Why we built Deal Score: A concert ticket is not like an airline ticket | Hacker News Reader

Why we built Deal Score: A concert ticket is not like an airline ticket

seatgeek.com

34 pointskessler7 comments

I feel a little uncomfortable with mysterious scores which essentially say "buy this!". Kayak.com essentially has to lie to me to artifically raise an airline's ticket in the search results (at least, lie by omission), but SeatGeek seems like they could massage the rankings easily for a fee. I don't really have a reason to trust them more than, say, Yelp!, do I?

Certainly a fair question. I can pledge to you that we do not (and never will) alter our Deal Score based on fees or relationships with ticket sellers. Our team has spent countless hours building the components of this thing to make it hyper-useful, and it would be pretty awful for us if its integrity were compromised. But I realize that doesn't mean the calculation is transparent.

Beyond that, two things that may be worth considering:

1) Any inaccuracies with Deal Score are in plain sight. If a calculation is off and a ticket isn't given the Score it deserves, that's sitting out there in the open on our site. So it would still be easy for people to "call foul" if there were ever a problem.

2) You're welcome to ignore Deal Score and just sort by price. At that point you're effectively getting the same experience as Kayak. Deal Score is something we built to add additional utility.

Why we built Deal Score: Stubhub has an affiliate program.

[edit: opinion about brokers/scalping removed]

I'd appreciate some responses from those who downvoted the above post.

update: fair enough, and thanks for the replies. I shouldn't let my own bias against ticket brokers get mixed into commenting on an application like this.

I didn't downvote, but when looking objectively I don't see why its so bad. Someone is buying something below market value and reselling it at something close to market value (selling tickets seems to be a pretty competitive environment)

Personally I think monopolistic practices of Ticketmaster are far more reprehensible.

I didn't down vote, but here's a shot in the dark:

The post concerns Deal Score, something that was added to SeatGeek which aggregates sale prices of seats over time into a general price range and ranks the current sale price against that combined with it's location. The result is a system that may rank higher priced tickets closer to the action as a better deal than a cheaper price from the last row.

You addressed nothing about the topic, but expressed your distaste for SeatGeek (which I believe you meant when you wrote Deal Score, since that is just a number). SeatGeek has been around for a little while, and it's fine if you don't like them, but you are certainly not evaluating their idea with your comment.

I didn't down vote but I could see issues with the comment.

I don't really see what is wrong with building a site based off of affiliate revenues, especially when the site is adding value. Kayak built a pretty substantial company off this model and there are plenty of other examples.

If the issue is with ticket scalping, is a secondary market that horrendous of a thing when the primary market is so inefficient? Also, what about the tickets listed and sold on Stub Hub and similar sites that sell below face-value?

If I'm going to pay over face for a ticket, I'd rather have Stub Hub around than the old way of dealing with ticket brokers. I'd venture to guess that Stub Hub has forced more tickets to be sold for > face but has reduced the margin between face and scalp price. I'd also guess that its value in reducing scalping margins has outweighed the fact that it creates more tickets that are scalped.

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