Ticket Scalpers Seatwave Take $25 Million Series C

techcrunch.com

5 points·brk··5 comments

They're already in 36 million and only since 2006? Where does all of this money go?

Server infrastructure and developers would be my guess. Probably a fair bit goes towards "misc. marketing expenses", which == bribes/kickbacks/gifts. :)

I don't hate scalpers. To me, they're just part of the invisible hand.

I really don't get VCs. So many wonderful, LEGIT, LEGAL ventures that would improve life don't get funded, yet they pour (read: waste) this much money into a borderline-illegal piece of junk like this that does nothing but piss off many people.

Oh and this article is wrong. The guy involved in this also has a U.S. version of this under a holding company; I know this because I tried to get Lily Allen tix from a venue in NYC and even though I got there like literally 10 minutes after tickets went on sale, I was told that they all "sold out".

"Impossible!" I claimed. Then I was told about this company - basically all they do is hire a bunch of low-lifes (read: college students who want quick pot-cash) to just hang around for hours before the tickets go on sale and they then just buy up all the tickets and resell them for 5-10X original cost.

Seriously who sees a future in a company that gets people aggravated by design and ads zero value to the process?

Are VCs that dumb, or just that desperate?

The fact is, tickets are incredibly under-priced if the secondary market is able to do this profitably.

If tickets were sold direct by the venues with some kind of demand or time based auction model, every single one of these brokers would immediately go out of business.

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