Since we get asked every year, let’s get this one out of the way first – How fast did tickets sell out?

There were 1500 tickets released across all three rounds.

  • All tickets were held in 20.6 seconds
  • The waitlist filled up 2.16 seconds after that

In other words ShmooCon 2023 sold out in 22.76 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 28 minutes and 8 seconds.  The higher times seen here are due to several tickets bouncing down through the waitlist until they get picked up.  

Ok, tell me more.

There were a total of 805 distinct transactions across all three rounds.

Tickets reserved per transaction:

  • Round One – 310 reservations were for 2 tickets, 30 were for one
  • Round Two – 226 reservations were for 2 tickets, 48 were for one
  • Round Three – 159 reservations were for 2 tickets, 32 were for one

There were 667 Unique IPs across all three rounds.

  • Number of rounds in which they appeared:
    • 1 round – 602
    • 2 rounds – 60
    • 3 rounds – 5
  • Transactions per IP:
    • IPs with 1-2 transactions – 652
    • IPs with 3+ transactions – 15

There were 703 Unique Email Addresses across all three rounds.

  • 616 purchased in one round
  • 74 purchased in two rounds
  • 13 purchased in all three rounds

What about people on the waitlist?

This year a total of 73 tickets were obtained via the waitlist during ticket sales.

  • 17 in round one
  • 32 in round two
  • 24 in round 3

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

ShmooCon caps attendance in order to preserve atmosphere, make effective use of our con space, and keep our sanity.  This year that magic number is just under 2200, back up to our normal attendance numbers.

There are 1500 expected attendees from general ticket sales.  This includes 75 students (with some faculty) coming from the service academies. Additionally, there are 64 students and 51 Shmoozers accepted through the Shmooze-A-Student program. 210 tickets are allocated to sponsors.  Pile on 54+ speakers, 30+ events folks (think Lockpick Village, RF Village, etc), 90 staff members, ~10 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 2022, 2020, 2019 and 2018.

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