The Long Tail In Event Ticketing

A 3-year-old events concierge app called Sosh reportedly is looking to bring in revenue by adding more utility to its services, which now are offered in San Francisco, New York and Seattle. Known mostly for providing advice on places to go and things to do, it’s now allowing submissions of event suggestions from activity sponsors.

Historically, Sosh has used an algorithm and physical searches to identify events. In its next phase, called the Sosh Marketplace, Sosh is enabling vendors, merchants, artisans and others in the three cities to submit their event ideas. The company, which has secured nearly $20 million in venture funds, the latest being in Augustworth $10.1 million, then would handle distribution, promotion and tickets, taking 5 percent of gross ticket sales for the service, reports TechCrunch.

The process simplifies the earlier method, where Sosh picked the events to place in its app, and vendors then had to handle ticket sales, either via email or by sending the user to a separate landing page.

Building trust

To help build user trust in the reliability of its platform, Sosh’s algorithm accesses and chooses content from hundreds of sites looking for high-quality and popular events. It then separately uses human interaction to choose which finally gets published.

In the three cities where Sosh offers its services, one in six adults ages 20 to 40 reportedly use them. It hopes that by now enabling vendors and others to submit their event ideas the popularity will grow even more.

“The key to building a two-sided marketplace was providing value to merchants before they ever had the option to actively get involved, which is what we’ve been doing for the past year,” cofounder Rishi Mandal, said in a TechCrunch interview. “Now, we say no to more vendors than we say yes to, because once you’ve established that quality bar you have the freedom to do what’s best for the users.”

Since it began piloting the vendor recommendation two months ago it has sold more than 50 events with an average checkout price of $130, according to TechCrunch.