Sell Event Tickets From Your Own Website, Not From a Platform That Just Changed Owner

Everyone fixates on the fee. They argue about the percentage, build spreadsheets about the percentage, and negotiate nothing, because the percentage is the least interesting number in the whole arrangement. Meanwhile the genuinely expensive part sits in plain sight: the list of every person who ever bought a ticket from you lives on somebody else's platform, under somebody else's terms, and this year that somebody else changed.

I mean that literally. Eventbrite, the platform a large share of Irish workshops, classes, quiz nights and festival days are sold through, was bought by the Italian software group Bending Spoons in a deal worth around 500 million dollars. Its filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission record the merger completing on 10 March 2026, at which point the company left the New York Stock Exchange and went private. Nothing about that is scandalous. Companies get bought. The point is narrower and it should bother you more: the fee schedule your event business runs on is now set in a room you have never been in, by people who have no obligation to tell you anything in advance.

That is what renting a sales channel means. You are not buying a service at a price. What you are accepting is whatever price gets decided later.

The Fee You Argue About Is Not the Fee You Pay

Start with the mechanics, because they are worth understanding properly before anyone decides anything.

A ticketing marketplace typically charges two things: a percentage of the ticket price and a flat amount per ticket, with card processing on top. Eventbrite's Irish organiser pricing page, viewed this month, advertises a service fee of 3.7% plus 1.79 dollars per ticket and a payment processing fee of 2.9% per order.

Read that again. On the .ie site, aimed at organisers selling tickets priced in euro, the flat fee is quoted in US dollars. I have spent twenty years watching vendors serve Irish businesses American numbers and hope nobody notices, and it still gets on my nerves. Verify the rate on your own account rather than a marketing page, because what an organiser here actually pays varies by country and by plan.

Now the part that matters more than any of those digits. The flat per-ticket fee is regressive. On a 90 euro conference seat it is noise. Charge 12 euro for a Thursday night life drawing class and a flat fee plus a percentage plus processing takes a serious bite out of a small ticket, and small, cheap, repeatable events are exactly what most local businesses run.

Look at the scale in Eventbrite's own annual report for 2025, filed with the SEC as it was being taken private. Creators hosted nearly 4.6 million events, issued 258 million tickets, and generated more than 3 billion dollars in gross ticket sales. The company's net revenue for the year was about 292 million dollars. Set one against the other and roughly nine or ten cents in every euro's worth of tickets ended up with the platform rather than with the people who ran the events. Treat that as a rough shape rather than a rate: it includes advertising revenue, it is net of refunds and chargebacks, and the mix varies by country. The shape is still the shape.

And before anyone says the attendee pays those fees, not the organiser: they come out of the same wallet either way. The customer looking at 27.40 euro for your 25 euro pottery class does not do a mental breakdown of who charged what. They see the total, and the total is the last thing they look at before they decide.

The Second Event Is Where It Actually Hurts

The failure that never makes it into anyone's spreadsheet is this one.

Consider a Westmeath pottery studio running weekend wheel-throwing classes, the sort of scenario that plays out constantly. Two years of them. Twenty-something sessions, a few hundred people through the door, most of them delighted, plenty of them the kind who would come back and bring a friend. Then a new six-week course goes on sale, and the owner sits down to tell those few hundred people about it and discovers there is nobody to tell. The names sit in a platform. Marketing permissions over those email addresses belong to somebody else. That audience, two years in the earning, is from a marketing point of view a locked filing cabinet in another building.

So what do they do? They pay to reach them. That is not a rhetorical flourish, it is the business model. Eventbrite's 2025 accounts show ticketing revenue falling by nearly 21 million dollars while advertising services revenue rose by about 4 million, as sponsored placements on the marketplace grew. You sell tickets through a marketplace, the marketplace acquires your customers, and then it sells you access to the customers you brought. This is the same trick every rented channel eventually runs, and it is the same reason handing a slice of every order to a delivery app feels cheap in year one and expensive in year three.

