Apple’s Passbook provides massive App Store boost for ticketing apps

Whatever the concerns have been about Apple’s Passbook and educating customers so far, it’s clear that people really want to use it. The introduction of Passbook support to a variety of ticketing apps has seen their popularity skyrocket in the App Store.

Nearly every ticketing app that has implemented Passbook since Apple released iOS 6 on the 19th of last month has gotten an in-category boost as well as a cross-category boost in its placement on Apple’s charts. The graphs below are from the apps’ entries on the popular App Store tracking service AppShopper.

Each of the vertical growth spikes you see in category positions coincide directly with their Passbook support updates. It doesn’t hurt that Apple has featured these Passbook supporting apps in a dedicated section of the App Store that is accessible via a button directly in the initially empty Passbook app on the home screen of every iOS 6 device.

There are more apps in the category and they all show an increase. Even those that are not about ticketing. The Starbucks app, which is always popular, also got a nice bump up in the standings.

When I talked to the folks at the MLB about their efforts to bring Passbook ticketing to major ballparks, one of the common things I heard was that mobile ticketing is an incredibly untapped market. The flow from purchase to ticketing to mobile browser or into SMS text has been such a turnoff that customers just don’t do mobile ticketing, period. They’d rather print out a ticket on paper than go through all of that stuff.

Tickets.com’s SVP of Client and Consumer Services John Rizzi told me that the numbers for ticketing to mobile phones were so small as to be not even worth counting. They were hoping that the streamlined flow, beautiful tickets and customer interest in Passbook would change the perception of mobile ticketing and turn those statistics upside down.

So far, it looks as if those Passbook enabled apps are off to a decent start. Now we’ll see if that translates into long-term success.

Image credit: John Sullivan / Getty Images