Eventbrite Takes on Ticketmaster With $50 Million Investment
Eventbrite announced Wednesday a $50 million round of funding led by Tiger Global. The five-year-old startup — once used primarily as a platform for organizers to sell tickets to small events — has grown up.
It’s now selling tickets to a Black Eyed Peas concert that can accomodate 60,000 people. And more growth looks to be on the horizon.
Eventbrite plans to use the cash influx for technology, including maintaining a platform that can handle traffic from events like the upcoming Black Eyed Peas concert in New York City’s Central Park, as well as international expansion. Since it was founded in 2006, it has raised almost $80 million.
“The excitement around what we’re doing is that we’ve created an enabling market, where anybody can sell tickets,” CEO Kevin Hartz tells Mashable.
But that doesn’t mean that Eventbrite can’t ably compete for the business of events that have the option to sell tickets on sites like Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
“Our number one source of referrals is Facebook,” Hartz says. “What that means is people are using Facebook to discover events. … We bring in more buyers without expensive billboards or things like that.”
Eventbrite says it’s on track to sell $400 million in tickets this year, of which it will take a 2.5% cut plus a 99 cents per ticket fee. Twenty percent of Eventbrite tickets sold last quarter were sold overseas, and this is one reason the company plans to be more aggressive with its presence there.
A new Eventbrite office is opening in London in the next few weeks, and Hartz says the company is considering financing a similar startup in China.
So is Eventbrite, as the New York Times recently proclaimed in a headline, planning to “Tackle Ticketmaster?”
“We have this worldwide market,” Hartz says. “In a lot of ways it doesn’t make sense to fight it out with one competitor. There’s a much broader opportunity.”
Maybe so, but Eventbrite’s scope is certainly starting to overlap with its more traditional, big-event counterpart
