My answer to a question on Quora:
Tickets – easily overlooked but essential to our enjoyment of theatre, music, sport, art and more. As we move away from the conventional paper ticket to e-tickets, we take a look over other key milestones in event ticketing history and beyond.
Ancient Greece The first known tickets were used for events that primarily took place in theatres.
Roman Era Originally, small disks of clay were used to stamp seating details and were used as tickets. The small disks were about the size of a penny.
1732 Audiences coming to watch a show at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, would simply pay on the door for admission to the theatre without being issued a ticket, and there was no guarantee of a seat. This was common practice for London theatres at the time.
1755 Theatre Managers began to issue pre-paid tickets – or ‘checks’ – for performances, enabling them to control more successfully the numbers of people in the theatre and, as importantly, to know how much money they were making each evening. These early ‘checks’ were circular metal tokens, usually made of brass or bronze.
1868 Audience members could now buy subscribers’ tickets, which reserved particular seats on a set day or days of each week. To meet this need a new style of reusable tokens was introduced. Tokens made of bone, either circular or oval in shape, were issued by the theatre. One side showed the name of the theatre and the name of the subscriber, while the other showed the year, the evenings subscribed to and the seat number. Each token was signed by the Box Office Manager.
Late 1800s Paper tickets gradually came into use, and the familiar paper tickets with a perforated counterfoil or ‘stub’ were developed around this time.
Early 1900s Paper tickets were becoming more ornate, with stubs being adorned with intricate borders and colored ink.
1940s Sports games in the US spurred the creation of inventive ticket design, with tickets to baseball games being produced in the shape of baseballs, and event catcher’s mitts.
The 1960s and 70s Ticket stubs for some football games and concerts become works of art in their own right and are often highly sought after by collectors. This was also around the time Ticketmaster was founded.
Late 1980s People would line up at the box office to get tickets for events. After that, the industry shifted to a physical distributed commerce model. Tickets could be purchased at Tower Records, other record stores, or at venues — all physical locations.
Early 2000s Ticketing moved online and became somewhat concentrated again: tickets were all bought through specific transaction hubs, then cVent and Eventbrite were founded and became mainstream because these types of systems allowed anyone with a computer and internet connection to sell tickets to their events online.
Early 2009 With the advent of WordPress, open source ticketing solutions, such as Event Espresso, started coming online and taking market share from the industry leaders, such as cVent and Eventbrite.
Early 2014 The team behind Event Espresso launched a free event registration and ticketing platform called, Event Smart, that’s powered by WordPress and Event Espresso.
2018 Eventbrite goes public on the NYSE and raises $230 million in one day. Meanwhile, Ticketmaster is valued at $9.2 billion, in a $115 billion event industry and Event Espresso grows to 2.84% market share in the event registration industry.
Sources:
- Ticket Operations and Sales Management in Sport
- The Hidden History of the Event Ticketing Ecosystem – Eventbrite US Blog
- Ticketmaster Company History
- Eventbrite – Wikipedia
- Reggie Aggarwal | Cvent
Learn How to Save Money Selling Tickets
Did you know there’s a tool that can help you estimate how much you could pay in Eventbrite fees and charges? With Event Espresso you can save 100% of what Eventbrite charges to sell tickets or accept registrations online. Plus you can do it all on your own website with your own branding and keep control of your event and attendee data.
