The major players in the online ticketing industry have “no incentive” to tackle ticket brokers or so-called ‘bots’ that buy tickets for events and post them on reselling websites at inflated prices, according to SeatSwap founder Dan Marcus.
Writing on SportTechie.com, Marcus argued that the sector’s biggest companies are making too much money from bots to prioritise clamping down on the technology, which has become a controversial issue in recent months.
“It’s not complicated: when your goal is to sell as many tickets as possible, you don’t hamstring the people that buy the most tickets,” he said.
“Legislation aimed at cracking down and levying stricter penalties on brokers does not address heart of the issue. Brokers are merely opportunists taking advantage of a broken system that enables them to work in the shadows and profit off fans.”
Marcus said that the secondary ticketing market is fraught with “indifference and wilful blindness” and acknowledged that a potential solution to the problem – a more open ticketing system that allows third parties to verify the validity and origin of tickets – has little chance of being adopted on a broad scale.
“Despite what we’ve been led to believe, the problem is not brokers but the platforms that enable (and even encourage) them to conduct business the way they do,” Marcus added.
“However, it shouldn’t come as a shock. These companies simply have no incentive to change. They have been making too much money for too long to make any sort of radical changes that might threaten their position atop their respective thrones of their fiefdoms built on service fees and commission.
“The bottom line is that unless the incentives change, fans are going to continue to get screwed.”
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