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1. The peak count is the count that matters to BLM. Burning Man takes out a license for a specific number of “souls on board” for each day. BLM doesn’t care a hoot (well too much anyway) if there are 60,000 people who show up on Monday and stay until the following Monday, or if 60,000 different people show up every single day (well that MIGHT be a problem because of entry and exodus issues, but BLM itself is mostly concerned about the number of people physically impacting “their” desert on any given day). So while my 60,000 different people every day is a little facetious, the principal is correct, i.e., there COULD HAVE BEEN MORE than 60,000 different physical people at Burning Man during 2012 as long as no more than 60,000 showed up at the peak. Its like a club with a max occupancy limit, but as people come and go you can easily in a night have MORE than that 300 Max number of people come in.

2. What this means is that BM can SELL more than 60,000 tickets if they can somehow make sure that no more than 60,000 actually show up on a given day. The problem is, they can’t do that. They don’t have any proper way to stop people and prevent them from coming in because the “occupancy level” has topped out. So they have to guess and rely on their entrance AND exit figures to keep things in check. And by the way, they DO count people who leave, or at least approximate it. They certainly count vehicles that leave during the week. That gives them at least a reasonable estimate.

3. I expect that they have always done this and have always played it pretty close to the line. I think 2011 was actually the first year when things went a little haywire because the actual tickets sold out. That had never happened before. When you include all ticket sales PLUS volunteers who get comp’ed, they have to play a pretty fine “game” of figuring out how to keep things in check. This year one interesting thing that happened is a LOT of people left early. They obviously have only alluded to it because they haven’t released entrance/exit counts on a daily basis (which I think they should, including volunteers and staff) but clearly based on lines and waits and the number of people at the burn, etc., the crowds had already thinned by Friday and Saturday. I was there from Saturday morning to the Tuesday after Labor Day and you could feel it.

4. Someone correctly pointed out that you can’t simply take the peak attendance and multiply it by $350. Many tickets were sold below $350 (although a few were sold above that as well, the holiday tickets last year were $420 I think) and there are many volunteer tickets given away so the peak attendance is NOT a direct multiplicand to determine gross revenue. That being said, it is clear that the gross revenue is a LOT closer to $15,000,000 (average ticket price of $300 for 50,000 tickets) then it is to $10,000,000 (which would be an average ticket price of $200 for 50,000 tickets).

5. The BLM fee is NOWHERE NEAR THAT MUCH. The BLM fees for 2010 (the last year for which there is a Financial Chart posted) were $1,250,000 for about 55,000 (again, we don’t know the exact number of bodies admitted but that was the peak census) which is about $25 per person. The likelihood that the BLM has jacked up the fees by a substantial amount is pretty low (governments don’t work that way typically). But even if the fees had doubled, that is still less than $3,000,000 for 55,000 people or less than 20% of a total estimated $15,000,000 in income. That leaves LOT of money to distribute.

One thing that has been blithely overlooked is that between 2009 and 2010, the payroll for Burning Man (according to their published charts) went from roughly $3,000,000 a year (where it had been for several years before) to $7,300,000 a year (more than double) in one swoop. That was a HUGE increase (whereas almost no other expenses went up by more than a modesst amount. I am sure there were some big salaries given out. I do not begrudge people who run things like this salaries (even big ones) but it has always surprised me that for an organization that on the one hand touts itself as inclusive, they aren’t so “open” as to publish their full financial statements (for instance, while they have always published these summary “financial charts” there is never any income information in them and there is never a detailed accounting). That’s their right, of course, it is a private company, but it flies in the face of openness and inclusion which is supposed to be the hallmark of the event.

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Something is not adding up…

Why the ~4,000 body difference between the tallys – Hanging chads?

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http://afterburn.burningman.com/11/financial_chart.html

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19652150 Says:
December 12th, 2012 at 1:03 am
estimated 19,652,150 $ that’s why his eyes are bugging out 56,149. x350 and they say it not about the money yea right lol !
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It’s important to realize this fallacy; A) not everyone is paying $350, so the ‘estimate’ is already quite off (people are volunteering and applying for low-income tickets). B) bm provides all kinds of expensive scholarships (I don’t know this total, but after seeing 3 welding friends get a sponsor of 2k, I understood that bm is generous. C) the permits to host such a large event (the size of a city) is costly–the land (and it’s cleaning once we are gone) is not a cost-free space to inhabit. D) And give thanks; you obviously went because you felt your life could be bettered in some way–the experience you had could not have happened w/out them.

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