VentureBeat

If you don’t know what to do New Year’s Eve, take a look at the parties on Going, a year-old event listing site. Mos Def’s ‘Sneakers Required’ party may not be that exciting for you if you’re not in the site’s targeted demographic of 21-29 year olds, but nightlife is only one area where Going wants to beat the competition (see our previous coverage here, here and here).

Going is all about “what’s happening?” and “who’s going?” in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — Miami will be added shortly. Events range from band tours to nightlife, restaurant openings, rock climbing, marathon training and lots in between. Wrapped around the user generated listings (75 percent of the site content is generated by users, according to the company) is a social network that the company sees as an augmentation of the popular social networks (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) in the sense that Going potentially introduces you to people with similar interests and allows you to manage your real-world social life with friends.

Recent improvements have been made to the recommendation layer of the site. Based on your past history of event attendance and any likes/dislikes you mark, Going offers a glimpse outside your immediate network by showing who attended the same events or has interests in common. Sounds like the start of a dating service, doesn’t it?

According to comScore, the website had 424,000 unique visitors in November. The company won’t be more specific about its traffic. It wouldn’t comment about revenue or profitability.

The company uses a nation-wide networks of promoters to build comprehensive, city-wide information. It has plans to add between ten and twenty more cities in 2008 and possibly to expand internationally in the second half of the year. Other players include Zvents, Eventful, Upcoming.org and Down2Night. But this is a tough sector. MingleNow and Judysbook and Attendio have fallen away, with Attendio saying it was abandoning events because users have failed to embrace such sites en masse.

As part of a strategy to get away from a strictly advertising and sponsorship revenue stream, Going.com has also expanded into ticket sales. So far, the company says, the ticketing add-on has been successful, reaching seven figures (tickets sold) for 2008.

Going is based in Boston, Mass., and has raised $3.5 million in a seed round and $5 million more in a Series A round earlier this year. It says it will look for Series B funding in the second half of 2008.

The events listing business has shrunk, with one competitor, Attendio, dropping out lately. The leading remaining competitors are, in rough order of apparent market share, Eventful, Yahoo’s Upcoming, Zvents and Going.com.

Among those four, there’s not yet a clear leader, nor have they yet attracted tens of millions of users — a reason Attendio cited for stepping aside. Capturing people’s attention when it comes to events, it seems, is harder than it might appear.

Further, there’s the risk of a large site stepping in — whether Google, with a new search category, or Facebook or MySpace with their own listings. As more data moves online, it becomes ever easier to simply collect and list events (Google, in fact, already offers a non-automated calendar tool). More is needed.

To defend against any such incursions, each of the four major sites has its own strategy for differentiating itself.

Eventful
The largest events site, and one of the oldest, Eventful is approaching three million registered users, and receives more than eight million pageviews each month not including its automated emails, which CEO Jordan Glazier told us people actually open between 40 and 80 percent of the time.

Part of Eventful’s success stems from its early comprehensiveness. During a test run of the site, I found a surprising number of listings in my small, boring hometown (Danville, Virginia, if you’d like to try for yourself) including a scrapbooking social and karaoke at Ham’s, a local bar.

However, Eventful is counting on major events and performers to keep it on top. One of the site’s more popular sections is a feature for fans to demand that performers visit their hometown.

The performers can watch the numbers grow, and when they’ve reached a high enough point, the performer can schedule an appearance, and using Eventful, can notify expectant fans that they’re on the way.

Yahoo Upcoming
While Upcoming started out as an independent events listing site, Yahoo snapped it up in October 2005 as part of a campaign to expand its local offerings.

The site has since been integrated with some other Yahoo offerings, like Yahoo Autos and Calendar. While Yahoo won’t reveal specific traffic information to us, it did say that the number of unique visitors coming to the site increased 102 percent in the year since August 2006. That would put it slightly above Zvent’s user numbers, based on the last available traffic stats for the separate Upcoming.com domain (the site is now under the main Yahoo domain).

Upcoming’s product manager, Vince Maniago, told us that Yahoo wants to make its listings comprehensive — likely with the intent of blocking any move by Google to capture listings with a search category. However, Yahoo’s search engine doesn’t give special weight to its Upcoming event listings.

