John is looking to buy Pearl Jam tickets during their 2016 North American tour. John lives in Florida and determines that Pearl Jam will be playing a show in Jacksonville on April 13th. John determines that he has about three mediums he can utilize to obtain tickets. John can go directly to Pearl Jam's website and buy from the arena vendor online, wait for someone to sell tickets on StubHub, or go to the Arena and purchase them there. John realizes Pearl Jam sells out almost all of their shows so waiting to buy them the day of the concert at the venue is not an option. John also realizes that if he doesn't try to buy tickets from the arena vendor when the tickets go on sale, he'll probably have to overpay from some reseller on StubHub. A couple of weeks later John realizes he missed the day when tickets went on sale, and the show in Jacksonville is sold out. The only way of getting tickets to his knowledge his to buy from someone on StubHub which he is very reluctant to do because he knows he'll be paying way more than he should have. John wishes there was a way he could still find cheaper or originally priced tickets on the web.
This is where SeatGeek comes into play. SeatGeek in its broadest terms is a free, online (desktop and mobile), ticket search engine. SeatGeek can be used to find tickets for almost any type of live events. SeatGeek lets its users compare and contrast ticket prices and seats from third-party vendors while also ranking the best tickets available based on value ("Frequently Asked Questions").
SeatGeek was founded in 2009 by two Dartmouth classmates, Russ D'Souza and Jack Groetzinger in Philadelphia (Fenn). D'Souza and Groetzinger turned their idea into a reality at a tech start-up accelerator program called Dreamit Ventures. The two decided to pursue the idea with the notion that "there was no easy place to buy [tickets], since every site had different inventory and different tickets" (Fenn). D'Souza and Groetzinger were trying to get recognition and promote their company when they finally managed to get a meeting with head of Yahoo! Sports Ecommerce, Eric Winter. Yahoo wasn't one-hundred percent satisfied with their current ticketing partner and decided to collaborate with the SeatGeek founders (Fenn). After this partnership was formed, SeatGeek's success really began to take off.
SeatGeek is a ticket aggregator, meaning that it does not sell tickets to consumers directly but instead displays the best options from third party vendors where you can purchase the tickets ("Frequently Asked Questions"). Aggregator sites have been a very popular tool for consumers trying to find the best deals. Some prime examples of other Aggregators include Google Products and KAYAK. Many of the vendors that SeatGeek partners with are companies people have never heard of before and would never know to check their website for tickets. Some of these third-party vendors include like UberSeat, Fanxchange, TicketCity, Razorgator and TN Direct although there are many more. SeatGeek's vendors get their tickets from the secondary ticket market. The primary ticket market is where all the tickets to an event are initially sold ("Frequently Asked Questions"). That could be directly from the venue or from a major ticket company like Ticketmaster. These vendors in the secondary market will purchase tickets in bulk from Ticketmaster or from the venue directly, and then resell them to the consumers. SeatGeek promises that that all of its vendors can be trusted because all the vendors offer 100% customer guarantees ("Frequently Asked Questions").
One of the major factors that has really set SeatGeek apart from the competition is its "Deal Score" algorithm (Fenn). The Deal Score algorithm's primary function is to accordingly rank the best possible seat (ticket) based on price, seat location, and historical trends. The historical trends includes what other people have paid for that seat at similar types of live events (Solomon). The Deal Score's front-end display is simply a number from 0-100 (100 being the best), that sits adjacent to the link of the third party vendor. The highest score will be displayed at the top of the venue page, and descend numerically to the worst deals.
Aside from their wonderfully-crafted algorithm another factor that has played a role in SeatGeek's early success is that their business is focused more on mobile interactions than desktop. Their application has been downloaded over 3 million times from iPhone and Android app stores and over 60 percent of SeatGeek's users use the app on a mobile device (Buhr). Co-founder Groetzinger stated that "Mobile upends industries, and it's beginning to reshape ticketing." (Popper).
The final major characteristic that SeatGeek got acclaim for was its interactive maps of venues all over the US. Users have the ability to get a strong visual understanding of where a seat is located within a venue before they purchase the tickets. The detailed maps have a function called "Seat View". When "Seat view" is clicked, a real panoramic, high-res, photo from that particular seat is loaded. This gives users a near-perfect idea of what they would be seeing from that location ("Frequently Asked Questions").
