Events.com: Streamlining the Event Experience
Events.com, co-founded by entrepreneurs Mitch Thrower and Stephen Partridge, is transforming how events are managed, marketed, and monetized. In a recent conversation, CEO Mitch Thrower shed light on the company’s mission to simplify the complexities of event organization, offering a comprehensive solution for organizers and attendees alike.
Thrower and Partridge identified significant inefficiencies in the event industry, leading them to create an intuitive and integrated platform. Thrower’s background at Active Network was invaluable in this endeavor. As Thrower explains, Events.com aims to give organizers a complete management solution, allowing them to “manage, market, and monetize your event the same way you’d manage marketing and monetize your apartment on the other end.” For attendees, the platform offers a way to “discover, interact, and transact with the events you love.”
Events.com officially launched in 2010 as a mid-market solution and quickly built a modular platform that provides all the necessary tools for organizers and attendees. The company’s goal was to be a one-stop shop, ensuring a seamless and engaging experience for everyone involved. The platform initially focused on event management aspects such as, registration, ticketing, marketing, and analytics.
Thrower emphasizes that “ticketing is certainly a part of what we do, maybe the tip of the spear.” He highlighted the fragmented nature of the traditional event technology landscape, where various solutions handled ticketing, marketing, sponsorships, refunds, data, and onsite operations. Events.com addresses this issue by offering a modular platform that consolidates these functions.
Thrower’s experience at Competitor Group, as well as, Active Network further helped him refine the platform to work seamlessly for event organizers. Events.com has acquired a diverse range of events over its life. The recent acquisition of the Wonderfront festival on San Diego Bay underscores the growth trajectory.
A Modular Approach for Diverse Events
Events.com serves a broad customer base, from music festivals like Rise in the Mojave Desert with its lantern releases to the Renaissance Festival in Florida, which can draw 90,000 attendees. They support smaller-scale events like axe throwing in bars and the Mayfair movie theater in Ottawa, Canada. Events.com provides support for entrepreneurs working in the mid-market ticketed event space.
Thrower shared “So what we’ve done at events.com is built a modular platform for event organizers to bring it all to one place. Now it’s modular.”
Events.com acquired sponsorship management technology that suggests optimal partners for various events, streamlining the sponsorship process. The platform provides tools for managing event assets, including inventory control, pricing, marketing proposal generation, and activation calendar creation. This modular approach allows event organizers to pick and choose the Events.com features that best meet their needs, such as marketing or ticketing solutions individually.
The Expanding World of Ticketed Events
The company’s global footprint includes headquarters in La Jolla, CA, plus offices in Seattle, Ottawa, Modena, Italy, and Edinburgh, Scotland. Events.com continues to grow its technology offerings as well as the acquisition of new events.
The scope of ticketed events is expanding rapidly, moving beyond traditional areas like sports, live music, and theater. Various new ticketed events have emerged, supported by recent technology such as, hot air balloon festivals, bicycle races, the ice cream museum, events for runners and swimmers, and even shark diving, all requiring ticketing. As Thrower notes, the ticketing market is vast. With limitless imagination, people are creating new events constantly.
Thrower concludes that “there are an astonishing number of projects around the world which are gated by tickets, and someone has to manage the infrastructure for those events.” The ongoing growth of Events.com is fueled by these innovations and the increasing number of individuals with novel ideas for ticketed events.
