If you've ever bought a ticket to a concert or an event online, chances are you've used a ticketing website and paid a fee. Now, Seven Days is getting into the ticketing business to provide a local alternative.
Burlington's alt-weekly newspaper and website will offer its services to local event producers and concertgoers at sevendaystickets.com.
Colby Roberts, associate publisher and director of sales at Seven Days, spoke with VPR about the new service and what it will mean for the community.
On the services the new site offers:
"We're going to offer the ability for event producers and advertisers in the area to sell their tickets through our website."
On why the area needs a new service:
"We really saw an opportunity. There are a lot of event promoters using national outfits like Brown Paper Tickets, Ticketfly, Event Bright and we felt like because we had been a leader in Vermont in terms of curating events through Seven Days, specifically in our calendar section, for years we also have a lot of venture producers who like to advertise with us.
"Extending that service to those folks would be kind of a natural progression for us. And we feel like specifically with those national outfits that I mentioned, that we can offer local customer service as well as a trusted brand."
"We get a lot of traffic on our site and we feel like that would be a convenient opportunity for our audience. But certainly we were looking at a lot of our event producer clients that we work with and seeing if we could provide them with a service that might benefit them. And be closer to home than some of the options they have been using."
The site is free for event producers, but what about the public?
"There is a similar fee as there would be with some of those other ticket sites. There's a similar percentage that we take on top of the ticket price."
How does that compare to the national alternatives?
"It's basically the same. It's three percent plus $1.25 [per ticket]. But as I mentioned before we have the local customer service, we have the local marketing muscle that some of these other folks don't have. We have the newspaper website where other content lives and where we can promote your events and hopefully, help you sell more tickets."
"Sevendaystickets.com is up and running. We have a couple of events that are live right now including one of our own events that we're having on Saturday, March 19 — "Spotlight on Journalism", which is a bunch of free movies. We're using the ticketing site as a way to promote it and you can go there and download tickets for free to these movies.
"We're also promoting Hedwig and the Angry Inch at ArtsRiot, which is starting on March 31. It's a six-show run and tickets are available at sevendaystickets.com."
