# The venue: which operator, and how big a room

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

Sellout rates for every Edinburgh Fringe venue operator, and how room capacity cuts differently for comedy and theatre. 35,035 ticketed dates, 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.

## Where you book matters more than what you pay

_The gap between the best and worst venue operator is seven-fold, and it is not the same fact as the price gap wearing a different hat._

**Share of ticketed dates that sold out, by venue operator**

| | Sold out | Dates |
|---|---:|---:|
| Traverse Theatre (11 shows) | 95.2% | 165 |
| Monkey Barrel (137 shows) | 44.2% | 1,248 |
| Summerhall (80 shows) | 30.8% | 1,228 |
| Pleasance (247 shows) | 30.7% | 3,331 |
| The Stand (83 shows) | 24.7% | 401 |
| Underbelly (177 shows) | 24.0% | 2,442 |
| Assembly (226 shows) | 15.3% | 3,258 |
| Gilded Balloon (194 shows) | 15.3% | 2,456 |
| theSpace (373 shows) | 14.4% | 2,973 |
| ZOO (47 shows) | 9.3% | 581 |
| Laughing Horse / Free Fringe (210 shows) | 8.0% | 2,938 |
| Hoots (210 shows) | 7.5% | 2,529 |
| Greenside (164 shows) | 6.9% | 1,556 |
| C venues (92 shows) | 6.5% | 831 |
| Just The Tonic (203 shows) | 5.9% | 1,936 |
| Braw Venues (56 shows) | 3.7% | 653 |

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.

The Big Four are not a bloc. Pleasance sells out at almost exactly twice Assembly’s rate and twice Gilded Balloon’s, 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, C venues, Greenside, Just The Tonic and Hoots all sit under 8% — well under half the festival-wide rate.

One qualification on the top of the table. Fit everything at once — operator, room size, price, genre, date — and Monkey Barrel’s advantage shrinks from +13.4 points to +5.3 and stops being statistically significant, because part of what looks like a venue effect is the kind of act that venue books. 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.

> **What the ≥ on four of those bars means**
>
> Traverse, The Stand, Laughing Horse and Braw Venues sell every date through the Fringe’s central box office, and it retires a past date rather than freezing it: the availability gauge snaps to zero whether or not the show sold. Checked against performances still 70%+ available three hours before curtain, that end-of-run reading was wrong 20 times out of 34, against 0–1.4% for venues running their own ticketing. Their sellouts are real — those come from live readings taken before curtain — but their misses can never be confirmed, so each rate is a floor with no ceiling. The Stand’s ≥ 24.7% is 99 confirmed sellouts across 401 dates and could truthfully be anything up to 100%, which is why it should not be read as "below Underbelly". Traverse is the one case the floor settles by itself: even counting every unresolved date as a miss, it is the highest rate at the festival.

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 sell out more. Split it by genre and the sign flips — inside every operator big enough to test._

**Sellout rate by room capacity — all genres pooled**

| | Sold out | Dates |
|---|---:|---:|
| Under 50 seats | 17.0% | 9,264 |
| 50–99 | 14.6% | 13,121 |
| 100–199 | 20.6% | 7,701 |
| 200–399 | 36.8% | 2,297 |
| 400+ | 30.6% | 1,421 |

Capacity is the room’s, from the venue’s own seating data, and is known for 96.5% of dates.

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.

**The same bands, split by genre**

| Seats | Comedy | n | Theatre | n |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| Under 50 | 9.2% | 2,552 | 16.2% | 3,356 |
| 50–99 | 18.5% | 4,605 | 13.4% | 4,304 |
| 100–199 | 30.0% | 2,289 | 14.1% | 1,582 |
| 200–399 | 36.5% | 896 | 14.4% | 291 |
| 400+ | 37.1% | 272 | 5.5% | 73 |

Excludes dates sold only through the Fringe’s central box office, which reports sellouts but not misses and is 26.3% of comedy against 13.4% of theatre — pooling the two without that exclusion understates comedy. The 400+ theatre cell is 73 dates; treat it as a direction, not a number.

Comedy rises four-fold across the range. Theatre is flat and then falls, and in the smallest rooms theatre beats comedy outright. The obvious objection is that big rooms are big-name venues — so hold the operator fixed and split at 100 seats:

**Same operator, same festival, opposite sign**

| Operator | Comedy under 100 | Comedy 100+ | Theatre under 100 | Theatre 100+ |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| Pleasance | 37.7% | 39.6% | 27.2% | 14.5% |
| Assembly | 15.3% | 32.9% | 11.0% | 1.5% |
| Underbelly | 16.9% | 23.7% | 38.0% | 17.3% |
| Gilded Balloon | 17.9% | 17.9% | 12.4% | 2.6% |

Minimum 40 dates per cell. Comedy rises in four of four operators; theatre falls in four of four. Gilded Balloon’s comedy pair prints as a tie because it is one: 17.89% against 17.92%, a rise of three hundredths of a point. Read that row as flat, and the finding as three operators plus one that does not contradict it.

The plainest reading: a comedy audience is largely buying “a comedy at 8pm”, so a bigger room draws a bigger crowd. A theatre audience is buying that play, so demand is bounded per show and a bigger room mostly buys emptier seats. Theatre sells out by being small.


## In full

> **Why this chapter is two pages**
>
> The league table on this page ranks operators, and the capacity tables split them by room size. Both treat the operator as the unit. The finding that undercuts both — that the room a show plays is a dimension of roughly the same size as the chain it sits inside — carries far more evidence than a scroll can hold, so it has its own page. Read this one first; it is the claim the other one corrects.


## Method, in full

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.