Maniago said the site will continue working on fleshing out and adding to its listings, focusing on quality. “Everyone has some kind of listing, which is why it’s so fragmented,” he told us, adding that making the listings both relevant and accessible is the priority.

Zvents
While Zvents was founded back in March 2005, it didn’t find much traction until later. In December 2006, Zvents became the events platform for Boston.com, the portal for the Boston Globe, and found its true calling in local search, which includes things like movie show times and department store sales events.

That pulls in about five million page views a month for the site, but perhaps more importantly, is fueling a growth rate for new visits that the company says is averaging between 30 and 50 percent each month, faster than competitors.

The focus is on information, provided in a calendar format. Where people already search online for listings or addresses, Zvents wants to provide an easily accessible calendar that their partners, who include many newspapers, can use.

Zvents isn’t betting the entire farm on local search, though; after all, Yelp Events is trying to do the same thing. CEO Ethan Stock has hinted to us that Zvents will release an “analytic platform,” based on its local search technologies within a few weeks.

Going.com
Formerly known as HeyLetsGo, Going.com changed its name in April, around the same time Attendio launched. However, the site has some notable differences from the others.

First, it only offers event listings in five major cities, making it more similar to Yelp (which has its own listings site, Yelp Events). The limited focus has actually helped — Going’s traffic appears to be near Zvent’s levels.

Second, the site has an emphasis on its users meeting up in real life, even arranging some events on its own. For example, Going arranged a three-city concert tour for the launch of the independent airline JetBlue.

Conclusion
Although the older sites would like to be known as mature market leaders, the online events industry is still young, and no dominant business model has emerged.

One of the Holy Grails for all the sites mentioned is ticket sales. If Eventful, for instance, could pair up with Ticketmaster for a share of the revenue, the site’s future would be set — at least, until Ticketmaster decided they could make their own events site. Eventful says it is working on similar deals now.

Their best bet is to take more active roles, from helping events get started like Eventful to organizing them directly, as Going does somewhat less often. Beyond just collecting data, having a direct role requires expertise that an automated listing site can’t easily match.

updated
After being a portal for events for less than half a year, Attendio has abandoned the the events industry, saying that market is too small. It has decided instead to become a widget-making company, jumping from one crowded industry to another.

It’s just the latest indication that the Web 2.0 market is bubbly, and raises questions about why VCs keep investing in the sector. The San Francisco company raised (see coverage) less than $1 million in funding from Sunbridge Partners earlier this year.

Renamed Gydget, the company’s widgets will link out to online articles, pictures, videos, and mobile-connected services. Users include several dozen celebrities and sports teams, like Beyonce and the Bengals.

Gerardo Capiel, the company’s CEO and founder, looks to be leaping from the frying pan to the fire. Even when Attendio launched, the events market was crowded: Other sites include Eventful, Zvents, Going and Yahoo Events (which acquired Upcoming).

Similarly, the widget-making boom has already arrived. Dapper, Widgetbox and Splashcast all offer some variation on the build-your-own widget theme. Capiel says Gydget’s offering is superior, as its widgets are capable of offering any type of content, while other companies focus on a niche like video or news.

Gydget’s advantage may be in simply having seen what works. Most traffic to Attendio already came from existing Gydgets like the game schedule widget used by the Oakland Raiders football team. By closing down Attendio and focusing only on widgets, the site may be able to capture a more significant audience.

However, it’s difficult to assess whether there’s a widget opportunity. Capiel declined to share traffic numbers. Widgets are fast becoming a commodity, offered widely around the internet. Pageviews also may not be as important a metric for the new business, as much of its revenue may come through affiliate sales of tickets for bands and teams.

Attendio first emerged during DEMO earlier this year. The company is in the process of raising another round.

Going.com, a site that combines events information with social networking, has taken $5 million and is growing quickly, even amid heavy competition.

Since launching at the beginning of this year, the company says it has grown to more than 500,000 unique users — most of whom are 20-somethings and all of whom are in one of the four cities the site supports for now: San Francisco, New York City, Chicago and Boston.

The financing comes from General Catalyst and Highland Capital, which also previously funded the company with $3.5 million.

It has grown in part because of its aggressive outreach technique. We registered for the site several weeks ago, provided the necessary contact information, and the site has emailed us with several events since even though we hadn’t explicity signed up for them.

