Louis C.K. Cuts Ticket Scalping 96% by Going Direct To Consumer

Louis C.K. is just flipping legacy entertainment business models in their heads right now. We know how he cut out the middle man and went directly to his fans to sell ticket to his upcoming comedy tour. Then we heard about the early sales success. Now, in an interview with comedy website Laughspin, C.K. reports that his direct to consumer model has cut down on the scalping of his tickets by a whopping 96%.

Here’s where we are with the scalpers as of now…

I’m doing 67 shows on this tour and we’ve sold 135,600  tickets to those shows after one week on sale.

In addition to the tour, I’m doing two shows in one city that are on sale through traditional ticketing.*

So as a comparison…

There are 1100 tickets available on stubhub alone for those two  traditionally ticketed shows out of 4,400 available ( Almost exactly 25%). ** and these shows aren’t sold out yet.

There are less than 500 tickets available on all scalper sites (including stubhub) out of the entire 135,600  tickets that have already been sold, from the tour sold exclusively on my site,louisck.com (substantially less than 1%)

So it’s working.  So far.

In other words, scalping is down more than 96% using his model, compared to what he is seeing at the venues on his tour that are normally ticketed. That’s massive. And just for fun, at $45 a ticket, Louis has sold over $6 million in tickets. Not bad for an experiment.