All live event-goers should use SeatGeek to find tickets. If an individual wanted to find the lowest price on tickets for an event they would have to go to multiple ticket vendors to compare prices and what seat location they want. That method is incredibly inefficient for several reasons. Comparing tickets on multiple sites is time consuming, the individual isn't guaranteed the best deal, and most third party vendors don't have dynamic, interactive maps of the venue to visualize what the optimal seat could be. With SeatGeek one is able to compare all prices and seats at once while receiving recommendations on what the best ticket is. SeatGeek is free to use and does not charge any fees to the consumer ("Frequently Asked Questions").
SeatGeek's target audience is essentially self-explanatory. SeatGeek targets any individual or groups that attend virtually any ticketed, live event. As mentioned these live events include major sporting events, concerts, comedy, WWE, theater, and more. Whether one wants to go to a Radiohead concert, a Red Sox game, or see Rent on Broadway, SeatGeek brings the tickets to the customer.
SeatGeek primarily generates revenue from the ticket vendors that SeatGeek is affiliated with. When a transaction is made between a SeatGeek customer and a third party vendor, SeatGeek is notified that its application was used to reference the user to the vendor. In each transaction SeatGeek takes 8-10% of the sale depending on what SeatGeek and the vendor have agreed upon (Solomon). This is a near perfect system between both parties. Third party vendors get more promotion using SeatGeek. Although vendors are giving up a small percentile, they are still generating more revenue by making more sales with that promotion. SeatGeek strives to make its entire user-experience very friendly and acknowledges that advertisements take away from a clean UI. SeatGeek has mobile and web advertisements but only in very specific locations such as in the center of one of their interactive football stadium maps (Burgess).
There are other companies in the e-commerce world aside from SeatGeek whose business model is managing and selling tickets to live events. Some of the major companies include StubHub, Ticketmaster, LiveNation and even eBay. Some smaller companies on the rise who are also trying to get a share in the market include TicketFly, TicketsNow, and TicketCity (Ibrahim). There wasn't really a clear-cut aggregator that dominated the ticket market before SeatGeek took off, however. Since SeatGeek began to grow exponentially with the help of its investors and major partnerships it was able to rise over some other small ticket aggregator companies. In 2011, SeatGeek was able to buy out one of its biggest competitors, FanSnap (Strauss). It wasn't until November 19, 2015 when SeatGeek became direct competitors with Ticketmaster, StubHub, and LiveNation. SeatGeek announced and launched their own ticket marketplace on their website and mobile app (Popper). Since their marketplace only launched a few months ago it's difficult to gauge their status in that market. When Ticketmaster learned SeatGeek would be joining the ticket marketplace market, they disallowed their own tickets to be sold anywhere except their own marketplace (Popper). This affected many of the competitors like StubHub who have seen an 80 percent drop in inventory. Groetzinger and D'Souza are confident that their company is going to shift the current oligopoly in the ticketing market (Popper).
The Verge, Forbes, and the employees of SeatGeek firmly believe they are in a comfortable position to take over a fair share of the ticketing market based on how well SeatGeek has been able to adapt to new technological trends. Their biggest adaptation being the strong focus on mobile platforms. SeatGeek has generated $27.6 million in revenue in the last year, over a 100% increase from its $13 million in 2013 (Ibrahim). In April of last year, SeatGeek raised $62 million Series C financing led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) followed by Accel and Causeway Media who also supported SeatGeek in their Series B round with an investment total of $35 million in 2014 ("SeatGeek Raises $62 Million"). SeatGeek is currently ranked #26 on Forbes "America's Most Promising Companies" which is enough to convince most that their future is bright ("America's Most Promising Companies"). Based on their financial growth each year SeatGeek's success will continue for quite some time.
Fenn, Donna. "The Kayak of Events Ticketing." Inc.. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Feb. 2016.
http://www.inc.com/30under30/donna-fenn/seatgeek-russell-dsouza-jack-groetzinger-2013.html
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/01/21/the-hottest-ticket-in-mobile-seatgeek-helps-you-scalp-the-scalpers/#a7d178c3c033
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/12/19/seatgeek-snuffs-out-competition/#ceaaca277f98
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http://www.forbes.com/companies/seatgeek/
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http://www.cnbc.com/2014/06/05/the-100-million-idea-that-barely-anybody-knows-about.html
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http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/19/9761164/seatgeek-buy-sell-trade-tickets-mobile-app
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http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/02/seatgeek-raises-62-million-in-a-series-c-led-by-technology-crossover-ventures
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https://seatgeek.com/faq
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https://seatgeek.com/tba/articles/how-does-seatgeek-make-money
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