38,000 tickets to Burning Man sold in 42 minutes. And that’s not the most astonishing thing. You see, each buyer was allowed to purchase only two tickets which means there were a minimum of 19,000 purchasers. Each purchaser had to be preregistered for the sale with a buyer authorization code. The sale website opened at 12 noon, exactly. It is unclear precisely how many seconds after the noon start the queue had filled to such an extent that any more hopefuls were simply arriving too late.
But I know this. If you had logged onto the sale site at noon plus 17 seconds, you were too late. Maybe 15 seconds was the window. Maybe it was 10. I suspect it was significantly less.
I was on the site in less than 2 seconds, and waited 19 minutes for access to the buy page. And barely more than twenty minutes after that, every ticket available had been sold.
38,000 tickets in 42 minutes. More accurately, in terms of whether you were going to be in or out, 38,000 tickets in under 16 seconds.
That is what getting tickets to Burning Man in the main open first-come-first-served sale was about this year.