The Stage

Theatre Ninjas app to roll out beyond Edinburgh

Published Friday 17 September 2010 at 11:47 by Thom Dibdin

Theatre Ninjas, the free ticket iPhone app and website, is to stay live after its introduction at this summer’s Edinburgh fringe festival.

Ninjas, which was started with a £1,000 grant from the youth arts charity Ideas Tap, allows producers, directors and theatre makers to offer a limited number of last minute tickets for their shows for free through both the app and the website.

They can add tickets automatically through the www.theatreninjas.co.uk website and users then contact the venue to claim their tickets on a first come, first served basis.

Rajiv Nathwani, one of the ten founders of the app, told The Stage that the group are now looking at ways to apply the app to other festivals and venues.

He said: “In the meantime, we are going to leave the app and the website running and just see whether people use it and, if they do use it, what they use it for. It is a bit of a testing ground for us now, before we make a decision about what to do next, it will be really interesting to see how different people use it.”

Theatre Ninjas was downloaded approximately 3,500 times during the fringe, while an average of 40 shows offered anything between 5 and 30 free tickets each, every day. Uptake of tickets was reported to be around 80%.

With strongly positive results from a user survey of the app, key findings for venues and companies are that 78% said that it introduced them to venues they had never been to before, while 61% said it took them to venues they had not heard of before.

Nathwani says the group want to keep the app free for users, with potentially a small charge for producers. While they are looking for funding and at different possibilities for income generation, from advertising to offering discount tickets, they intend to run it as a not for profit entity with all income going towards the running of the app itself.

He added: “We’d like it to work as many places as we can, but also in London fringe theatre all the year round. There are so many theatre companies that don’t sell out and just want a full house. We would like for the 80% of uptake of tickets to continue and for producers to know that they will be able to fill a house through the app.”

Theatre Ninjas was not the most downloaded of all the free apps at the Edinburgh fringe 2010. The Fringe Society’s own app with the fringe programme had more than 22,500 downloads, a figure welcomed by chief executive Kath Mainland who said she was “delighted with how the app has supported audiences, inspiring them to discover some of the innovative, exciting pieces of work on offer at the world’s greatest arts festival.”

The other much-used app was iFringe - free for the first time in Edinburgh this year - which had also been used at the Brighton Fringe. The app, run by Fringe Guru, draws together reviews from six independent websites.

With more than 20,000 downloads, the app had approximately 112,000 page views of full reviews. By the end of the fringe, the app had a total of 2,853 individual reviews covering 1,404 shows.

Richard Stamp, editorial director of Fringe Guru Ltd told the Stage: “We’re delighted by the response we’ve had to iFringe, both here in Edinburgh and at the Brighton Fringe in May. It shows that you can use new technology to deliver good, old-fashioned, high-quality content - and proves that’s something today’s Fringe-goers still want and need.”