Below is an example of an Going.com event that an has become an “editors pick.” It reveals the user who first added the event, the event itself, how many people are going.

The company started in its hometown, Boston, and has been expanding from there. While it incorporates user profiles and comments with its event listings — similar to what a long list of competing web sites are also doing (previous coverage) — it also puts teams on the ground. It hires local editors to highlight the most interesting user-added events, it works with established local event promoters, and brings in celebrities for special events that only members can go to. The company makes money from getting paid by sponsors for certain events. For example, NBC Universal is sponsoring an event for Don Cheadle’s new movie, “Talk to Me.”

It will use this funding to expand to other cities.

When we covered Going back in April, we noted it is going up against old-media competitors — in New York, for example, there is a long list of other print and online publications that feature events, including The Village Voice and Time Out New York. With Going’s continued growth, it seems those competitors will need to make improvements to their sites. However, let’s not forget that newspapers’ web site readerships are growing twice as fast as online audiences on web sites overall, according to Nielsen. There are several other start-ups in the local events area, including MingleNow and Down2Night, along with more mature players such as Zvents, Upcoming and Eventful.

Successful startups have also made use of putting people on the ground. MySpace began throwing parties together with celebrities and sponsors as early as 2004. Yelp, a local review site, paid local reviewers as it opened up local listings in new cities.

Facebook, specifically among social networks, seems to already be sucking air out of the room. It already relies on geographical locations to help users identify each other, and has an “events” feature. We find ourselves using it more and more for local events.

Going.com, a Boston-based networking site centered around urban events, has grown rapidly since it launched in June of last year.

The site, which tomorrow changes its name to Going (away from HeyLetsGo.com), says it has 220,000 unique monthly visitors to the site. The numbers, while not mind-blowing by any stretch, are enough to look around and ask why other sites haven’t sewn up this events area. Going lists events in three cities; it launched in Boston six months ago, and more recently New York and San Francisco. It tries to mobilize a community around each event. We tinkered with it today, before the relaunch tomorrow, and it is intuitive.

One factor keeping this and other similar sites from explosive viral growth is the number of old-economy competitors, from publications like the Boston Globe, to the New York Times and the Village Voice — and as events go, old-fashioned event-planning over the phone.

Also, Going’s chief executive Evan Schumacher says no other Web site has done the hard work of engaging with event promoters in local communities. Going, which focuses on answering the question “What should I do tonight?,” has targeted top event organizers in each city and encouraged them to invite their contacts to events using Going. You’ll see some events, like this one for Klaxons, with more than a thousand people responding to the invites and registering. If respondents express interest in going to an event, their photos show at the bottom of the event page, with links to their profile.

As for competition, you’ve got JudysBook, which has yet to have real traction, and Yahoo’s Upcoming.org, which is still larger than Going, but limited to the techie crowd. You’ve got Yelp for information about restaurants and bars, and you’ve got MingleNow, a site that revolves around tequila-filled night clubs, and Down2Night, which is mainly texting event information to your cell phone. You’ve got Zvents for an agenda of events in your region, but much less oriented around people (update: forgot to mention Eventful.com, which is similar). And you’ve got various invite services, but these tend to be more for personal parties or occasions. Facebook’s community is still centered around colleges, even if it has branched out.

Going has hired editors to pick and profile specific events for each city, and then tries to encourage user participation. Any event can be featured, from Playboy parties to art gallery openings and charity events. The targeted community is the out-of-school crowd, broadly the 20- and 30-somethings.

The company is backed with $3.5 million in venture capital from General Catalyst Ventures and Highland Capital. George Bell, of GCV, was co-founder of Excite, and Bob Davis, of Highland was co-founder of Lycos.

JetBlue has partnered with Going.com promote alternative rock tours (The Teddy Bears in San Francisco and NY, for example), and JetBlue’s new air service to San Francisco.

After talking with Schumacher, it’s clear he wants Going to be the Facebook for city events — replicating Facebook’s success of matching online interests with those that exist offline. If it executes, this site could go somewhere, but we’re still not certain how viral such a site can be. After all, the point is not to hang out at a site about events, but to actually go to the events. Screenshots of an event, and a profile, below.

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