Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes
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Why don't they let anyone with a credit card join a ticket lottery? Just trying for a ticket could cost say, $10 to discourage people from trying every one of their credit cards. Perhaps to make it more fair, a winner must take their tickets, to discourage gaming.
This goes on for two days. Then the "real" tickets go on sale, the lotto winners get their tickets.
This way if you run to the computer at 10:03 or get out the hospital the next day or just simply forget until dinnertime, you still get a chance.
The real problem is that they've combined a 1 hour media event with a developer conference. So many people every year use their ticket JUST for the keynote. It's like combining the Super Bowl and JSConf, then reaching the conclusion that obviously JSConf needs a bigger venue because millions of people tried to get a ticket.
I'd be really curious to see how many developers would seriously be willing to throw down $1600 for a keynote-less conference that notoriously offers no free stuff (ala Google IO) and has many of the materials available afterward. Then instead of trying to solve the intractable problem of a lottery that leaves more people satisfied, you'd actually see who really cares about the content.
JSConf also sells out in like 10 minutes, which is why they moved to a lottery system. There are no media events or giveaways there (mostly), just a really really good event that refuses to get larger because getting larger may (probably will) spoil some aspects of the event that make it really good.
Think about the lottery this way: if WWDC sold out in two minutes, it's likely that more than the number of people that can attend were on there trying to buy tickets at the same time, so it was really down to a lottery of timeouts, latencies, and overwhelmed systems. A real lottery at least makes it slightly more civilized, doesn't give geographic or equipment-based advantages, and spreads out the entry times over a day or two to let all timezones take equal advantage.
So, there's not really a gain in the quality of the person who gets to go, but it does call a spade a spade and takes some of the frustration out of the physical process of getting a ticket (if not with the result of the attempt).
edit: I do like non-transferable tickets, however (with some negotiated process of refundable tickets). This can be mostly enforced by essentially requiring will-call for all ticket purchases. While some people might be willing to let you borrow their credit card/id, not that many strangers will. You will have to be prepared to be a jerk and turn people down, though.
I'm still not sure about your idea...it just seems to boil down to reducing the incentives while keeping the price high, so of course there is some point where you can adjust that mixture to where you will only sell the number of tickets available.
I agree with the argument that the keynote attracts some people that otherwise don't care (though the WWDC is always super crowded post-keynote), but considering the other conferences that have this problem, the volume of people buying tickets, and the volume of people upset with the process that denied them tickets, I'm not convinced that going keynote-less would be sufficient to erase the issues with ticket buying. And that's really the only knob you have except for raising prices, which certainly does your attendee demographics no favors.
I also really have to agree with saurik that, even if you can reduce demand to have tickets sell out in, say, an hour, simple distractions that morning (kids, forgotten meetings, car problems) still mean you miss it, which will again heavily skew your demographics to the set of people glued to twitter who would never have missed the 30-minute, 15-minute, and 5-minute warnings of impending ticket sales. Some of those people are going to indeed be the true fans, but many will just be seeing those by virtue of attributes that bring no advantage to the conference, and may limit its reach. It takes all types :)
(I agree totally, am just adding some things I think are important.) It also levels the playing field in other ways: imagine someone who has a slight tremor in their hand, and can't use a mouse as quickly as others. Many people have jobs (including relevant ones) or families that might require their attention during the critical minute-long window.
So, unless your goal is to have a conference filled to the brim with the world's most dextrous, carefree, and well-off people, "first come first serve" doesn't make any sense... it is "fair" for some definition of "fair", but it is using a criteria with existing fundamental biases. As another example: "auction off to the highest bidders" is also a fair allocation scheme, yet many would balk at that.
At least this year they pre-announced the tickets; last year the time zone advantages were more drastic, and the "I have other things in my life that require me to be on certain schedules" issue was more costly. You also run into human advantages, such as "do you have friends (or minions) who are also on crazy schedules and can alert you". People like myself even had programs (and/or services like Pingdom) watching for changes to the website (although at least that is in some way related to the concept for the conference ;P).
The imbalance between the number of people willing to pay $1600 for the conference and the number of tickets available is so enormous by this point that there's simply no way to make it fair. It doesn't matter if it's first-come-first-served, or a lottery, or if you give preference to people who went before, or people who haven't gone before, or anything. No matter what you do, you're going to leave out a ton of people who deserve to go.
