine tasting event.
So it’s a broad range and
if we want to have
all that inventory, all those
great experiences to do, that
certainly includes the music.space
.
It’s a broken space
and we’re looking to
solve it by producing a great
product and helping people sell more.
But the reality is, there ‘s
contracts and other factors
at play that make it
a little more challenging to get into.
Problem child for [xx]
You
mean the artist will have these existing
contracts where they have
agreed to do all of their
ticketing or something through Ticketmasternd
, you know, I think
that there’s always a little
bit of friction when you’re trying
to democratize an industry.
You know, I think that there’s traditional
ways of doing ticketing especially in
music and live entertainment where it,
you know, it requires contracts,
it require exorbitant fees
and that’s just not what we stand for.
We want user to use our
service because they love us
not because they’re locked into a
contract and we’re not going
to inflate fees so
everybody can have a piece
of thathigh or not,
so take he long tale is extremely fragmented.
It’s made up of older
companies that have been around
much longer than us and you
know, small scrappy start
that we always butt up against.
It’s sort of just an array
of different types of ticketing solutions.
I’d say that Eventbrite is doing
a good a job of dominating in
the long tail, but we certainly
can’t look constantly coming up against new challenges.
We’ve been fortunate.
It’s not like social
networking 3 years ago where
there was Vevo and My
Space and Tagged and and
Facebook and so on.
Yeah.
But you always have a lot
of work and challenges ahead of us.
But, I mean, the bottom line is
that if you look at our
pricing, our pricing is roughly
if you compare it to the
average Ticketmaster feeit ‘s
one third of the Ticketmaster take.
So, what’s your percentage you take, or?
We don’t publish that.
Oh, OK.
It’s kind of an average.
In terms of gross
profit per ticket though,
they’re roughly And we
think over time that, despite all
the friction of entering the
music market, it’s an
inevitable fact that we’ll move upstream.
Oh, so if you don’t publish a
percentage, if I go on right now
and create a ticket for
20 dollars, there’ll be a percentage.
Sorry, there’s an average.
Our OK, so you don’t publish the net.
We don’t publish our average across all.
OK, I got it.