When the ticket sale happens on your own site, that list is a table in your own database. Same people, same event. Completely different position five years from now.

Pricing Power Belongs to Whoever Owns the Terms

If you want to know what a platform will do to its pricing, read what it tells investors rather than what it tells you.

In that same annual report, Eventbrite states plainly that it raised ticketing fees in early 2023 for the first time in five years, has implemented pricing increases since, and, in its own words, plans to continue making changes to its pricing structure from time to time. The recent history bears it out. An organiser fee model was introduced in June 2023, then reversed in September 2024, a reversal the accounts quantify as a 16.8 million dollar drop in organiser fee revenue. Introduced, then withdrawn, inside fifteen months.

I am not arguing bad faith. A business is allowed to change its prices, and that filing is more candid than most. The operator's question is different: what happens to your margin the next time the model swings, and what is your move when it does? If your answer is to absorb it or leave, you do not have a pricing strategy, you have a subscription to someone else's.

What you are deciding	Marketplace ticketing	Ticket sales on your own site
What you pay	Percentage plus flat fee per ticket, plus processing	Card processing only, on your own hosting
Who holds the attendee list	The platform, under its permissions	You, in your own database
Who sets the next price change	The platform, when it chooses	Your payment provider's published rates
Where new attendees come from	Marketplace browsing and search	Your own search visibility and audience

What Selling Tickets Yourself Actually Involves

This is where the objection usually arrives, so let us take it seriously: is running your own ticketing a technical project? No. It is four things, and none of them require a developer.

1. A page for each event, carrying the date, the venue, the price and a button.
2. A ticketing or booking plugin, of which the WordPress ecosystem has several mature options that need no custom code.
3. A payment provider connected to it. Stripe's published Irish rate, for example, is 1.5% plus 25 cent for standard cards issued in the European Economic Area.
4. A way to check people in. In practice the plugin emails a QR code and you scan it at the door with a phone.

The street-level version of that: on the night, a queue of people hold up their phones, you scan, they walk in, and the money already sits in your own account rather than waiting on a platform payout schedule. Then take the difference on fees. On a 20 euro ticket, a percentage-plus-flat-fee marketplace charge is materially more than 1.5% plus 25 cent. Across a sixty-seat room, several times a month, that gap stops being abstract and starts being the cost of the raw materials for the class.

There is a visibility argument too, and it is stronger than most owners realise. Google supports event structured data, which as its Search Central documentation explains makes your events eligible for the event experience in Google Search and Google Maps, with your logo and description attached. The required properties are basic: the event name, the start date and the location. Google is explicit that it can take manual action against sites that abuse those guidelines, so mark up real, publicly bookable events and nothing else.

Any competent WordPress event plugin outputs that markup for you. The result is your event, on your own domain, appearing in front of the audience the Central Statistics Office measured in its Household Digital Consumer Behaviour release last December, when 57% of internet users here had booked tickets to concerts, cultural and other events online.

None of this needs a 3,000 euro agency build. A WordPress site with the payment side already working, on hosting that includes the SSL, the nightly backups and the analytics for 60 euro a year, covers the whole of it. Deploy the event page, verify the checkout with a real card, and you are trading.

Where a Marketplace Genuinely Earns Its Cut

Now the honest part. An argument with no concession is just an advertisement.

If you are putting on a public event for the first time, with no mailing list, no social following and no search presence, marketplace discovery is worth real money to you. Someone browsing what is on in their area this weekend is a customer you cannot otherwise reach, and a percentage of a ticket you would not otherwise have sold is a good trade every time. The same holds for a large one-off with genuine box office complexity: multiple ticket tiers, thousands of attendees, staffed scanning lanes, a promoter who needs reporting in a format their funder recognises. That is what those platforms are built for and they do it well.

The mistake is treating a launch tool as a permanent tenancy. Use the marketplace to find people who have never heard of you. Do not use it to sell the fifth season of a class to the same forty regulars who already know exactly where to find you.

