How Long Can Ozine Keep Up With The Free Events?

I was supposed to post this on the date of the site’s third anniversary but I was busy working and getting content for Ozine’s Anime Fair.

As you can see, ever since the post-pandemic era started, Ozine Fest has been pulling no punches when it comes to promoting it’s events and with this one, they started handing out these events that are free of charge.

For one, this would be a great marketing technique to sell their paid cosplay events as unlike the events handled by Cosplay.ph which rely on SM’s ticketing system, the organizers at Ozine Fest use these events to sell tickets thus more people being able to attend their paid events.

This retains the exclusivity of the tickets themselves and that the people who don’t use Lazada (which I myself wonder why Ozine Fest uses this platform to sell tickets) have the option to just go to the free event and buy the tickets there.

I’m no business man but I believe that these might damage Ozine’s profits in the long run and for a variety of reasons. First off, providing free events on a regular basis would make congoers opt out of going to their paid events because what’s the point of attending their paid events if they would give out events for free?

Free events like the recent Anime Fair might also set some unrealistic expectations from the cosplay community, especially from your average congoer.

The tale of congoers and cosplayers versus event security has been with the community since time immemorial and with what the attendees of these free events don’t know is that there will still be mall security and it’s not only the congoers who are using the mall. It’s a public space, so expect that other people would use it too.

With that said, my consensus with free events like Anime Fair is that while it’s good to provide events like this as a way to give back to the anime/cosplay community and sell tickets, doing it too much might have them end up in a disadvantange.