The event needs a bigger venue or some other radical change if it's to avoid leaving a lot of people out in the cold. Maybe Apple doesn't care, and nothing says they have to make any changes at all. But if they do care, then something really has to give. They need a vastly bigger space, or multiple conferences throughout the year, or a higher price, or something to manage the insane demand, if they actually want to improve this stuff.
Who really cares about the content? A ton of people. Buying a ticket only for the keynote is simply not a problem, and it's obvious just from being at the conference and talking to people who go or who want to go but can't because they couldn't buy a ticket.
1. Meeting with people (can be achieved without a ticket and just going to SF that week)
2. The sessions (many of which are recorded and thus largely don't require a ticket, but some are not I think?)
3. The keynote (not actually important for developers)
4. 1-on-1 with engineers. As far as I can tell the only truly unique and universally considered valuable aspect of the conference that absolutely requires a ticket.
So it seems that (4) is the real value here, probably more to do with the fact that its so hard to get developer help from Apple any other time of the year. Since you mention radical changes, I wonder if it would be worth it for Apple to just prerecord ALL sessions, make them all available after a Keynote that has nothing to do with the conference, and then offer a WWDC week that just focused on direct contact with engineers. This would actually be better for the sessions too: many times I've had a question about a session, and either there wasn't time to answer it then, or I didn't think of it until much later. By having a conference full of people that had plenty of time to review content beforehand, you'd probably get more questions answered.
I agree that #2 isn't all that important (although there are probably some people who learn better in that sort of environment) and #3 is basically just a free show that you get with your ticket and could easily be made completely separate.
I like the idea of a week that's just focused on direct contact with engineers, but I fear that it would end up in very inefficient uses of their time due to being flooded with people asking basics because they couldn't be bothered to watch the intro sessions. In general, I fear what would happen without enough structure. But perhaps it could be made to work, and it certainly seems worth considering.
The obvious first step seems like a bigger venue, though. Apple keeps saying they can't... but other companies pull it off, so I have to wonder why Apple can't.
Regarding multiple conferences, Apple decided not to do the Tech Talks for 2012. I hope they'll reconsider for 2013. That really was a great resource to have, and the 1:1 with the evangelists and DTS was excellent.
For higher prices, I keep on hearing this rumor and it never happens. There was a bump in the prices around 2010, and it never went further up from there. Maybe they're afraid of pricing out the indie developers? I have no idea.
I'd prefer a solution that scales the cost so as to make tickets available for every level of 'desire':
-first 1000 tickets cost $500 to get people in who may have never been able to otherwise -the next 4000 cost $1500 -the next 2500 cost $3000 -the next 2000 cost $4000 -and the final 500 cost $6000 or more so there are ALWAYS some tickets at the upper end available if you REALLY have to go.
Geez back in the Microsoft heyday there were many different conferences. Sure, the PDC had 20K attendees if you wanted to go to that but there were other smaller conferences as well.
Hell, I'd settle for an east coast conference so I don't need to hang out with the skinny-jeans hipsters :)
I was there, trying to buy them at 9:59am, at 10:00:20am the website finally went live, pressed the buy button and was greeted by "unable to process your request."
Seriously, Apple needs to figure this shit out. Whether that means opening up more seats, making tickets more expensive, or even just having a website that doesn't go down on you… something.
But that's my point: It's not even first-come first-serve anymore, it's a server-load-powered lottery.
But it is not just dev conferences. As an avid runner I've run a number of races every year. Recently a number of them have gone from selling out 12K slots in months to hours. In grad school classes filled up in seconds as well when registration opened.
This is a manifestation of our JIT culture. No longer do you mark the registration date in your calendar. No, now your call family and friends and have everyone raring to go at 11:59 PM before registration opens. If you're keen, you might probe their API and reverse engineer the site to get a jump on others.
Now that everything is in the ether, there is no concrete queue. You can't get there early if you're diehard. It is simply the roulette wheel of HTTP errors that determines who gets what today.
Apple’s tickets sold out 95 percent faster than Google’s tickets
WTF kind of statistic is this? The measure of two tech giants is how ludicrously quickly they sell out tickets to their conferences?
I thought I barely missed the cut, now I see that I wasn't even close.
