# The show itself: genre, origin, format and the nulls

Source: https://edfringeguide.com/analysis/genre
Part of: What actually sells out at the Edinburgh Fringe — https://edfringeguide.com/analysis

Genre, country of origin, work-in-progress billing and twenty pre-registered hypotheses against Edinburgh Fringe sellout rates. Snapshot pinned at 21 August 2026.

35,035 ticketed performances across 3,292 shows, 3–21 August 2026. Snapshot pinned at 21 August 2026 (2026-08-21T19:40:00.000Z).

**Every rate below is a floor**: a date counts as sold out only where the outcome was observable, and unobservable dates count as not sold out.

## Theme moves the sellout rate less than the venue does

_Children’s shows and music lead. Circus trails badly. Comedy and theatre are nearly level at date level — and nothing like level at show level._

**Sellout rate by genre**

| | Sold out | Dates |
|---|---:|---:|
| Children’s shows (124 shows) | 20.0% | 1,355 |
| Music (298 shows) | 19.7% | 1,674 |
| Comedy (1,287 shows) | 17.5% | 14,528 |
| Theatre (952 shows) | 17.3% | 11,280 |
| Opera (151 shows) | 16.3% | 1,372 |
| Cabaret (137 shows) | 16.3% | 1,313 |
| Spoken word (95 shows) | 14.2% | 325 |
| Circus (104 shows) | 9.7% | 1,019 |

Exhibitions and events are excluded: walk-in and timed-entry formats barely use the booking channel, so their rate measures the format, not demand.

At show level rather than date level the comedy/theatre gap is much starker: 48.3% of comedy shows sell out at least one date, against 33.7% of theatre shows. Theatre is also the only major genre that is more expensive than comedy while selling out less — £13.57 against £10.37.

Format tags cut across genre and carry signal genre alone does not. Dates tagged “Interactive” sell out at 34.3% across 77 shows; “Classical” at 5.6% across 73.


## Where the act is from

_Australian shows sell out at more than twice the rate of American ones, and it is one of the effects that survives adjustment._

**Sellout rate by the company’s home country**

| | Sold out | Dates |
|---|---:|---:|
| Australia | 28.7% | 2,017 |
| Scotland | 23.3% | 5,701 |
| England | 16.2% | 15,030 |
| USA | 13.7% | 5,348 |
| Elsewhere | 12.5% | 4,770 |

Both genres agree here, which is why this one is not split: Australia leads and the USA and “elsewhere” trail in comedy and in theatre separately, and nothing reorders. The size of the Australian edge over England differs — ×1.93 in theatre against ×1.42 in comedy — but that is a magnitude wobble on one shape, not two different stories.

Australia holds up inside almost every venue operator large enough to test, and survives the multivariate model at +10.1 points; Scotland at +7.2. The exceptions are Underbelly and Hoots, where Australian dates sell out below the operator’s own average rather than above it. The Australian circuit sends acts to Edinburgh with a Melbourne or Adelaide run already behind them, which is the same signal the credential table picks up from a different direction.


## A work in progress sells out the night and not the run

_Comedy that advertises itself as unfinished sells out 26.79% of its dates against 16.91% for everything else — and is no more likely, slightly less in fact, to sell out at some point in its run. Both of those are the same fact, and which one you quote depends on who is asking._

**Comedy with “work in progress” in the title, against the rest of comedy**

| Comedy | Dates | Shows | Dates a show | Dates sold out | Shows selling out at least once |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| Work in progress in the title | 683 | 99 | 6.9 | 26.79% | 44.4% |
| All other comedy | 13,810 | 1,180 | 11.7 | 16.91% | 48.7% |

Median run: 5 dates against 14. The two right-hand columns are the whole finding — the date column says a work in progress is nearly ten points more likely to go, the show column says it is four points LESS likely to ever go, and neither is wrong.

The date-level gap is not composition. It survives every control that could explain it away, including the tightest one available on this data — the exact room, which holds the operator, the building, the size, the price and that room’s own programming all at once.

**The same comparison, held inside progressively narrower strata**

| Compared only against comedy in the same… | ×odds |
|---|---:|
| Venue operator | 1.63 |
| Operator and price band | 2.39 |
| Operator, price band and room size | 2.33 |
| Exact room | 1.52 |

Mantel–Haenszel, on 683 dates from 99 shows. A show-clustered interval on the raw ten-point gap runs +1.2 to +19.6 points — wide, and clear of zero. It is not one venue’s house style either: Hoots 205 dates, Monkey Barrel 183, Laughing Horse 76, Just The Tonic 55.

