It is the room, not the venue: every building, every room

It is the room, not the venue

The league table above treats an operator as one thing. Inside a single building, rooms of the same size at the same price sell out nearly forty points apart — and the ranking holds up on a completely different set of shows.

Pleasance Courtyard is one operator at one address. Its Bunker One sells out 60.4% of its dates and its Below 22.8%. The two rooms hold 56 and 55 seats, average £13 a ticket, sit in the same building, and are 37.6 points apart. That gap is not an oddity of one venue: across the festival the median operator spans 36.7 points from its best room to its worst, against 38.3 points across the whole ranked operator table from Monkey Barrel down to Just The Tonic. Those two numbers are the same order, not equal: a max-minus-min over five to twenty-two rooms of 80–240 dates carries sampling noise the operator range does not, and shuffling the labels inside each chain — rooms kept, dates kept, only which room a date sits in randomised — still produces a median spread of 9.6 points (7.7 to 11.9 over 500 shuffles). The observed 36.7 is far clear of that floor, but roughly a quarter of it is floor. The room is a dimension of the same size as the venue chain the page has been publishing.

The obvious objection is that a room is just where the good shows get put. So rank every room on a random half of the shows that played it, and score it on the other, disjoint half — ranked inside its own operator, so a good chain cannot masquerade as a good room.

In full

The material the scroll has no room for.

The findings page draws the readable cut of this chart: buildings with at least 4 measurable rooms, which is 19 buildings and 129 rooms. It is a sample of the finding, not the finding. Drop that one threshold — keep every per-room floor exactly where it was — and the same query returns 49 buildings and 187 rooms, 30 buildings and 58 rooms more. That fuller chart replaces the sampled one here rather than sitting beside it, so no building is drawn twice on this page.

Method, in full

What this chapter measures, what it excludes, and where it is weakest.

Both cuts are one query with one set of floors. A room is drawn if it has at least 60 dates and at least 3 distinct shows in this snapshot; a building is drawn if it has at least one such room here, and at least 4 on the scroll. The 19 buildings the scroll draws appear here with identical rooms and identical rates, and a test fails the build if they ever stop matching — the deep cut is an extension of the scroll’s ' + 'chart, never a second opinion about it.

The 3-show floor is the one doing the most work, and it was added after the fact. Without it a single listing that played one room every day of the festival becomes that room’s entire record, and Underbelly Cowgate acquired an 84-point internal spread out of one show. A room bar is meant to describe a room, so a room whose record is one act does not get one.

Operators that sell every date through the Fringe’s central box office are excluded from this page altogether, not marked with a ≥ as they are in the operator league table. The reason is that the claim here is comparative — this room against that room inside one chain — and a floor with no ceiling cannot be ranked against a measurement without inventing the missing bound. Their rooms are not shown rather than shown wrongly.

Population is the driver set rather than the ticketed floor the rest of the analysis publishes. One timed-entry listing running dozens of slots a day moves a small room’s rate by twenty points, and those listings are excluded from the driver set. It is the one population difference between this page and the scroll’s headline figures, and it is why a room rate here will not reconcile against a venue rate elsewhere to the decimal.

The held-out test in the section above is the only thing on any of these pages built on a random split. The split is seeded and the seed is fixed, so re-running it does not reshuffle until the data itself moves; the whole split is repeated ten times and the gap never changes sign. Rooms are ranked inside their own operator, so a good chain cannot enter the test disguised as a good room, and the interval resamples shows rather than dates because dates inside one run are not independent draws.

The population, the definition of “sold out” and the two bounds every rate sits between are the same across every page here, and are set out once in how this was measured and what these numbers cannot tell you.