Comic-Con test sale sells out within minutes

SAN DIEGO (CNS) – Organizers of July's Comic-Con International at the San Diego Convention Center sold all 1,000 four-day badges offered Wednesday within minutes, in an online sales test that mostly avoided snafus that plagued previous attempts.

Tickets had gone on sale twice before, but only a handful were bought before computer systems were overwhelmed, said David Glanzer of Comic-Con International.

This time, the sales were spread over three Web sites, which allowed the badges to be sold, but some bugs still need to be ironed out, Glanzer said. He said officials with the organization that puts on the event — to be held July 21-24 — will pour over data about what worked in this latest test and what did not, and will announce sometime in January when the next group of tickets will go on sale.

They used to sell tickets in-house, but had to go outside once annual attendance surpassed 80,000, he said. The figure is now around 125,000.

The increase has also fueled demand for tickets online. Glanzer said computer servers received 250 hits per second during previous sales attempts this year.

“We've talked to different companies that handle this kind of volume, and typically it's over hours or days and some cases weeks,” Glanzer said. “In our case, (the Web traffic) was all the same second.”