JetLib News

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

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.