Looks like it sold out in the exact amount of time it took to process a transaction.
I've been told the reason the event has been kept small is to maintain the same ratio of Apple developers to attendees. But I think that overstates the value of the Apple devs a bit. The attendees at this event really are one of a kind.
But, like another poster said, selling out in under 2 minutes makes them look good.
I'll give you a moment to let the sheer stupidity of your suggestion sink in.
In my experience the value of WWDC is getting to spend time doing Q+A with Apple engineers, and moving to a bigger venue with more competition for engineers reduces the overall value of the conference rather than increasing it.
Same as Google IO, these events have become like popular concerts- people leap on tickets because they know they're going to sell out, not because they've thought through why they'd want them.
This is not an ideal solution but it's much better than the current one.
The problem with raising prices should be obvious -- it preferentially selects wealthier attendees, not necessarily those who "value it the most".
> This is not an ideal solution but it's much better than the current one.
I don't think you've thought your position through. All raising prices achieves is to limit attendance to those who didn't care about the high price.
The fact is -- contrary to your claims, compatible with mine -- raising prices does both. It slants things towards people who value it more in dollars. People get a higher score for this both by valuing WWDC more and by valuing dollars less. That is better than random.
Next time leave out the meta discussion insults.
Note also that, "if demand exceeds supply, raise prices" is basic economics and standard advice on HN for many other things. e.g. if you're a freelancer with too many people trying to hire you, patio11 would say to raise prices.
you would not then reply saying he didn't think things through because all that is going to accomplish is having price-insensitive clients rather than good clients.
EDIT and how many people go to WWDC as a hobby? how many are really price insensitive? a lot of them, even if they have money, want to get business value exceeding the ticket price, or they will not go. filtering by who can get the most business value by attending would not please certain people with certain egalitarian mindsets, but would still actually be way better than random.
lots of people look price insensitive because the business value for them attending is $25,000 or whatever -- far more than the ticket price. but that isn't actually price insensitivity and it's a good thing to use a system that makes sure those people get to attend.
Yes, if the point is to maximize profit. If you have any other goal in mind, then maybe it's not the best strategy. For example, if you want diverse attendance at a conference, raising the prices to what the market will bear may not be the best approach.
> ... you would not then reply saying he didn't think things through because all that is going to accomplish is having price-insensitive clients rather than good clients.
And? Where's the counterargument?
> and how many people go to WWDC as a hobby?
Feel free to change the topic.
> Next time leave out the meta discussion insults.
It's only insulting if you've thought your position through. Clearly you haven't.
A lot of indie developers go to WWDC. I would go so far as to say they are the mainstay audience for the conference. Raising the prices significantly would mean the conference would lose most of their main audience.
I got the error page that said to restart my browser at 10:00 am. Then the maintenance page at 10:01. At 10:02, it was sold out.
Should they go to a lottery system? It seems like who gets in is pretty arbitrary already, at least it would take the stress out of it. I was nervous about it all morning, and my heart was racing just before 10. Such craziness.
like last year, i'll make a stop at the alternative wwdc (http://altwwdc.com) conference that has some good people from appsterdam spitting out the truth.
for me, wwdc is a great time to meet some cool people in town for the conference, but it's easier to meet people (and have a conversation) at the get togethers/parties/bars over a beer versus during the conference itself.
first 5000 connections with using account/session where the credit card was already on file. This didn't work for us since we were attempting to pay with the corporate credit card.
By the time I pivoted to Safari one minute later it was sold out.
The only exceptional thing about my account was that I'm a member of two dev programs, a business and an enterprise, on the same account.
Obviously, the bigger devs would have got their tickets days (weeks?) ago.
I think there's some subset reserved for Developer Relations and they give them out at will - I've never noticed a particular strategy with respect to app store placement.
However, that's a tricky road to go down. I have no idea what Apple's criteria is for that, and I know some teams that have worked closely with Apple in the past that never got that treatment.
Edit: before dzlobin does!
The videos are going to be released during the show. Anyone in NYC going to set up a WWDC East event?
He goes to check the Apple Store. It still says that there's something in his shopping cart. So, on a whim, he decides to complete the checkout process. Put in his address, name, info, credit card, clicked through a few screens.
And he got in. All thanks to a cookie.
Alas, it doesn't seem like 2013 will have any "saved by a cookie" moments.