Event tickets are a big business and startup FanSnap is entering the game with a compelling ticket search engine. FanSnap is launching the public beta of its nifty Kayak-like live ticket search engine for sports, concerts, and theater events. FanSnap, through partnerships, provides free ticket search results for close to 60 of the leading ticket providers, including StubHub, eBay, Ace Tickets, AllShows.com, Barry’s Tickets,Gold Coast Tickets, Las Vegas Tickets, RazorGator and TicketNetwork. The results include more than 12 million tickets to 40,000 events.
FanSnap’s technology makes finding tickets to an event very simple. The site allows fans to see ticket selection and price ranges at-a-glance. FanSnap uses sliders to allow filter to see tickets by price range, date, time, number of tickets available, and by the series of the event (baseball homestand, a multi-night concert performance, or a week of Broadway shows). Users get a comprehensive list of comparable ticket offers from multiple providers. The search results also make it easy for users to see the full price of a ticket on a ticket vendor’s site, including all taxes, commissions, and fees that may come with a ticket. Similar to Kayak, when a user clicks on a desired ticket, he or she is taken to the vendor’s page.
Here’s the really cool part. Next to the search results, FanSnap has an interactive map of the event venue, which includes a “best value” feature that highlights at-a-glance those ticket offers that are priced significantly lower than surrounding offers. The value of the tickets are color-coded, with yellow being the lowest price and dark red being the highest price. The available tickets are distributed over the venue map, with the “best value” tickets as determined by FanSnap’s technology (the best tickets for the lowest price) represented by stars.
But that’s not all. FanSnap’s map then lets users zoom into a row-level view of the available seats map (only created for around 200 of the top venues of the U.S, but will be rolled out to more venues in the future), to see exactly where the desired seats are versus the rest of the stadium or event space. FanSnap says that they plan on including actual “views from the seat,” a photo from the actual seat, in the future (they already have a partnership with seating chart site SeatData to create this feature). Competitor SeatKarma already offers such court-view photos.
FanSnap is led by some pretty experienced people in the online tickets and search aggregation industries. CEO and co-founder Mike Janes used to be StubHub’s chief marketing officer. Steve Hafner and Paul English, co-founders of Kayak, are on the board of advisers. Co-founder Rishi Garg was the director of strategy and business development for MTV Networks. And FanSnap received $10.5 million in Series A funding from General Catalyst Partners, which is also one of the primary investors in Kayak.
Janes says FanSnap’s biggest competitor is Google, since many consumers will type in the name of a desired event to Google’s massive search engine. But FanSnap, he says, solves the problem of filtering the legitimate tickets from the fake ones, and also provides real-time data. Other competitors include event ticket aggregator TicketStumbler, but FanSnap appears to have more ticket vendors (and thus reach), more interactive images and more features.
FanSnap’s search engine is disarmingly good. Not only is it comprehensive, but FanSnap’s focus on visuals and images makes it really easy for users to see exactly what they are getting both in terms of value and location of a seat. Ticket selling is a dynamic industry—consumers often get ripped off or are charged unwanted fees. FanSnap adds transparency to the market by making side-by-side comparisons of fees vendors are tacking onto the value of a ticket. And FanSnap says that it fully vets each ticket vendor to ensure legitimacy and customer service.
When “something is the new something”, you have to add “on steroids”
I have a video of Mike Janes, CEO of FanSnap, introducing his new service here: http://www.blip...tv/file/1874114
Thanks for coming to visit us, Robert. We appreciate your time and interest. I need to get one of those Flip videos! Best wishes in your new endeavors.
Great point Jonas
Please have a look at FanSnap to see our “performance enhancing” features. One clarification to the article – we are now out of beta, not entering it. We do have feedback links on every page of the site. Please let us know how you think the ticketing finding experience could be even further improved. We will be upgrading the ticket search engine constantly.
i like the “visual seats” part… but i still dont understand why facebook or other social media guys who already have the kind of data to bring the consumer and producer together leave so much food for others on the table…
Hi Vikki. Going to events is certainly one of the best examples of social activity around. Fans never buy only one ticket.
You should report on this.
http://www.ewee...Concern-241278/
Google is using your web surfing/searching behavior to tailor your adwords ads.
Now with Double click also they can track you just about anywhere you go on the interweb. And compile all that data to serve you text and even video ads on any page.
We don’t know exactly who has access to this data and will never be provided a list. We don’t know if this tracked data is associated with a person’s Google profile which contains your address, and other identifiable information.
When Google bought DC, it was a given that this was the reason.
This is like the Facebook ad platform everyone was complaining about, except the entire internet is facebook in this paradigm.
I’m going to do the same thing I did when Om wrote about these guys way back when – there are a ton of competitors in the space. You’ve written many of them up before, in fact.
Here’s one: http://www.tech...-ticket-search/
But here’s the kicker. You wrote about a competitor THIS VERY MONTH: http://www.tech...t-in-the-house/
When a CEO says that their biggest competitor is Google, they’re most likely lying.
Ah, found the comment that lists them all:
http://www.tech...comment-2641554
“Fansnap, TicketStumbler, Seathound, SeatQuest, Tickex (and SeatKarma). Crowded field.”
My issue is more with Fancast’s CEO than with TechCrunch here. I would hope that his blatant misdirection would lead to greater skepticism next time.
Good point. It is a very crowded field.
not only that, as soon as any of these guys makes a profit, without hesitation you will see “Google tickets”
Thanks Chris. The key difference is that FanSnap’s ticket-level data comes via strategic partnerships and systems integration directly with the ticketing companies. There is no industry standard for data, so we have to normalize as well. Ticket inventory and prices in the resale market are incredibly dynamic, not unlike the stock market, so a web site crawling-based approach with its inherent latency, is problematic.
