---
title: "The owned list audit: how much of your audience can you reach without paying a platform"
description: Followers, past buyers, email and SMS opt-ins are four different things. Here is a twenty-minute audit that tells you how many people you can reach on announce day without paying a platform to do it.
image: https://backstage.hive.co/hubfs/BackstagewithHive.png
---

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# The owned list audit: how much of your audience can you reach without paying a platform

Followers, past buyers, email and SMS opt-ins are four different things. Here is a twenty-minute audit that tells you how many people you can reach on announce day without paying a platform to do it.

![](https://backstage.hive.co/hubfs/BackstagewithHive.png)

#### Published on Sep 23, 2026

#### [Written by Anthony Ramsay](https://backstage.hive.co/backstage-articles/author/anthony-ramsay)

 Category

#### [Backstage Community](https://backstage.hive.co/backstage-articles/tag/backstage-community)

Every venue has a number it quotes when someone asks how big the audience is. Usually it is the Instagram follower count, and usually nobody has checked how many of those people saw the last announce.

Bruce Houghton put it in a way that stuck. Streams are rented attention, social is borrowed, and your direct list is the only thing you own. Ian shared that framing on LinkedIn and it is the whole argument behind this post. If the list is the asset, you should know what it is worth. Most rooms have never added it up.

This is the twenty-minute version. Four numbers, one ratio, one move.

## Four numbers, side by side

Open a blank sheet and write four lines.

The first is followers, across every social account the venue runs. Add them up and write the total. Then go back through your last five announce posts, pull the reach on each one, and write the average next to it. Reach is what matters. Followers is the number you quote and reach is the number you get, and on most venue accounts the gap between them is wide enough to be uncomfortable.

The second is past buyers. Export the last twelve months of ticket sales, count the unique email addresses, and write that down. This is the largest audience most venues have and the one they use least, because it lives in the ticketing platform and never gets treated as a list. Every one of these people has already paid you.

The third is email opt-ins, the people who have said yes to hearing from you, separate from the ticketing export. Write the total, then the average opens from the last five sends. Same logic as followers. The list size is the claim and the opens are what actually happened.

The fourth is SMS opt-ins, if you have any. Write the total and the average clicks from the last five sends, since a text has no open rate and clicks are the nearest thing. If you do not have an SMS list, write zero. Zero is a useful number here, because it is the one that will move fastest once you start.

## What each one is worth on announce day

Now put a price on reaching each group.

Social reach costs you nothing until the algorithm decides otherwise, and it decides otherwise every fall when every venue in your market announces at once. The reach number you wrote down is what you get on a quiet week. The announce-week number is lower, and the only way to bring it back up is to pay for it.

Past buyers cost you nothing to email and they already trust you with a card. A buyer from eight months ago who gets a plain announce email for a similar show is the warmest lead a venue has, and most venues never send it, because the export is sitting in the ticketing platform and nobody has thought of it as a list.

Email opt-ins are the middle of the sheet. Reliable, cheap, slow to build, and the open number tells you exactly how many people are actually there.

SMS opt-ins are the smallest group and the one that behaves most like a room full of regulars. When Marc built Yoshi's list from zero to 25,000 in under a year, one text about the restaurant quietly sold two thousand dollars of show tickets. The list was smaller than the follower count for most of that year, and it was the channel that sold.

## The ratio to look at

Divide your reachable owned audience by your social reach. Reachable owned audience is the number of people who would actually see one message from you on channels you control. That is your email opens, plus your SMS clicks, plus your past buyers multiplied by your email open rate, since that is roughly how many of them would see the announce if you emailed them tomorrow. Buyers is a total and reach is per post, so the multiplier is what keeps the comparison honest.

Take a 500-cap room that runs four nights a week. Twelve thousand Instagram followers, average announce reach around 1,800. Nine thousand unique buyers in the last year. A 4,000-strong email list that opens at 30 percent, so 1,200 opens. No SMS. The reachable owned audience is 1,200 opens, plus zero, plus 9,000 buyers at 30 percent, which is 2,700. Call it 3,900 against a social reach of 1,800. The ratio is over two.

That room has been treating Instagram as its audience while sitting on an owned audience twice the size, before it has built a single opt-in form. Nothing about that is unusual. It is what the audit turns up at most venues the first time anyone runs it.

If your number comes out under one, you are announcing to an audience you rent, and the fall on-sale is going to be expensive. If it is over one, you already own the more valuable asset and the work is using it. Most venues land well over one and had no idea, because the biggest line on the sheet, past buyers, has never been sent anything.

## The one move

Take the past buyers export and make it a list.

Import it into whatever you send email from. Tag each buyer with the shows they bought, even roughly, by genre or by room. Then take your next announce and send it to the people who bought a similar show in the last year, a day before it goes anywhere else.

That is the smallest possible version of an owned audience doing its job, and it costs nothing but the afternoon. Everything else, the opt-in box at checkout, the SMS keyword at the merch table, the presale that only goes to the list, builds on that one send. If you never do anything more than this, you will still have turned the largest number on your sheet into a channel. Doing it by hand for one announce is an afternoon. Doing it for every announce, with the tags kept current, is the point where most venues start asking what their email platform can do on its own.

Try it

Pull your last twelve months of ticket sales and paste this in alongside the file:

> "This is my ticket sales export. Count the unique email addresses in the file and tell me the total. Then group those buyers by the event they purchased, and for each event tell me how many unique buyers it had. Ignore any row where the quantity is negative, because those are refunds."

That gives you the second line of the audit and the tags for the one move in the same pass. Fill in the other three lines from your social and email dashboards, run the ratio, and post the four numbers in the [Backstage green room](https://backstage.hive.co/community?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=owned-list-audit) so the room can see the range. Nobody in there has done this before either, and the 300-cap room with a healthy ratio usually has more to teach than the arena with two million followers.

Join the conversation with event marketers figuring this out together: [Backstage community](https://backstage.hive.co/community)

### [Anthony Ramsay](https://backstage.hive.co/backstage-articles/author/anthony-ramsay)

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