The Limits, Stated Plainly

Selling tickets yourself moves work onto your desk, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Refunds are the clearest example. When a marketplace handles the transaction, refund requests, card disputes and the attendee who swears they never got the email all land in someone else's support queue. Bring ticketing in-house and they land in yours, along with the responsibility for handling a disputed card payment properly. For most small events that is a handful of emails a month. On a bad week, when a venue floods and eighty people need refunding at once, it is an afternoon of your life.

The other limit is discovery, and it is the real one. Your own website will not send you a stranger who was simply browsing for something to do on Saturday. That traffic has to come from your search visibility, your existing audience and your local reputation, all of which take longer to build than an account signup takes.

One from our side of the fence, since I am asking you to take mine seriously. Years ago we underestimated what a ticket release does to a small site. An on-sale is not steady traffic, it is a wall of concurrent visitors hitting the checkout in the same ninety seconds, and the server sizing that comfortably runs a brochure site all year will fold under it. We size for the spike now and cache aggressively in front of it. Ask your host what happens at 9am on release morning. Be suspicious of any answer that does not mention caching.

What This Is Really a Decision About

Strip out the percentages and this comes down to one question: after the event, who owns the relationship with everyone who came?

Sell through a marketplace and you rent that relationship, on terms an owner you did not choose can rewrite, using a fee schedule the company has told its investors it will keep adjusting. Run the sale through your own site and the relationship is yours, sitting in your own database, ready the next time you have something worth telling people about.

Most local businesses running events will end up doing both, and that is the sensible position. Marketplace for reach, own site for the people who already know you. What matters is knowing which job each one is doing, and making sure the channel you rent is the one you could walk away from tomorrow.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it cheaper to sell event tickets on my own website?

On the fees alone, usually yes. A marketplace charges a percentage plus a flat amount per ticket plus card processing, while selling from your own site leaves you paying card processing only, on hosting you were paying for anyway. The published Irish rate from Stripe for standard European Economic Area cards is 1.5% plus 25 cent per transaction. That gap is widest on cheap, high-volume tickets like classes and quiz nights, and narrowest on expensive, low-volume ones.

Do I need a developer to sell tickets from a WordPress site?

No. The WordPress plugin ecosystem includes mature event and booking plugins that handle ticket types, capacity limits, QR code check-in and payment provider connections through a settings screen. Your job is to choose one, connect your payment account, and test a real transaction before you announce the event.

Will my events still show up on Google if I stop using a ticketing marketplace?

They can, and the mechanism is free. Google's Search Central documentation explains that event structured data makes an event eligible for the event experience in Google Search and Maps, provided you supply at least the event name, start date and location. Good event plugins generate that markup automatically. What you lose is marketplace browsing traffic, which is a separate audience worth weighing honestly.

What happens to my attendee list if the ticketing platform changes ownership or terms?

It stays with the platform, governed by whatever terms and marketing permissions apply at that moment. Eventbrite's SEC filings show its merger with Bending Spoons completing in March 2026 and the company leaving public markets, and the same filings state it plans to keep changing its pricing structure over time. Export your attendee data regularly regardless of which platform you use, and keep your own copy of any consent you have collected.

Should I move ticketing for an event that is already on sale?

No. Finish the current event where it is. Switching a live on-sale confuses customers who already hold tickets and creates two sources of truth for your door list. Set up ticketing on your own site for the next event, run one small session through it end to end, then move the rest once you have seen a real payment and a real check-in work.

Is there any event where a marketplace is still the better choice?

Yes. A first public event with no existing audience benefits genuinely from marketplace discovery, because a percentage of a ticket you would never otherwise have sold is worth paying. Large one-off events with complex tiering and staffed entry operations are also well served. The economics turn against you on the repeat events sold to people who already know your name.

Sources

• Eventbrite, Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025, US Securities and Exchange Commission
• Culture and Travel, Household Digital Consumer Behaviour 2025, Central Statistics Office
• Event structured data documentation, Google Search Central