Film and event ticketing service BookMyShow has appointed Albert Almeida as the COO of their non-movies vertical. This move is a part of a company-wide pivot towards events as a major source of business. Before joining BookMyShow, Almeida was COO at Hungama Mobile, a digital content company that operates music and video streaming platforms, among other things. At BookMyShow, he'll report directly to CEO Ashish Hemrajani. Big Tree Entertainment, which owns BookMyShow, and also runs theatrical revenue tracking firm Rentrak, made a little over ₹300 crore in the 2017–18 financial year, a 27% increase from the previous year. Anonymous experts cited by the Economic Times estimated that BookMyShow sells around ten million tickets a month. Business model and competition BookMyShow's simple business model means that it's one of the few high-value digital startups in India that is already making profits. It collects handling charges from people who purchase tickets, and a commission on the ticket price from sellers. Now that the company is pivoting to non-movie events, which tend to have a much higher average revenue per user, ticket volumes may matter less than the kind of events to which tickets are sold. On the quantity front, though, Paytm is gaining steam, pouring investment after investment in its ticketing vertical. Last Wednesday, the company announced that it was acquiring ticketing startup TicketNew for $40 million. In the last twelve months, the company said that it has sold over 52 million tickets. Read: We need transparency reports from Paytm and other Indian tech…
