ShmooCon 2017 – Ticket Sales Stats

There were 1460 tickets released in three sales rounds.

All tickets were held in 8.16 seconds.

The wait lists filled up 1.02 seconds after that.

In other words ShmooCon 2017 sold out in 9.18 seconds.

Remember – this is the time in which the “line” to reserve tickets fills up. It takes a few minutes more for people to fill out their email address, request 1 or 2 tickets, and actually complete the reservation.

Total time for all reservations across the three rounds was 19 minutes and 27 seconds.

Tickets reserved per transaction:

Round One – 290 reservations were for 2 tickets, 20 were for one

Round Two – 312 reservations were for 2 tickets, 26 were for one

Round Three – 98 reservations were for 2 tickets, 14 were for one

Looking at tickets purchased:

Unique IPs – 581 This one is always kind of fun to look at. There’s always a few obvious office parties or university groups (we’re aware of at least one CS department who dismissed students from class so they could go to the lab and attempt to buy tickets).

Unique Email Addresses – 707 662 purchased in one round 41 purchased in two rounds 4 purchased in all three rounds



Ticket Numbers:

Total attendance at ShmooCon will be just under 2200. 1460 of these tickets were released through general sales. Around 200 tickets are allocated to sponsors. We accepted 75 students through the Shmooze-A-Student program this year and have several other student groups attending as well. Add in 30 some Shmoozers, around 90 staff, 61 speakers, 20 press, 30ish events folks (think lockpick village, wireless ctf, etc), and a few other categories of tickets and we end up right against that 2200 goal.

Ticket Sales:

After each reservation round we go through the logs and look for anything that might point to outright shenanigans, including the usage of bots and other automated tools. Here’s the thing – we’re just not seeing it. Yes, we are aware people are attempting to script their way into loading pages and completing the registration process. Everything happens so quickly though, that it’s just not providing a true advantage. As an example, in today’s round we saw a scripted attempt that got caught up in our counter measures and never got a reservation. And, of course, we have a few counter measures in play – some secret, some not. The captcha simply serves as a liveness test.

We’ll talk more about this at 0wn the Con as we do every year. For now we’ll just say thanks. This week we’ll get the speaker line up posted, hopefully the schedule and point you at some other fun stuff that will be happening at the con as well. To those of you who got a ticket – see you in a few weeks. To everyone who didn’t, remember we live stream the event so you can watch along from home.