Fandango performs strongly as subscription services try to disrupt the movies

The last two years or so have brought an increased attention to movie ticket sales. Theaters like AMC are rolling out their own ticket-subscription services to try to increase traffic into their theaters. Well, according to Rakuten Intelligence, movie ticket subscription packages aren’t the only game in town for movie tickets. Fandango, the online movie ticket purchasing website, is enjoying growth in almost every category, including a 15.3 percent increase in online revenue year-over-year. Not only that, while there has been a  4 percent increase in Fandango buyers, the number of movie tickets sold has increased a healthy 14.1 percent, showing that Fandango is growing their user base and selling more tickets per user. In fact, over the last 12 months, Fandango has seen an increase of 9.7 percent on tickets per buyer.

A strong percentage of Fandango orders, 18.2 percent, are for a single tickets but the majority of orders, 53.9 percent, are for a pair. As more families head to the movies, a solid 27.2 percent of ticket orders on Fandango are for between three and seven tickets, and less than one percent of orders are for eight or more tickets.

As with most things that sell online, the holiday season – December, in this case – is the most brisk time of year for online movie ticket sales. Not only has December been Fandango’s biggest month for ticket sales over the last two years, but the number of tickets sold has grown year-over-year. Compared with December 2016, Fandango’s sales in December 2017 grew 14.3 percent.

If the consistent talk about how fewer people are going to the movies is correct, it isn’t affecting Fandango. The online movie ticket seller is growing across all age groups, save for one: 25-34 year olds, who are showing a 3.5 percent decrease in buyer numbers.

“25 to 34 year olds, many of whom may have young children, are undoubtedly most susceptible to the appeal of in-home streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu, which increasingly offer a strong alternative to the movie theater” says Ken Cassar, VP of Strategy & Insights, Rakuten Intelligence. “Even with that decrease, though, 24-35 year olds are still a critical movie theater constituency, representing 26.1 percent of total Fandango buyers and a quarter of generated revenue."

Even female buyers, who only account for 42 percent of the ticket revenue, are slightly outgrowing their male counterparts--by 2.9 percent versus 2.6 percent year-over-year for males.

With a panel of over 5.5 million online shoppers, Rakuten Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.

Rakuten Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Rakuten Intelligence can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Rakuten Intelligence gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time, which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.