Since the beginning of the 2009 season the SB Nation Atlanta Braves blog Talking Chop has been conducting a weekly fan confidence poll and graphing those results against previous weeks. It's been interesting and informative to watch the confidence go up and down with the performance of the team, but what else does that confidence affect?
With the launching of SB Nation Atlanta there are now fan confidence polls on all blogs covered by this new Atlanta hub site. If you're a fan of the Hawks, you can vote on Peachtree Hoops. If you're a fan of the Falcons, you can show your confidence at the Falcoholic. Same with Bird Watchers Anonymous for the Thrashers, From The Rumble Seat for the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, and Dawg Sports for the Georgia Bulldogs.
I've recently partnered with SeatGeek to share the Braves fan confidence poll data and compare it against their data for ticket sales, and the correlation is amazing. Below is a graph comparing the Atlanta Braves Fan Confidence this season to SeatGeek's collected data of average ticket price as a percentage of face value.
Click on the graph for a larger view.
As you can see the ticket prices seem to follow the collective fan confidence in the team (and they said my poll was not scientific... bah!). By looking as ticket prices as a percentage of face value we can see that fans are willing to pay more for tickets when the team is doing good (I do believe that's why we named the blog FairWeather Report).
While there are aberrations like last night's game where the draw was not only a first place Braves team, but the most hyped rookie pitcher in years, for the most part it is the play of the team alone which seems to control what fans are willing to pay in Atlanta for Braves tickets.
We'll continue to collect more of this data and revisit this correlation with SeatGeek later in the season, and once the other Atlanta sports start back we'll see if their ticket prices follow the fan's confidence in their team. So if you're a fan of any Atlanta team, make sure you visit those sites and contribute your voice to the fan confidence.
Here is an explanation of SeatGeek's data and how it is collected:
What: Face value is the first sale price printed on the ticket, as determined by the MLB/teams and often sold directly through the MLB. See an example here: Nationals at Braves on SeatGeek. So if the primary market (face value) price was $100 and the secondary market price was $110, it would be 110% of face value. As you can see, for the Braves, their tickets tend to trade below face value on the secondary market (which means more deal opportunities). In this example, $100 would be printed on the ticket.
Where: We get face value information because it is publicly available on the web - though we automate it so we have a lot of data. We are able to get % of face value by comparing this information to our database of transaction ticket prices on the secondary market - as far as I know, we are the only site that has the capability of looking at transaction ticket prices and thus offering this unique look into fan sentiment.
My thanks to SeatGeek for coordinating this project.
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