> **Scarcity, not heat — and the two readings are for two different people**
>
> A work in progress is five nights in a small room at a low price, usually a name testing material. Five nights of a thing people want is a scarcer product than fourteen, and that is what the date rate measures. The show-level rate says the underlying demand is no greater: 44.4% of these shows sell out at least one date against 48.7% of other comedy. So a punter should read “work in progress” as “this particular night will go”, and a producer should read it as “this format does not make you a hotter show, it makes each night scarcer”. Reporting the per-date figure as though it were the per-show figure is the natural mistake, and it would be a big one.

The depth measure agrees with the show-level reading and not the date-level one. Against the peer model’s expectation these shows sell +1.20 points more of their allocation than comparable shows — indistinguishable from zero on 65 shows. They close the last few seats more often. They do not sell deeper.


## Things that do nothing

_Twenty ideas about what sells a Fringe show were written down before any of them was tested, so that the ones that failed would have to be published too. These are the ones that failed._

**Tested, and not there**

| What was tested | Dates | Sold out | Everything else | Held inside | ×odds |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---|---:|
| Sorting early in the brochure — title A–M | 21,763 | 16.39% | 18.55% | Venue operator | 0.96 |
| Shouting — an ALL-CAPS word in the title | 2,299 | 16.09% | 17.20% | Venue operator, room size and price band | 0.99 |
| A long run — 13 dates or more | 23,477 | 17.29% | 16.68% | Venue operator, room size and price band | 1.02 |
| Opening late — first date 12 August or after | 2,898 | 23.33% | 16.58% | Venue operator, calendar date, room size and price band | 1.16 |
| Taking a day off mid-run | 20,167 | 19.26% | 13.70% | Venue operator, calendar date and price band | 1.02 |

Every row is a Mantel–Haenszel odds ratio against the rest of the driver population, held inside the strata its own row names — five rows controlled five different ways, so the column saying which is not decoration. Twenty hypotheses at the usual threshold buys about one false positive by chance, so nothing here was promoted on a date-level p-value: each was re-tested either with an interval that resamples SHOWS rather than dates, or on a held-out set of shows. The two candidates that died at exactly that step are in this table.

- **Sorting early in the brochure — title A–M** — The one large cell that looks like an effect — theatre A–M against N–Z — is date-level significance on clustered data and does not reproduce at show level.
- **Shouting — an ALL-CAPS word in the title** — Strongly negative on dates, gone once dates are clustered inside shows. The same measurement on blurb text was published as a surviving negative in an earlier pass; read that as unconfirmed.
- **A long run — 13 dates or more** — The raw per-date rate is U-shaped and its top bucket is largely the timed-entry listings named in the method notes. Run length is right-censored at the cutoff.
- **Opening late — first date 12 August or after** — Only dates from 12 August count, so every opening cohort is live at once. The raw gap is timed entry, not the venue: 2 shape-detected listings from the method note carry 295 of these 2,898 dates, and dropping them alone — before any control — takes late openers to 15.25%, below the 16.58% of everything else. The interval crosses zero either way.
- **Taking a day off mid-run** — Survives operator and calendar date, then dies on price and flips sign between the two genres. The festival’s own day off is Monday 17 August.

> **This withdraws support for an earlier finding of ours**
>
> An earlier pass over blurb text reported that an ALL-CAPS word in the blurb is a control-surviving negative, on a date-level significance test. The same measurement on title text, on the same shows, is strongly negative on dates and evaporates the moment dates are clustered inside the shows they belong to. The two are the same claim about the same writers. Treat the blurb version as unconfirmed rather than as established, and treat any date-level p-value on a show-level feature the same way.

Three more died the same way and are recorded here rather than tabled: a producer with ten or more shows in the festival sells out 32.8% of dates against 14.7% for a one-show producer, survives venue and genre, and dies on price — big producers buy the expensive slots, and that is the whole effect. Prices ending in .50 outsell whole pounds until you notice a £12.50 show is simply 4% dearer than a £12 one. And a room turning over ten shows a day runs at half the rate of one turning over two, which is entirely what kind of venue does that.



## Method, in full

The nulls section is the part of this analysis most worth reading and the least likely to be quoted. Its hypotheses were written down before they were tested, which is what makes a null result reportable rather than an absence of a finding: a page that only publishes what survived is a page that cannot tell you how much was tried. Each row names the controls it died under, because "no effect" and "no effect once the venue is held fixed" are different sentences.

The work-in-progress finding is a per-date against per-show trap and the trap IS the finding. Counted per date a work-in-progress billing looks like it sells; counted per show it does not, because the format is concentrated in short runs and a short run is a different denominator, not a different demand. Both counts are published side by side rather than the flattering one alone.

Genre is treated as a moderator throughout this analysis rather than as a row in a table. Five of the six pooled cuts audited turned out to be averages of two opposite shapes, most sharply start time, where the pooled reading is true of theatre and the reverse of the truth for comedy. Where a cut in this chapter stays pooled, it is because it was split, checked, and agreed across genres — and it says so.