Thank you!

I still believe comparison shopping for event tickets is still the best way to get a good price on an event ticket, at a site like http://www.ninjatickets.com

I also bought 2 options for the Patriots on the first day avaiable for $530 each… I sold them the week before Thanksgiving for about $2000 each ( I personally thought they were overvalued at $2000 and thought I could get them cheaper later in the season….) I cashed out and got a check within days (didn’t want to pay the 3% paypal fee).
I bought back again this weekend, which is more of a gamble because I bought 4 of the Patriot vs. Giant matchup options for around $350 each. I’ll figure out this week if I will keep 2 and cover my costs or keep 4…. Anyways so far they have been top notch people to work with and there is so much more transparancy than the other two companies offering service similar to this with their blogs and newsletters…

I dont get what the difrent teams have to do with the superbowl ticket? or do they give free tickets to fans with season passes to spacific teams, and the ticket is only valid if te corasponding team is there. Or am i way off track?

I know the founders very well, and have followed the growth of their business since the modest beginnings. Hagos (comment #17 above) and Gerry have come a long way, and are executing very well on a great business idea.

I can personally attest to a few things –

1. These guys are totally passionate about what they are doing, and their knowledge of the ins and outs of this fuzzy space is now extremely impressive

2. It is a great business idea – bad ideas do not gain traction at the MIT 50K (now 100K I guess…), and this was a finalist, if I remember correctly.

3. These are people with integrity and good business sense. They will always deliver for the fans before thinking about short term profits. So while the ‘they will default and pay 3x’ idea makes good food for theoritical thought, that transaction is probably npv negative with lifetime value of the customer figured in, and Yoonew seems to get this.

And now that they are on the Arrington radar, they have to be positioned at the sweet spot on the S curve and poised for explosive success

I am a Yoonew net promoter… and wish them all the luck for success.

Disclaimers – unprompted post, no financial interest in the co.

http://www.nyti...amp;oref=slogin

Furthurmore, I would suggest that you check out their site. I am seldom wowed by new websites, but they have done an amazing job of incorporating advanced technologies that are completely relevant to their business instead of what so many other companies do with worthless widgets.

I wish them the best!

“Super Deal or Super Swindle”?
It’s a catchy title – and I’m happy to say it’s really a super deal. We’ve fullfilled 100% of our Fantasy Seat obligations since we founded the company 4 years ago, and we’ll keep doing so.

The 401(k) story
One of the comments on the post talked about how Gerry, my co-founder, had to pull money from his 401(k) to fulfill ticket obligations. You know, we’re proud of this. We were pre-funding, pre-staff, pre-experience, pre-relationships and pre-exchange – we were a couple of business school students with a big dream – and by sacrificing Gerry’s retirement funds, we delivered every ticket we said we would. I think this says a lot about the kind of people we are and the kind of business we run. And, as often happens, the adversity resulted in several valuable lessons learned which have since improved our ability to price, secure, and deliver tickets.

The 300% Guarantee
Back in 2005, we were trying to figure out how to make people feel comfortable that we could actually get tickets to big games. The 300% guarantee seemed like a good idea, and Forbes wrote about it in the story that was referenced. However, as it turns out, there’s an economic impact to this that screws up the exchange dynamics (see comment #13). Realizing this, we went back to the drawing board and developed relationships with ticket brokers and other intermediaries that make it possible to simply guarantee that we can acquire seats to games. It may cost us a bit more or a bit less than we had planned, but we’ll get them.

On the whole, it’s great to start getting this kind of attention. As with any new business model, there are kinks that have to be worked out, and based on what we’re seeing, I think we’ve done a pretty good job dekinking. I’d encourage any skeptics to sign up and log in and watch the market in action – it’s free, and it’s amazing how agile the market is at responding to even in-game events (You can see charts from yesterday’s playoff games at http://yoonew.b...f-playoffs.html).

Thanks,
Hagos

–
Hagos Mehreteab
President and Co-founder

Its even worse than that, say you paid $24 for the ticket because the odds of your team making it are something around .05% or something, if the ticket’s face value is $150 then they’re better off paying you the $72 instead of even attempting to obtain the ticket.

This is ultimately a consumer confidence thing, its bad PR to not deliver on the tickets that you say you’ll guarantee up to 300%. They may be able to pull something like this off on a small scale, or on a large scale for one big game, but over the long term the bad press will not make them any money.

a simpler way to explain this is . . . if I know for a fact that Yoonew will payout the 300% whenever they know the cost of the ticket is above that 300% . . . the price of any given contract will never be worth more than 3x of what it is today. This puts a cieling on the option contract. Using backwards induction, this means no contract is worth more than 3x the face value of ticket. . . even the superbowl . .. . eeks!

I tend to agree with the Forbes article that this is a service that can be provided by a much larger company, who can mitigate the risk of escalating ticket prices through its other revenue streams. I also think that @Eric Willis (6) is correct to look at this as a platform that can be licensed to other exchanges, which would diversify the Company’s revenue streams and mitigate the risk of escalating ticket prices.