How do businesses get people to come to their events? Viral marketing is one way. But Munich-based event-management site Amiando has figured out a way to make the tickets themselves viral. Today it launched ViralTickets. If you buy a ViralTicket for an event on Amiando, you get a referral code that you can pass onto friends or colleagues. Anyone with that code gets a discount, and the original referrer gets a refund on his or her original ticket purchase. So if you buy a $100 ticket, for instance, and pass the code to three of your friends, they could each get a $10 discount on the tickets, and you could get a $15 refund (or whatever amount the event organizer decides to offer).
ViralTickets is part of a redesign of Amiando’s site, which now lets event organizers customize their events pages with different widgets. These include ones for ticket sales, car pools, message boards, participants lists, photos, music, videos, polls, surveys and more. You can also take these widgets and put them on your blog or MySpace page to spread the word even more. For instance, below is a ticketing widget for a fake event (it’s live, so don’t actually buy any tickets).
Amiando can offer ViralTickets because it takes care of all the payments, and so can manage all of the discount calculations and refunds itself. (You can also use Amiando to manage free events). Amiando takes a 7.5 percent cut of all ticket sales to manage all the ticketing, take care of payment processing, print up badges, and manage returns. If you just want to use Paypal and deal with the ticket management yourself, Amiando lets you do that also and just takes a 1.5 percent fee.
To celebrate its redesign, Amiando is offering a free event to the first 1000 TechCrunch readers who signs up with the promotion code “techcrunch” (up to $200 worth of fees).
I know amiando from their early days. First they seemed to be just an evite clone (it has been observed several times on this blog, that a lot of those smart German engineers waste their brains on meetoo products instead of being more innovative). But their ticketing and now the viraltickets show that this company is on the right way. They look beyond the German market, they innovate and they are very passionate about their product. Way to go!
It’s always interesting to see how innovative some companies can be. - Jermaine Fanfair
Interesting enough, but I am not sold on the idea. The discount part is interesting but that’s about it. Not everything has to be viral or social or (insert buzz word here).
We use amiando for several months now and it just works great. I’m native Spanish but left for Australia decades ago. We organize quite several meetups here with their site and I’m glad to hear about their success. Met one of the cofounders some time ago, and they are really passionate about what they do.
Will try this viral ticket thing, guess we start with around 5% to 10% discount and see how it goes.
Mark
Why would German engineers be smarter than any other engineers? They only excel in two areas. Automobiles and S&M bondage devices. When it comes to software and business models, it’s apparent that Germany ranks right in that meaty part of the curve. Not falling behind and not showing off either.
So what’s new here… uhhh… not seeing anything new. What’s viral here? Certainly not the service. Trying to claim some sort of viral appeal would be like Ticketmaster claiming to be responsible for the popularity of Coldplay.
I would love to see a follow up post of how many people buy the “tickets” in the example post right after you warned them
Ahm…like…duh. Most direct-mail providers do this, it’s called coupon referrals. There’s only like 2,000 companies in the US who do this.
Innovative? Are you kidding?
Please, if your business IQ is less than 100 don’t post here.
So? What’s innovative is applying the concept to an online ticketing service. Of course giving bonus for referrals is nothing new, but in this industry it seems noone has thought of it yet. That’s what makes it innovative. The new website looks great by the way.
I like apples.
Totally not innovative. A referral program? Lame.
Cool service. Personal referrals have a powerful impact on consumers. What somebody likes, somebody else will purchase. How do you take advantage of this concept for other business models? .. http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
Widgets man, whod’a thunk?
Sorry, am i missing something here?
So im running ‘the great rock and roll swindle party’ [forgive the pun] and wanna sell my tickets for €100 to make a profit?
do i
a. sell them to networkers and fans for €120 so i can hit my target?
b. sell them for €100 [€80 net] so i don’t make any money?
Why cant they focus on getting the base product right? like sorting out a recurring events feature? HELLO
jimmy
That’s the coolest thing i have ever seen coming from Germany next to the Bimmers and Octoberfest!
Way to go amiandos … New site looks and feels terrific!
What happens with the income from your fake ticketshop?
Most US companies are very focused in domestic market. International arena for most companies is still an un-chartered territory.
Way to go Amiandos!!!
Inovation for the sake of inovation also leads to useful inovation.
Well German’s are one year late to the game, we in the valley introduced “Network Ticket Selling” concept a year back. Infact, we allow any one to promote event and get commission on each ticket sale(in Amiandos case they only allow attendee) .
-Bala, CEO
Eventbee Inc
http://www.eventbee.com
No payment in Euro, no terms of use for non US residents. Don´t you like the 430M Users in Europe? From my point of view you have just no service for me. From that point a buck is a lot of money.
http://www.startup-lounge.de
Their business model might not be so innovative, the website is pretty much up to date though. HD video is popping up everywhere on websites now
They have a nice looking website. Looks like it should be able to capture some of the European market.
We used this service for the Berlin Knight Rider fan convention and it worked like magic
Wait, so they charge a bunch of set-up fees AND take **7.5%** of your ticket sales?
Who cares if they’re sporting some sort of newfangled referral program. That’s not innovation, that’s a rip-off! Why use a company that will charge you that much, especially when there are companies who provide their service at NO COST to event producers?
*cough* Brown Paper Tickets *cough*
Actually, they don’t charge any set-up fees, so it’s okay
We could say it is innovative somehow. But I d really like to see how this will work, if many people would buy tickets lol
Nath
http://www.themostpowerfulcompany.com
We grounded % based pricing last week, introduced flat $1 per ticket fee, regardless of ticket price.
Do anyone still want to pay % based price :)?
-Bala, CEO
Eventbee Inc
http://www.eventbee.com
We´re using amiando in the second year and we save up to 30% percent of our time. amiando 4.0 is a Event Management CMS/CRM with a full registration&payment service.
I dont care if its a copy of some valley stuff, the valley don´t cares about me to :-), if you want to sell stuff to “the one year behind” europeens first learn french, spanisch, german and polisch. One year is a lot of time to do this.
eventbee looks like a 10 bucks website… Amiando is a great thing…
Just great. Really like the (German?) lady on the mainpage…
BTW: They are offering their service in 4 (!!) languages including free local support. That’s really a difference to Valley-companies…
I can’t speak from the venue/artist perspective. But from the consumer side, I haven’t seen this in an online (or for that matter paper ticket) medium. And that makes it brilliant. I organize events all the time and the per-ticket fees are always an unpleasant surprise. The opportunity to NOT have that confusion, to offer a discount to friends and to receive any sort of a gratuity for my efforts would *hugely* impact my interest in repeating the usually thankless (and often abused) task of organizing. The details may need to be refined but the idea is solid.
isnt this just an affiliate program by another name?