Eventbrite reported yet another Year-over-Year down quarter with Ticket sales down, Net Revenue down and a larger net income loss. More information in their Financial Report and Presentation.
Growth Comparison with RunSignup
Here is the ticket volume and a comparison with RunSignup (Eventbrite is still 7 times our size in terms of paid ticket volume, although that delta continues to gradually close – maybe we will catch them in the next 10 years):
Using Customer Float
Eventbrite continues to use customer float (ticket sales they have not yet paid out to customers) to finance their operation, holding over $350 Million of money due to customers at the end of the quarter.
Two Headwinds – Loss of Subscription Revenue and Loss of Ticket Customers
The last couple of years Eventbrite has tried to cover up their continued decline in ticket volume (customers are moving to other platforms like TicketSignup) with revenue increasing moves like Ads and Subscription fees. They raised those fees too much and had major loss of business, and have since scaled back some of their subscription fees. This lowered “Marketplace” revenue from $11M last Q1 to $6M this Q1.
Of course the core business is also suffering with a decline of 8% in ticket sales year over year for the quarter. It is also important to note that ticket sales are down 27% when compared with Q1 of 2019 (RunSignup | TicketSignup is up 84%).
The downward trend in ticket sales is no longer able to be masked by increasing fees to keep revenue stable. Hence the multiplier pounds of layoffs and ongoing cost cutting as an attempt to please Wall Street:
Summary
When we first started following Eventbrite in detail, they were very dominant in the ticket space. Since then, they have continued to diminish their brand equity with moves that seem to attempt to make them look good to Wall Street, but are not serving their customers well. As we have discussed in the past, the core error in our opinion is the move to define themselves as the Marketplace for events. The fact is there is no one marketplace for events, and they are not replacing word of mouth, local connections, Google, Facebook and emerging AI Chat tools.
Of course, we are here to help serve event customers directly with no ads for other events, where you own your data and we won’t sell it to other events, where you get a free, full website and free, unlimited email. Oh, and if you are doing Timed Entry, we do it right, not a hack like Eventbrite.