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New Web site SeatGeek aims to predict ticket prices
SeatGeek, a new Web site tha launched this week during the TechCrunch50 Conference in San Francisco, is aiming to take the guess work out of when event tickets will reach a bargain price.
Using a proprietary algorithm that crunches relative data, the site allows users to plug in the name of a sports team or music artist and receive information on the best prices for those tickets on the secondary market, and whether those prices will decrease or increase. The site checks several broker sites in real time to determine the best prices.
"We forecast the price of concerts and sporting events," co-founder Jack Groetzinger told TicketNews. "We know that prices sometimes drop as an event draws closer, but sometimes they don't. We try to predict it, in which case buying early might be a good thing. But often, buying immediately isn't always the smartest move."
Currently, the site is concentrating on predicting prices for Major League Baseball and concert tickets, but SeatGeek plans to add National Football League tickets to the mix within a month or so.
Among the factors the algorithm studies in order to make the forecast are past prices for the team or artist, the weather, what other events are nearby, whether an opponent is in a playoff race, who's playing and who's injured, and other variables. It offers three levels of prices, for inexpensive seats, medium-priced seats and premium seats, and it will recommend whether a fan should buy now or wait to buy in order to score the best deal.
SeatGeek makes money on the 7 percent to 10 percent affiliate referral deals when fans buy tickets from one of the sites listing tickets, such as StubHub, and also by selling a product, SeatGeek Pro, to brokers.
The pro version sells for between $2,000 and $10,000 per year, depending on the level of forecasting a broker wants, and allows resellers to time when best to buy tickets. The site claims to have an 80 percent accuracy rate.
"We think this can change the way people buy tickets," said Groetzinger, who co-founded the site with Russ D'Souza. "In some cases, it can save people hundreds of dollars."
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8-12 months you are out of business.
That is the prediction, the promoters, ticketmaster all have figured out how to make the money and now there is no more middle man, unless the middle man is an idiot and continues to buy tickets hoping to only lose 25% of what they paid for them on stubhub
I predict ticket broking will be dead for the next few years as more and more brokers are getting smarter and they are only able to make stubhub, ebay, razorgator rich while making themselves broke and barely making money on anything
Then in a few years when ticketmaster realizes their dynamic ticket pricing might not work so well, and all of the ticket brokers are weeded out, it might pick up again, but that is my prediction for ticket broking
Seems more like wishful thinking than an educated guess on your part. Then again, I wouldn't expect much in the form of education from someone who can't even spell "brokering." Anyone who understands what dynamic pricing is going to do knows that it is going to operate much like the stock market, with fluctuating prices (albeit in a more controlled environment). Like in the stock market, all you really need to do is buy when an event is priced low and sell when it's priced high. Obviously, brokers have better instinct for what is considered the low or high end for a given ticket than the public does, which will only help them further in profiting off the system.
Where doe these guys get the funding for such foolishness
this is the dumbest idea of the year
I am not sure what the point of this site is. When customers come to their site to search for tickets to an event, they send them away if it is "Not the right time?" That seems like bad business to me. Also, good luck getting $2 - $10k from the brokers that would actually use this technology. Most of the largest ticket brokers, Stubhub and EBay, don't set ticket prices, the people who sell their tickets do.
The site's a joke...as a broker, I wouldn't pay that kind of money for a website to potentially tell my customers my prices are too high, even if they're priced at the market price. What dynamic pricing appears to be trying to do is replace the skill and knowledge that goes into ticket pricing - both on the primary and secondary markets - with these complex algorithms that claim to do a better job at determining market prices for tickets than the thousands of us who have an understanding of the human element of the ticket industry (the consumer) and have successfully been pricing our tickets for decades. Sorry math geeks, I'm not buying it.
I have been in this business 14 years and talk to real buyers and sellers every day. I can't even tell you for sure what orders and prices will be next week. These guys think they can pull some numbers out of a computer?
Why would I want to work with someone who wants to tell ready to buy customers to wait?
Hi guys,
Thanks for the comments (and criticism). We wanted to make sure that we cleared some outstanding concerns up.
1.) Our data comes from millions of ticket transactions. We can see trends that are not apparent even for brokers in the ticketing industry. We've studied our predictions and have been 70%+ accurate and we are improving every day by gathering more data points.
2.) There appears to be some misunderstanding about the broker service we are going to roll out. The broker service will tell sellers the optimal time to deploy tickets based on the price trajectory that we forecast. It will be more than just a binary (wait to buy or buy now) but it will instead show a graph indicating when the ticket will peak. $2-$10K may sound like a lot of money but the average transaction on the secondary ticket market is ~$500. There is enough fluctuation in ticket prices that we believe the service can pay for itself very quickly for large brokers.
Keep the comments coming.
Russell D'Souza
Co-Founder SeatGeek
It is not believable that you are analyzing millions of transactions. What is your information source? Ticketing sites show
offer prices, which as we all know have little to do with how much tickets actually sell for.
I just read a press release where you say your algorithm is 80% accurate. Now you say 70%? Pick a statement and stick by it!
Also as brokers we all know human elements your computer program could never know.
And seeing how 75% of tickets naturally drop in price as the event date nears do we really want you telling our potential buyers to NOT buy tickets?
And the comment before this hit it dead on. How can a UNFUNDED startup (I read you raised less than 50k so far) have MILLIONS of ticket transaction information? There are few companies with that kind of volume and unless Stubhub, Ticketmaster, Livenation, Ticketsnow, or mayyyybbbbeeee a Barrys or VIP tickets is involved there is no chance in hell you have that kind of data.
I believe that they have a huge dataset of ticket transactions. It's probably not that hard; all websites nowadays have interfaces where you can query their data.. I'd imagine the ticketing ones do, too.