CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

I can’t claim I’m the first one to think about this, but every time Ticketmaster shows up on HN I keep coming back to this idea:

Sell the tickets with regressive price based on time. Sales starts say 2 months before event, initial price is truly exorbitant, say one million dollars. Price decreases linearly down to zero (or true cost price). At any point, people can see current price and the seats left.

Now every potential spectator is playing a game of chicken: the more you wait, the lower the price, but also lower are the chances that you’ll have a ticket. That would capture precisely the maximum amount of dollars that each person is willing to pay for it.

This idea sounds extremely greedy, because it is, so I can’t fathom that no one ever pitched this in a Ticketmaster board meeting.

My idea, however, was a bit less greedy. Once you sold the last ticket, that would be your actual (and fair) price-per-ticket for the concert, and everyone would be refunded the difference. You’ll never know how low it will go, so you shouldn’t overpay and hope it will lower later. I’m pretty sure Ticketmaster will skip this last part if they decide to implement this.

There are multiple issues with my idea, it’s elitist, promotes financial risks on cohorts poorly capable to bear them, etc etc, but it will definitely fix the scalpers problem. Pick your poison.

The scalper problem is a mispricing problem: Scalpers are just arbitrageurs because ticket prices are artificially very low.

If you want to fix that, you need to ask yourself "why are ticket prices artificially very low?" first. The answer probably isn't "artists/venues like leaving money on the table".

Ticketmaster has it's own resale platform. It's able to double dip. They basically say tickets are relatively cheap and scalpers are the bad guys. They encourage the scalpers. Then they can resell using their own resale platform and they get fees on top of that.

The fees on re-sellers are crazy, and they take fees from both seller and buyer.

Seller Side:

List price: $100

StubHub seller fee (15%): -$15

Seller receives: $85

Buyer Side:

Ticket price: $100

StubHub buyer fee (10-15%, let's use 12%): +$12

Buyer pays: $112

StubHub's Take:

From seller: $15

From buyer: $12

Total StubHub revenue: $27

So they're making an additional ~27% (on the "true" market price) in addition to the ~25% they charge in the primary market. So if the market price was $200, if they just charged that they would make $50. But instead they'll sell it for $100, make $25 on the primary and an additional $50 when sold in the secondary market.

They don't own StubHub but they have their own. In 2017 they opened up TicketExchange which allow the sale and validation of tickets on third-party websites, including StubHub, which they did to capture some of that amount. They get to play like the reasonable party here, the scalpers are taking the heat and they're getting a cut of that.

They do other things that's baffling like selling tickets a year ahead of time, which is kind of weird considering very few people, even big fans, would be really on top of buying tickets a year out. It's obviously designed for scalpers.

You can easily solve this by having the ticket tied to a name and requiring you to show ID, maybe allow others to dump back at face value, but that would likely be gamed as well but not as easily (you dump your tickets and let someone else pick them up at that exact moment). Or make them non-transferrable but that would greatly reduce the value to fans.