Mitch is Eventbrite’s partnership manager. Keep up-to-date with partnerships by connecting on Twitter!


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Now that the South by Southwest festival is finally coming to a close, I’m back in San Francisco and trying to decide what to catch-up on first: email or sleep. Kidding aside, SXSW was a blast this year and the whole Eventbrite team was excited to be a part of it.

For the past couple of years, Eventbrite has had a strong presence at SXSW. This year seemed different though, as if someone declared us the official-unofficial-registration solution for the huge SXSW party scene. On many separate occasions, people told me that Eventbrite was used for every single party that they registered to attend.

However, anecdotal experiences only go so far – so here are some of the facts:

  • Eventbrite supported 649 total SXSW events.
  • 590 of these took place in Austin, while 59 events celebrated the spirit of the festival remotely. Some of my favorite remote events include “North by New York City” and “SXSW Rejects Rebellion“.
  • We saw an increase of 79% more events on Eventbrite over last year.
  • Over 1900 attendees used Sched.org’s Eventbrite integration.

Frankly, when I was watching our numbers of events being published, I wasn’t expecting such a large increase this year. But, it turns out that we’re all just a bunch of procrastinators. Even at just 1 month before the beginning of the festival, we only had 98 SXSW events published (just 17% of the total events that we would eventually see on Eventbrite). Our largest day for publishing SXSW events was March 6th, when 47 event organizers got around to making their event official.

Here is a full break down of when our events were published:

When you’re planning for 2013, here are 2 strong pieces of advice:

  1. Publish and start promoting the event at least 3 weeks before the festival – you’ll be far ahead of the majority.
  2. If you’re worried about competing for attendance among the hundreds of other distractions, you should plan your event accordingly. Check out how events stacked up by date:

Sunday (3/11) had 149 events and was the most popular day; Saturday (3/10) was a close second with 127 different events. For event organizers who waited until Monday (3/12), they faced much less competition as there were only 77 events on our platform.

Did you go to SXSW and attend Eventbrite events? Tell us about your experience in the comments! Or, give us more ideas on how you would like us to use this kind of data in the future.