For all the debate around distribution platforms and marketplaces, the fundamentals of ticketing have barely changed.

Across festivals, sports fixtures, cultural venues and independent events, the same pattern appears again and again: the organiser sells the tickets.

In industry circles, this reality is often summarised as the “Three 90% Rule”, a framework associated with Pierre-Henri Deballon, founder of the event tech platform Weezevent. It distils three recurring patterns observed across two decades of operating ticketing and supporting organisers ranging from local venues and cultural institutions to major festivals and sports clubs.

The first 90% is the one most people underestimate. In the vast majority of cases, around nine tickets out of ten are sold through the organiser’s own channels: the official event page, the venue website, the mailing list, the community on social media, the partners who relay the message, the word-of-mouth network that follows a brand or a programme. This is not a new trend. It is the structural reality of the live event economy. Attention and intent are created by programming, storytelling and community — all of which sit with the organiser. Ticketing infrastructure processes demand; it does not manufacture it.

The second 90% is behavioural. When organisers successfully build a direct sales ecosystem — owning their database, managing pricing and optimising conversion themselves — they rarely return to relying primarily on marketplaces. Once the economics are understood, dependency becomes difficult to justify. Marketplaces may still be used tactically, but they stop being central. The exceptions are typically financial: events with heavy upfront costs or higher risk profiles sometimes lean on marketplace exposure as a way to secure volume early. In those cases, the function is closer to risk-sharing than pure marketing.

The third 90% concerns control. In marketplaces, most communication is not controlled by the organiser. Editorial picks, email calendars, push notifications, homepage placements and algorithmic rankings are governed by the platform, scheduled to optimise the platform’s global performance, and shared across thousands of competing events. From the organiser’s perspective, this creates a predictable asymmetry: you can list an event, but you cannot command when it will be promoted, how prominently it will appear, or how sustained the push will be. Exposure is real, but it is not sovereign.

Taken together, these three observations explain why “direct-first” ticketing is not a fashionable doctrine — it is simply an accurate description of how ticket revenue has always been generated. Marketplaces have a role, and in some cases a valuable one. But for most organisers, the economic engine is elsewhere: owned channels, owned data, and a direct relationship with the audience.

That is ultimately what the Three 90% Rule captures. Not a disruption, not a prediction — a baseline. In ticketing, the organiser is the marketer, the brand, the distributor and the long-term custodian of demand. Platforms matter, but they do not replace that equation. They succeed when they strengthen it.

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