Eventbrite

Overview

Eventbrite is a global online marketplace for live experiences that enables its users to search for, find, and create events. Events include music festivals, marathons, conferences, hackathons, air guitar contests, seminars, political rallies, charity events, gaming competitions and more. The social e-commerce platform allows for event organizers to plan, promote, and sell tickets to events. It also enables attendees to find and purchase tickets to these experiences.

Eventbrite at its core employs a matchmaking business model, as it operates the digital platform that brings together event organizers and attendees, facilitates their interactions, and enables the exchange of financial payments via its marketplace.

Eventbrite also provides other complementary products to both event planners and attendees, which help encourage the use of the matchmaking platform. Complementary products include the provision of statistical data to event planners, customer service teams to help run events, event promotion services and Eventbrite monitoring applications.

History

Eventbrite was founded in 2006 by Kevin and Julia Hartz. Since then, it has completed four acquisitions, opened offices in Melbourne, Dublin, and Nashville. The company is based in San Francisco, where it employs nearly 300 people.

The company has raised a total equity funding of $198.28M in 9 Rounds from 19 Investors. Investors include Tiger Global, DAG Ventures, Sequoia Capital, T. Rowe Price, and Tenaya Capital.[i]

As of 2016, the company accounted for 187 countries hosting events with Eventbrite, two million events held yearly and four million tickets processed per month. [ii] Total number of tickets sold on Eventbrite in 2014 was 80 million. [iii]

Customers

Eventbrite caters to two customer groups, which it serves via its online ticketing platform. The first customer group encompasses the event organizers, who use Eventbrite to help plan various events such as corporate events, weddings, birthday parties and more. The second customer group consists of event attendees who, use the platform to search for, find and purchase tickets to these social events.

Despite it occasionally selling concert tickets, Eventbrite mainly targets smaller functions and corporate events such as business conventions. [iv]

Engagement  — Value Creation Proposition

For its first customer group, the event organizers, Eventbrite creates value by facilitating the processes of event planning, promotion, and ticket sales. Organizers are also able to access various resources on event management on Eventbrite, such as free planning and promotion templates, live demos and the latest research and reports. In 2010, Eventbrite was the first company to reveal data regarding the financial benefits of “sharing:” for every Facebook share of a paid event, an additional $2.52 of revenues was generated by the event organizer, whilst driving 11 additional page views of the event page. [v]

Eventbrite also provides marketing options to help organizers promote their events, such as the tools to customize event pages. The website offers direct access to Facebook, Twitter and other social-networking tools, and organizers are able to send invitations and e-mail reminders from their Eventbrite account. Eventbrite also gives attendees the option of spreading the word with built-in sharing tools on the event page, thus improving the promotion of events on behalf of the organizers. They can also offer multiple ticket options including reserved seating and add questions to assess their attendee types, thus gaining an insight into their customer profiles. Organizers can also benefit from up-to-date dashboards and reports that monitor the volume of ticket sales. Eventbrite also offers the option of a customer team to run the day smoothly on behalf of organizers.

The second customer group, or attendees, can view all events that are taking place around the world by way of the Eventbrite platform. The website allows attendees to get offline and engage in the of their social activities preference. They are able to filter location and types of events to match the ones of interest.

Delivery — Value Chain

Event organizers can set up their free online accounts online within minutes and fill in the event details. On the day of the event, the EventBrite mobile application allows organizers to rapidly scan attendees’ tickets directly from their phones.

Eventbrite has also introduced a novel initiative, a wristband designed to speed up attendees’ entry to events. Organizers get happier attendees via the wristband and access to even better analytics from Eventbrite, which can help them track attendee movements at an event.

Customers are able to view events on Eventbrite’s social media pages. The company’s target markets are those that are IT literate. Eventbrite has integrated with Facebook Open Graph to change the way attendees find and share events. Eventbrite sends out monthly “Event Picks” newsletters using data from previous events with high attendance rates, as well as events the recipient’s Facebook friends have signed up for. Eventbrite now also sends out social notification emails, so if two friends are attending the same event, the third friend will receive a Facebook notification.[vi]

Monetisation — Value Capture

The company takes a 2.5% fee on the ticket value plus $0.99 per ticket up to a maximum of $9.95 per ticket. It adds 3% for credit cards processing. (It does not charge for free events.) The company does not run any advertising. [vii]

Eventbrite sold more than 11 million tickets in 2010 for $207 million in gross sales.[viii] As of 2015, the company has processed more than $3.5 billion in gross ticket sales and more than 200 million tickets in more than 180 countries. [ix]