Let’s answer the big question first: How fast did tickets sell out this year?

There were 1400 tickets released across all three rounds.

  • All tickets were held in 13.62 seconds
  • The waitlist filled up 1.79 seconds after that

In other words ShmooCon 2020 sold out in 15.41 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 to be complete across the three rounds was 26 minutes and 12 seconds.

Ok, tell me more.

There were a total of 735 distinct  transactions across all three rounds.

Tickets reserved per transaction:

  • Round One – 240 reservations were for 2 tickets, 20 were for one
  • Round Two – 307 reservations were for 2 tickets, 36 were for one
  • Round Three – 118 reservations were for 2 tickets, 14 were for one

Looking at tickets purchased across all three rounds:

Unique IPs – 614

  • IPs with 1-2 transactions – 603
  • IPs with 3-6 transactions – 9
  • IPs with 7 or more transactions – 2

Unique Email Addresses – 632

  • 547 purchased in one round
  • 69 purchased in two rounds
  • 16 purchased in all three rounds

What about people on the waitlist?

This year a total of 38 people got tickets after being waitlisted.

  • 10 in round one
  • 21 in round two
  • 7 in round 3

And the rest of the tickets?  Who do they go to?

ShmooCon caps attendance at 2200 in order to preserve atmosphere, make effective use of our con space, and keep our sanity.  

This year there are 1400 expected attendees from general ticket sales.  There are 98 students and 50 Shmoozers coming through the Shmooze-A-Student program.  75 students (with some faculty) coming from the service academies..  245 tickets are allocated to sponsors.  Pile on 60+ speakers, 32+ events folks (think lockpick village, wireless ctf, etc), 90+ staff members, 15+ registered members of the press, and a few other categories of tickets (donations, contest winners, etc) and we end up right against that 2200 goal.

What if I want to know more?

We talk a bit more in depth about ticket sales and our philosophy behind it (as well as many other things) in this online post.  Also, as we do every year, we’ll chat about all of this live at the 0wn the con session (which is taped and available for viewing later).

For those of you who like to look at the past – here’s the data for 2019 and 2018.

If you have any questions, email is the best way to go!