Ticketfly: Facebook really does fuel ticket sales

Updated

San Francisco startup Ticketfly aims to take on concert ticketing giant Ticketmaster. Its main weapon? Social networking.

The company’s founders Andrew Dreskin and Dan Teree previously sold their company TicketWeb to Ticketmaster, and they told me last year that the larger company still doesn’t understand the importance of social media. This week, the company sent me some numbers to illustrate that social networking really is driving sales.

Specifically, in January of this year, Ticketfly events were shared 31,000 times on Facebook and Twitter. (Ticketfly’s Backstage Suite can create a concert website and a ticketing page, then it helps promote the concert through Facebook events and automatic tweets.) On average, every Facebook share or tweet resulted in the sale of 3.25 tickets.

To be clear, Ticketfly doesn’t look like it’s going to unseat Ticketmaster right away. If Ticketfly keeps up this pace, it will sell about 1.2 million tickets this year. While I can’t find any recent Ticketmaster sales numbers, the company said it sold 141 million tickets back in 2008.

Still, the numbers suggest that Ticketfly is on to something. Here’s all the data the company sent me:

• In Jan 2011, Ticketfly events were shared on Facebook and tweeted 31,000 times and those links were clicked 52,000 times
• In Jan 2011, Ticketfly sold 3.25 tickets for every Facebook share/tweet
• Facebook is Ticketfly’s top referrer at roughly 9% of total traffic
• In Jan of 2011, 33% of Ticketfly affiliates were active and selling tickets to Ticketfly events (Ticketmaster was at approximately 20% at the height of their affiliate program)
• Visitors to Ticketfly’s site in Jan of 2011 were 582,000
• Year over year revenue growth Jan 2011 vs. Jan 2010 was 236%

Ticketfly has raised $3 million from High Peaks Venture Partners, Contour Venture Partners, The NYC Seed Fund, and various angel investors.

Update: Ticketfly says it actually expects to sell 2.5 million tickets this year.

Also, after I asked the company, it shared more details about how it determined that it sold 3.25 tickets for every share/tweet. It turns out Ticketfly just divided the 100,000 tickets sold in January by 31,000 shares and tweets (as measured through bit.ly). In other words, it’s not a direct measurement of whether shares and tweets were actually driving ticket sales.

[image via Flickr/Rhys’s Piece Is]