Facebook and Eventbrite Partner to Promote Ticket Sales

Here is some fascinating news for event coordinators who are currently using mega monster social networking site, Facebook, as a means of event marketing and promotion.

It has been confirmed that Eventbrite, a large and rapidly expanding social commerce company has partnered up with Facebook to sell tickets to an upcoming F8 developer conference. While it has not yet been announced that a partnership between the two companies will be extended beyond this endeavor, there is great speculation. Eventbrite has assisted event coordinators worldwide in achieving over 10 million ticket sales and presumably, coupled with the marketing and social networking power of Facebook, the potential for a profitable partnership is quite promising.

The rewards, for event organizers worldwide, of this merger is the ability to maximize ticket sales to promoted events without having to pay any out of pocket overheads. Facebook adds over 3.5 million scheduled events each and every month. With options for event coordinators to use a service like Eventbrite to generate, promote and mange ticket sales digitally, at no cost to the event organizer, the increase in ticket sales could be staggering.

When interviewed founders of Eventbrite, Julia Hartz and Kevin Hartz not only announced that they had received funding from Sequoia Capital, they also stated that they were experiencing amazingly rapid company growth and anticipated to gross over $100 million in tickets sales throughout 2010. Those are some high expectations, but theoretically achievable. Event organizers can use Eventbrite to manage all aspects of their ticket sales including payment collection and receive a check for the full amount of every ticket sale at the end of the event. This is again at no cost to the event coordinator while Facebook and Eventbrite would generate their revenue by charging the ticket purchaser a modest service fee of 5.5% + $0.99. It would be somewhat like Facebook having it’s own digital box office.

Is the speculation of a future partnership justifiable? It would certainly seem so. It’s obvious that a partnership between Facebook and Eventbrite would create a significant increase in flow to the service. And even if a small percentage of the 3.5 million events added to Facebook each month required ticket sales, there would be minimally tens of thousands of dollars in revenue generated. What about events that distribute free tickets as a means of analyzing the demographic of their Internet sales? Eventbrite already provides this service as a viral marketing technique.
When asked if the Facebook/Eventbrite partnership would extend beyond the confirmed f8 developers conference, Eventbrite CEO, Kevin Hartz had only this too say, “Sorry, I can’t comment at this time. We never comment on deal speculation.” , while Facebook representitives remark, “We’re always testing Connect implementations with various sites and have nothing to share at this time.”