By Brian Thompson
As demand for the secondary ticket market continues to expand, so too does the supply of sellers. With the stigma of “scalping” fading, everyone is able to become a ticket broker. On social networking juggernaut Facebook, this trend has been no exception. With 56 million active users, the market for ticket sales on Facebook is vast. Unsurprisingly, a crop of Facebook “apps” have popped up to service this market.
One of the applications for this purpose has been the Ticketing app provided by TicketLeap. A user’s Facebook events are easily integrated into the application, and then the user can specify how many tickets to sell at what price. The application even supports different types of tickets and prices. Most importantly, event goers can purchase tickets online using their credit cards, thus allowing event organizers the ability to receive money ahead of time without the bother of collections. TicketLeap’s main draw is that it allows users to sell tickets to small, personal events that Ticketmaster and its rivals would never cover.
Applications like those from TicketLeap are beginning to provide a challenge to other businesses that attempt to offer ticketing services with much higher service fees. While it would be extreme to think that a Facebook app would frighten Ticketmaster or any other big names in the industry, the increasing numbers of tickets available at lower transactions fees could slowly begin to nibble away at those higher fees assessed by larger ticket brokers.
In addition to TicketLeap, there are other companies looking to sell tickets to larger events via Facebook. SeatQuest has created an application which allows users to show friends where they will be seated at upcoming events. This ties in with SeatQuest’s primary service, which is to show maps of events and show the user where specific seats are available.
I Need Tickets and Tixology are two other Facebook apps aimed at helping students match up to sell off their tickets within their own network. SeatBOT makes aspiring ticket brokers out of its users by asking them to find friends to sell tickets to, in exchange for a 5% cut of the ticket price. Cashfly occupies a similar space as TicketLeap. All of these services underscore an important fact for understanding the ticket market on Facebook; there are no significant barriers to entry.
Even though the apps are beginning to grow in popularity, none of them can boast as many as 20 daily active users, according to Facebook statistics.
