An Update to Our Event Ticket Reseller Policy | Hacker News Reader

An Update to Our Event Ticket Reseller Policy

adwords.googleblog.com

61 pointsrexbee20 comments

I'm interested to see how this plays out. On one hand, this is obviously unambiguously good for consumers. On the other hand, Google is leveraging their market position to effectively serve as a corporate regulatory body, through the fact that freezing these sellers out of Google results will effectively tank their business.

It reminds me of a conversation here about Google's behavior with regards to their upcoming Ad Blocker. It would be very easy for Google to guide their business decisions in a certain way, then say "This is how things should be" and use their clout to force everyone to behave in that way, except that everyone else will then be playing catch-up. They have the power to do it, and in this case, it's for a good cause (plus, they're not a ticket reseller, etc).

But will that always be the case? Who decides which specific instance, if any, is "a bridge too far"? Is this something we even need to worry about, or should we let the market decide? Like I said, I'm curious to see how these kinds of actions by Google (and other market leaders) evolve over time.

Adwords has had all sorts of requirements for advertisers since it first started, so this isn't anything new. Google has occasionally caught flak from certain segments, in cases where they offer competing products. Google Flights comes to mind as the most obvious example.

Ticket resellers would be far too small a market for Google to actually do anything nefarious. It's just not worth risking a precedent.

I think Google also knows these concerns very well. I'm absolutely sure that they have more lawyers than programmers working on the upcoming ad blocking.

Strategically, Google owns so much of the open internet that they get plenty of benefits by, for example, improving ad quality overall. Their competitors aren't some ticket resellers that they would screw over by banning their ads. It's Facebook, Apple, and possibly Amazon with closed ecosystems.

That's why Chrome is such an excellent browser: Google's interests are almost completely aligned with someone browsing the internet. That, plus their basically unlimited money, and what's probably the world's best software dev operation meant that they easily outclassed Firefox without really trying[0]. Chrome was started at a time where native apps (and the Facebook SDK) had become superior platforms for app development: Remember Zynga? Yeah, me neither...

[0]: The "Chrome" wave of browser advancement has probably hit a sort of natural slowdown for now, which is (among other things) what allowed Firefox to catch up.

They're not planning on freezing them out of search results. This is purely about whether they can advertise with AdWords.

FINALLY. Reselling needs to be regulated so badly. I couldn't get tickets to a show at a medium-sized, local venue half a day after it was announced without having to go through a reseller and buy at a 200% markup. It wasn't even a person with a large amount of name recognition, either.

Then how was the market clearing price 200% marked up?

Many scalped & resold tickets are bought with stolen credit cards. Marking up doesn't imply market clearing, and since the buyer didn't spend their own money it doesn't result in a loss to them. Only the venue and fans lose out, as the show has fewer actual attendees purchasing drinks, where venues make most of their money.

So your argument is that most of the tickets go unsold at any price, despite having been purchased by resellers, and that attendees arriving at the venue will find it mostly empty despite it being impossible to find tickets?

Got any proof for that claim?

It needs to be regulated, but really shouldn't it be the government enforcing price transparency?

I'm not opposed to this action, but ideally we wouldn't need Google to do this.

Ideally we wouldn't need them, but every step counts, since the government is doing nothing.

Last year, my ex bought me some tickets for a concert as a present, and she bought them in Viagogo thinking it was the official place at almost double the price. Tickets were not sold out on the official webpage. They design their webpage trying to hide the fact they are resellers. Awful, I hope they fail miserably.

Viagogo lied to me the other day, so I am very happy to see Google do something about this...

I searched for an event and I was in a hurry and I made an honest mistake where I tapped the first item in search result on mobile without checking (tapped a paid Google Ad by Viagogo; normally I am more careful to avoid scummy ads!).

Paid a premium for "D reserve" seats but was given "E" seats many rows back from D section. Scummy switcheroo. Also worried if we would get into event since tickets were bought in someone else's name. And bookings two seats means you pay 2 booking fees - uggh. The worst part was that you pay more, but the UI for Viagogo is really really shitty!!!

Lesson learned: avoid scummy Viagogo unless no other choice...

It would be nice if resellers were required to prove that they actually have tickets in hand before advertising. Many times these resellers work as brokers trying to match buyers and sellers and buy tickets after getting offers, leaving some buyers out in the cold when tickets don't materialize. Also maybe require proof of actual rows and seats on the tickets, if they don't match, when buying allow the buyer to back out of the deal.

A large number of resellers are directly connected to the venue and artist management. Artists don’t want to be seen as too greedy, yet their contract has guaranteed payouts that simply aren’t possible given the venue size times # of seats. By directly routing most tickets to resellers they can charge way more than the face price of the ticket while shifting the blame to the resellers. In some cases the artists are aware, in others their manager doesn’t discuss it with them (but presents bigger paychecks as proof of how great their management skills are).

There is zero desire on the part of anyone involved to stop the practice, other than a few artists that really do care about fans and are willing to take a pay cut (eg Bruce Springsteen).

There is a lot of human psychology at play here which I find interesting. The fact that people are willing to pay above-face-value for these tickets implies that there IS a market for them, and so it means the face value is underpriced.

However, if the original pricing was indeed the high price at which the market cleared, people would consider it as greed on the artist's part. So we end up in this bizarre scenario where people are happy to overpay a faceless middleman for watching an artist rather than pay the artist themselves.

This was covered very well in the December 6, 2017 Freakonomics podcast. I was very surprised!

  A large number of resellers are directly connected
  to the venue and artist management.

Interesting, I didn't know that.

Where can I learn more?

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/live-event-ticket-market-scr...

If anyone actually wanted to stop ticket scalping they would put buyers name on tickets and only allow reselling on primary site, for face value. No hi-tech required. This is what train service I use did after people tried to buy all and resell reduced price tickets.

The problem is that there are so many different players in the event game. You have the artist, the people that own the venue, the promoters, the ticketing company itself, and then you also want to provide comp tickets.

It’s not always as simple as “does the purchaser really want to go to this event? Is the purchaser a person or a company? Is the ticket being used bought from my reseller or from the primary source?”

The people that own the venue typically do not care how the tickets are bought because they usually make most of their money from concessions. The artist also don’t necessarily care where the tickets are bought from, the promoters also don’t care necessarily where the tickets are bought from because in both cases they just want to get paid.

The only people that are really affected by resellers and scalpers are the person or people that genuinely want to go to the show and can’t afford the prices that the scalper or reseller is selling them at.

I wish Google would delist these sites entirely. It's illegal in many (most?) states to resell tickets above face value, but these sites are often the only place to find tickets to popular events.

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