Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Ticket Brokers Say Enough Is Enough



FlipATicket.com today announced that it is leading the charge of brokers who have united and said, “Enough is enough!”.  Over the course of the last several years, brokers have witnessed drastic changes the ticket industry has undergone; so drastic, in fact, that it is difficult to fully grasp.


If you were told five years ago that EI would be purchased by Ticketmaster, or that StubHub would be purchased by eBay, or that TN would morph into a gargantuan network of thousands of brokers, or that Ticket Technology would be bought by StubHub/eBay, or that LiveNation would buy every venue under the sun and ditch Ticketmaster for their own ticketing service, only to merge with Ticketmaster a few months later, would you have believed any of it?  Who could have imagined that all of those things would take place in five short years?

Perhaps a better question would be: How have these changes helped your business?  Let’s see...
  •  Fewer places to list your tickets.
  •  Little to no access to other brokers to work trades.
  • Fee after fee after fee after fee piled up on top of you.
  • Policy changes, sometimes daily.
And what is the result of these changes that we have all witnessed? You, the broker, are left holding the short end of the stick, working harder to earn less.  Your choice of places to buy, sell, and trade tickets has been boiled down to making a decision between the lesser of all that is evil.  That’s how you grow a business, right?  No, we didn’t think so either.

A number of months back, the folks behind BlueBucs.com sat down and started working on ideas of how to counteract the absurdity that has transpired in our industry, and to help brokers regain control over their business and costs.  They poured over so many ideas and options that it is impossible to enumerate, but their brainstorming team always came back to two primary “must do” points:
  •  Control costs for brokers and consumers.
  •  Keep it simple and effective, a la Google. 
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