Timing and the run, in full

When shows sell out

Prime time is a myth — for theatre. For comedy 7pm is the best hour on the clock. Saturday is real, Sunday is not, and the festival gets harder to get into as it runs.

Pooled, the 8pm–10pm slot everyone competes for sits at or below the festival average, the peaks are 11am and 3pm, and the whole range is seven points end to end. That is the most misleading chart on this page. It is the average of two clocks running in opposite directions.

Comedy’s best hour of the entire day is 7pm, at 27.1% — eight points clear of its own late-morning showing and half again the festival average. Comedy rises into the evening. Theatre collapses into it: its three worst hours on the clock are 7pm, 8pm and 10pm, at 11.1%, 10.4% and 9.4% — but not the 9pm between them, which runs at 16.4%, above theatre’s own noon. The slump is those three hours, not a continuous stretch. Theatre’s peaks are exactly where the pooled claim says they are, at 11am and 2–3pm. So “prime time is a myth” is a true statement about theatre and the reverse of the truth about comedy, and the pooled chart says it in both their names.

Across the run the rate climbs — 10.5% on 5 August against 21.4% on 14 August and 18.8% on 18 August — the same catalogue getting harder to book into as the festival advances through its calendar and the tourist population builds. The climb flattens in the third week rather than continuing.

Selling out is not usually a cliff. Of the 34,777 ticketed dates the monitor has a trajectory for, 35.6% dropped below half availability at some point, 21.5% got under 20% left, and 15.9% were seen at zero — so most of what runs low does eventually go. That last figure is below the page’s 18.8% floor rate because the floor also counts sellouts the live ledger caught on dates with no trajectory of their own. Eventual sellouts are separable from the rest about three weeks out, when they are already at a median 63% availability against 87% for everything else.

A third of sold-out dates come back

Selling out is not a one-way door, and how often a date reopens turns out to say more about how a venue manages its stock than about how much people wanted the show.

That is an eight-fold spread, and it lines up with how each operator sells rather than with how well. Monkey Barrel, Underbelly and The Stand reopen four or five sellouts in ten; Laughing Horse reopens one in sixteen. A Free Fringe show has no held-back allocation to release and takes no returns, so when it is gone it stays gone — which under a stay-sold-out definition would make it look like the most in-demand model at the festival.

For anyone using the site, the practical reading is the cheerful one: a date showing as gone is worth checking again, and roughly three in ten of them will have something. That is on top of the stock a venue never puts through the central box office at all, which is why every “gone” message here says the venue may still have tickets.

How much warning you get before a date goes

The availability percentage is not equally trustworthy everywhere. In the smallest and the largest rooms, most sellouts arrive from a reading that still looked comfortable.

That 200–399 row is the one to distrust, because it is two different rooms averaged into one number. Split it by genre and the middle of the table stops being the reliable part for everybody:

Warning quality is U-shaped pooled, and it is worst at both ends for opposite reasons. A 30-seat room moves several percentage points with every single ticket, so it skips straight through the thresholds between two readings. A 600-seat room moves hundreds of seats faster than a polling interval can see. The rooms where the percentage means what it looks like are the 100–399 seat ones in the middle.

The practical consequence, and the reason this section exists: in a small room the number of seats left is the honest figure and the percentage is the misleading one, and any “selling fast” estimate that divides availability by a rate of sale is systematically over-optimistic below about fifty seats.

Method, in full

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

Four days in early August are a hole in this chapter and are excluded from every weekday and trajectory claim rather than averaged in. An upstream change stopped the availability monitor for that stretch, and a gap in a time series is not a low reading — treating it as one would drag every weekday rate toward whatever the surrounding days happened to do.

Every figure in this chapter is right-censored at the snapshot cutoff, and the censoring is not uniform across the claims. A date late in the run has had less time to sell out than a date early in it, so run length and opening date are the two cuts where the censoring bites hardest, and both say so where they are published. The festival runs past this cutoff; rates rise through a run and the final numbers will be higher than these, though the climb flattens rather than continuing.

The recovery finding is about inventory and not about demand, and it is the claim on these pages most often read backwards. A date going from sold out back to available usually means stock was released or a hold expired, not that buyers changed their minds. That is also why the recovery chart is drawn to a different scale from the sellout charts and says so: it is a share of an operator’s own sellouts, not a share of its dates, and the two are not comparable by bar length.

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.