Analysis → The venue: which operator, and how big a room
The venue: which operator, and how big a room
The operator league table and the capacity finding that runs backwards for theatre, with the working shown. The room-level correction to both has a page of its own.
Some figures are temporarily redacted. The measurements of how deeply shows sold into their central box-office allocation are withheld while we review data use with the festival organisers; the sellout rates, sample sizes and everything else are unchanged. Nothing has been deleted, and the figures will return if and when that review concludes.
Where you book matters more than what you pay
The gap between the best and worst rankable venue operator is fourteen-fold, and it is not the same fact as the price gap wearing a different hat.
| Operator | Allocation sold | Dates sold out | Dates | Shows |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pleasance | redacted | 32.1% | 4,819 | 266 |
| Laughing Horse / Free Fringe | redacted | ≥ 6.9% | 4,570 | 223 |
| theSpace | redacted | 13.3% | 4,523 | 480 |
| Assembly | redacted | 15.8% | 4,124 | 238 |
| Hoots | redacted | 7.7% | 4,014 | 217 |
| Gilded Balloon | redacted | 10.6% | 3,897 | 203 |
| Underbelly | redacted | 19.0% | 3,645 | 192 |
| Just The Tonic | redacted | 5.2% | 3,060 | 224 |
| Greenside | redacted | 6.5% | 2,323 | 196 |
| Monkey Barrel | redacted | 43.5% | 1,893 | 157 |
| Summerhall | redacted | 24.5% | 1,708 | 80 |
| C venues | redacted | 3.2% | 1,098 | 117 |
| Braw Venues | redacted | ≥ 2.8% | 1,025 | 57 |
| ZOO | redacted | 9.9% | 928 | 51 |
| The Stand | redacted | ≥ 25.4% | 638 | 110 |
| Traverse Theatre | redacted | ≥ 89.6% | 270 | 12 |
Cells marked “redacted” are measurements of how much of a show’s central box-office allocation sold, temporarily withheld pending a review of data use with the festival organisers. The remaining columns are unchanged.
Floor rate: a date counts as sold out only where we could see it, so every bar is a lower bound. For most operators the ceiling is only a few points higher, because they sell through their own ticketing as well as the Fringe’s and both outcomes are visible. The four marked ≥ have no ceiling at all — see below. Twelve timed-entry and walk-around listings are excluded here, as exhibitions and events already were — see “What these numbers cannot tell you”. They moved six of these bars, and the other ten not at all. Five moved by points: Underbelly from 23.5% to 19.0%, Summerhall from 27.8% to 24.5%, C venues from 6.4% to 3.2%, Assembly from 13.5% to 15.8% and Pleasance from 30.3% to 32.1% — the last of those ARCADE’s 432 slot dates at 9.7%, which had been holding Pleasance down. The sixth barely moves and is listed for completeness: Hoots from 7.9% to 7.7%, on 103 dates.
The Big Four are not a bloc. Pleasance closed out ×2.03 as many of its dates as Assembly and ×3.03 as many as Gilded Balloon, on comparable ticket prices — a bigger spread than anything the programme itself would suggest. Assembly and Gilded Balloon are the standout underperformers relative to what they charge.
Monkey Barrel is the outlier at the top, and it is a year-round Edinburgh comedy club running its own rooms through August rather than a festival land-grab. At the bottom, Hoots, Greenside, Just The Tonic and C venues all finished under 8% — well under half the festival-wide rate. C venues is the bottom of the ranked table at 3.2%, and it is there because one timed-entry listing left it: Truthmachine ran 160 slots at 28.1% and was carrying more than half of that operator’s sellouts by itself.
One qualification on the top of the table. Fit everything at once — operator, room size, price, genre, date — and Monkey Barrel’s advantage shrank from +13.4 points to +5.3 and stopped being statistically significant, because part of what looks like a venue effect is the kind of act that venue books. That fit is the mid-festival one, on the 2026-08-16 snapshot, and it has not been refitted at the season-final cutoff — it is quoted here for its direction, not its decimal. The spread across the table as a whole is real; the exact size of any one operator’s edge is softer than the chart makes it look.
