The Box Office, a Thing of the Past?

The days of waiting in line to buy tickets to your favorite concert, sporting event or show, may be dwindling away. More and more businesses and individuals are selling tickets online in record numbers. In 2003 Major League Baseball reported ticket sales of about 7.5 million tickets, an increase from the year before by almost 2 million. Now with online outlets such as Stub Hub, tickets.com, eBay and Indocquent, ticket sale numbers are sure to increase dramatically.

“We have seen on our own web site tickets being sold by businesses and indivisuals sell quickly,” claims Mike Podlesny, President and CEO of Indocquent.com, an online website which allows businesses and people to promote their products and services in over 20,000 cities around the world. “It seems as soon as they go up, they are gone.”

The key to this growing popularity is people’s quest to not lose valuable time in their lives. Apple just released their iPhone and people around the country waited in lines for hours and some even more than a day. “It would be easier to just buy it online then sleep in a tent,” claimed one person waiting in line for an iPhone.

That is the philosophy of a lot of ticket customers. It is easier to pay a bit more, yet not wait in line for hours with no guarantee that you will even get a ticket..

How important are online ticket sales to businesses? To put it into perspective, The National Theatre launched its online ticket sales system and sales increased almost 250%. Now online ticket sales account for more than 20% of their revenue, an increase of almost 7% over the previous year.

Businesses are creating online ticket portals daily as are new web sites dedicated to selling tickets. There is no data available as to the number of ticket sellers availble online, but with sales numbers increasing across the board annually, they are sure to pop up all over the place.