Online shopping site Nextag has purchased ticket search engine FanSnap for an undisclosed price, the two companies announced Wednesday, December 7.
The acquisition helps Nextag combine its travel and shopping deals with event tickets to allow the company to better market comprehensive trip experiences to Nextag’s 40 million unique monthly visitors.
“As we grow into 2012, our vision for Nextag is to create a better shopping experience for users, and a better merchandising platform for suppliers,” Nextag CEO Jeffrey Katz said in a statement. “With FanSnap, we’re acquiring the talent, relationships, and software capability to expand this vision into an entirely new market — event ticketing — with the most innovative social commerce tools available.”
The two sites work in a similar fashion. Visitors to FanSnap can type in the name of a team or event and comparison shop for tickets from the country’s leading ticket resale exchanges and broker sites.
On Nextag, consumers largely do the same thing, but instead of tickets they search and compare products or travel deals from leading vendors.
Mike Janes, founder and CEO of FanSnap, told TicketNews that the company made the deal in an attempt to survive and grow in a highly competitive and rapidly changing industry.
“We came to the conclusion that, while FanSnap is twice as large as any other ticket search engine, we needed more scale to really take advantage of the opportunity,” Janes said. “Enter Nextag, with 40 million shoppers a month.”
Janes believes the millions of potential new customers FanSnap will gain access to could mean improved sales and marketing opportunities for the company’s ticketing partners, which include StubHub, TicketsNow, Ace Ticket, Razorgator, Barry’s Tickets and TicketNetwork.
“Together FanSnap and Nextag will become an indispensable resource for sports, concert, and theatre fans, as they can find the best values in tickets, merchandise, travel, and lots of other great stuff fans shop for all in one place,” Janes said.
The acquisition will not affect FanSnap’s multi-year deal with Microsoft’s search engine Bing, according to Janes. Under that agreement, event-related searches on Bing point users to tickets on FanSnap.
“Our partners at Bing have been incredibly supportive of the Nextag-FanSnap deal,” Janes said.
FanSnap will move from Palo Alto, CA, to Nextag’s headquarters in San Mateo, CA, and Janes and most staffers will be absorbed into Nextag.
“I am leading Nextag’s new event ticketing organization, and my role remains the same — to help fans find the best tickets and to help our partners sell those tickets,” Janes said. “We will continue to operate and innovate both the FanSnap ticket search engine and our Facebook presence.”
TicketNetwork is the parent company of TicketNews.