Every bar here is a whole company, though, and a company is not where a show actually plays: the next section is why that is only half the story.
Room size runs backwards for theatre
The festival-wide finding is that bigger rooms sold out more. Split it by genre and theatre runs the other way — inside every operator big enough to test.
Capacity is the room’s, from the venue’s own seating data, and is known for 96.5% of dates. Excludes the twelve shape-detected timed-entry listings — see “What these numbers cannot tell you”. They were worth ten points to the 200–399 band on their own, which used to top this chart at 36.0%.
That is the opposite of the intuition that a small room is easy to fill. A 40-seat room is not scarce, it is invisible: the scarcity only bites once enough people know the show exists. But pooled like this the finding is mostly comedy, because comedy is the larger half of the sample.
| Seats | Comedy | n | Theatre | n |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 50 | 8.6% | 4,127 | 13.4% | 3,415 |
| 50–99 | 17.1% | 7,407 | 12.8% | 6,778 |
| 100–199 | 28.8% | 3,654 | 13.0% | 2,456 |
| 200–399 | 36.5% | 1,283 | 12.2% | 483 |
| 400+ | 34.1% | 440 | 4.7% | 107 |
Excludes dates sold only through the Fringe’s central box office, which reports sellouts but not misses and is 26.0% of comedy against 12.6% of theatre — pooling the two without that exclusion understates comedy. The 400+ theatre cell is 107 dates; treat it as a direction, not a number.
Comedy more than quadruples across the range, from 8.6% under fifty seats to 36.5% at 200–399. Theatre is flat and then falls, and in the smallest rooms theatre beat comedy outright. The obvious objection is that big rooms are big-name venues — so hold the operator fixed and split at 100 seats:
| Operator | Comedy under 100 | Comedy 100+ | Theatre under 100 | Theatre 100+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pleasance | 39.1% | 38.7% | 31.8% | 11.5% |
| Assembly | 13.2% | 30.3% | 22.7% | 1.4% |
| Underbelly | 16.6% | 25.2% | 19.4% | 14.7% |
| Gilded Balloon | 11.0% | 15.5% | 5.2% | 2.2% |
Minimum 40 dates per cell. Theatre falls in four operators of four, and it is the half of this table that survived the full season intact. Comedy rises in three of the four — Assembly, Underbelly and Gilded Balloon — and is flat at Pleasance. An earlier version of this table reported comedy running the other way at Gilded Balloon, its small rooms beating its big ones by nine points; that was entirely an artefact of the faulty post-performance readings described in “What these numbers cannot tell you”, and is withdrawn — corrected, its small comedy rooms lose to its big ones by 4.5 points. So the pooled comedy chart above is carried by the room bands across the whole festival rather than by any one chain, and the “opposite directions” headline is properly a claim about theatre.
How much of it is the act
A venue sets where its shows start far more than it sets how far apart they end up. In comedy a good act in a weak room stayed rare all season — about one in nine. In theatre it is closer to one in five, because theatre’s venues start twenty points closer together.
In full
The material the scroll has no room for.
Method, in full
What this chapter measures, what it excludes, and where it is weakest.
Operator is a derived column on the snapshot, not a rule applied per analysis. Every venue in the programme is mapped once to the chain that runs it, and the mapping is printed with any unmatched venue carrying 100 dates or more, so a venue quietly falling out of a chain shows up as a build-time warning rather than as a chain that looks smaller than it is. Sites a chain runs as separate buildings — Pleasance Courtyard and Pleasance Dome, the four Underbelly locations — are one operator here and separate buildings in the room drill-down, which is why the two pages count different things.
The one adjustment that changes how the table should be read is the multivariate fit, and it is quoted in the section above rather than buried here because it cuts against the headline: fit operator, room size, price, genre and date together and the top of the table shrinks toward the middle. The spread across the table survives; the precise size of any single operator’s edge does not. Nothing on either page is a causal claim, and no row here is a lever a producer can pull.
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.