While it's always tough when one of your main competitive advantages is price, this is a smart move for them. Really good talking point to get people in the door and away from Eventbrite. Best of luck!
It looks great, except of course for other ticketing companies, from the outside but it's really unclear what the paid services are. For example I'm sure EventBrite calls their events directory "promotion" so I think your paid services need to be more explicitly spelled out. I agree if you are going to compete with EB you are going to have to do something drastic and with ticketmaster holding contracts with all the large venues it will be very interesting to see if this takes off or just destroys value in the industry.
In our opinion, event discovery via a directory isn't that effective. Real discovery comes from social proof and recommendations from friends/connections.
We're working on some things to assist with this, but we're also looking into other channels of mobile commerce (beyond ticketing) that we can monetize.
But how do you then monetize it? Is your paid promotion program something like you get a percentage of the sales that a directly attributed to your promotion (aka "social proof / recommendations") like for example bandsintown? I guess what I'm still saying is it's unclear if I pay you X what is the value you are providing me. The service is very cool just trying to understand the premium service.
Thanks. Considering that event management covers a lot of areas, there is definitely some overlap into other spaces. For instance, we do offer lightweight email campaigns and will soon offer custom email invites.