The real question isn’t whether the inherent latency is a problem but whether this is truly a venture-fundable business at all. Consider FanSnap raised VC raises additional questions about the investment due diligence and size of the actual market on the side of the VCs.
First, I’ve heard reports of a $2B secondary ticket market. Is that your sole market? If so, ticket re-sellers like FanSnap or TicketStumbler.com only receive a small cut of each ticket sale, and it isn’t likely to assume you will have a monopoly on the market for all of those tickets, thereby bringing actual addressable market down quite a bit.
In other words, would a smaller competitor with far less resources deflate your overall market share with a better design, even with a slight inherent latency from a cruder, more brute-force approach with a site-crawling engine?
Of course, we know where M. Janes stands on the issue.
I have a video of FanSnap’s introduction here: http://www.blip...tv/file/1874114
Thanks Sachin. You are correct, there are probably at least a dozen sites that are working on the ticket search opportunity, In fact http://www.seats.com and http://www.fatlens.com worked on this years ago. This clearly validates that many people see value in improving the ticket finding experience and understand there is a real consumer problem to be solved. We have worked very hard to put together the right team, partnerships, and technology to work on this important problem. Per your competition comment, I was CMO at StubHub. When fans do not find tickets at the box office/Ticketmaster, the #2 place they look is the search engines, i.e. Google. Fact. The #1 online customer channel by far for ticket companies is Google Adwords. Fact. I stand by my statement where the lead gen dollars we are competing for reside.
StubHub > FanSnap >> TicketStumbler.
Yawn. Fact.
Their biggest competitor might actually be the acts and managers…
http://jamtopia...ls-mike-damone/
And once again, this site makes my ticket search engine look like child’s play…
http://jamtopia.com/tickets/
TL
Thanks Todd. The most important thing is to keep going to games, concerts, and shows and supporting the performers. In this economy, they are working extra hard to attract fans, and in this economy, going to events is certainly a welcome escape from CNN.
I think the site looks great. But I thought this comment was silly. Really, I should buy tickets to events just because multi-millionaire performers are “working extra hard”? And meanwhile hundreds of thousands are losing their jobs every month? Get a grip pal.
Great business, great space and these people have done a great implementation of it. Looks like a kickass team is behind this too. Seems like the ingredients of success to me…
Nice site, very useful. I just launched twitter.com/ticketfeed as a secondary ticket market on Twitter. Useful for discovering, fansnap on the other hand looks also useful for discovering and purchasing tickets.
Examples of view from seat photos are actually already live on the site (you can check them out when you click on the maps of Dodger or Angel stadiums, Fenway or AT&T parks, or Wrigley or US Cellular Fields) We are hard at work populating the remaining venues now.
This company clearly has a very serious business model, team and most importantly an excellent, easy to use interface. They can easily win here.
Very excited to use the service!
Isn’t this just another way for greedy scalpers to make money off of fans? If you buy tickets, and care how much you are paying, realize these services are you not in your interest.
Hi Ray. Before the growth of the online ticket resale market, if an event sold out or one did not care for the remaining tickets at the box office, the only recourse was to go to a street scalper. No choice, no guarantees, no transparency as to what market prices were. eBay, StubHub, TicketNetwork, Razorgator, TicketExchange and many, many other ticket market makers all provide choice and safety. Our goal at FanSnap is to provide HD-level transparency so fans can make informed buying decisions. Also, while there are hundreds of professional ticket sellers in the US, the growth in the market is being fueled by individual sellers. Every sports league endorses a resale partner for their season ticket holders. Major media properties like ESPN and AOL endorse resale partners. Why? There is huge demand from fans who are not served by the box office. Forrester Research says it is a $3 billion/year market. There is also a misperception that resold tickets and prices are always at the high end. Prices are market-driven and fluctuate with the balance of buyers and sellers. Check out entry-level tickets this year already for many of the baseball teams. Less than $10 with fees. Watch ticket prices for any event as the date approaches. If there are many tickets available, asking prices plummet.
Tickets are being purchased with a sole purpose of sale for profit in a secondary market that you are creating a platform for. I don’t buy the argument that shows with low attendance will use these services to sell tickets at a lower price. Some of these companies are selling tickets in both the primary and secondary markets. What stops Ticketmaster from making it easier for scalpers to get hot tickets in larger amounts knowing they will be resold on stub hub?
Hi Ray. Only Ticketmaster plays in both the primary and resale markets. They historically have aggressively used everything from technology to lawsuits to keep any type of unfair purchases from occurring at the public onsale. Check out recent news including their removal of TicketsNow links from their site, their agreement with the NJ Att’y General’s office, and their testimony during the congressional anti-trust hearings regarding the proposed merger with Live Nation. This should address your concerns.
I was on the FatLens team, and the thorniest problems were normalizing data from diverse sources, and ensuring the data remains current. FanSnap seems to have done an excellent job tackling these issues and layering all that with a smooth and friendly UI, full of AJAX-y goodness.
Well played!
Thank you, Ranjit. You obviously have a very good idea of what we have been spending our time and energy on the past year. A tip of the hat to you and the original FatLens team…
Mike,
Its a very good point that Google is your biggest competitor. For anyone that knows the ticket business the reason Stub Hub was able to be so successful was providing a quality site to buy and sell tickets and more importantly bought links to rank organically high in Google.
I personally think that ticket aggregators haven’t been successful because none of them have enough money to buy links to rank organically and they can’t afford to buy adwords. Sites like StubHub, CoasttoCoast Tickets, TicketNetwork, and others have made the barriers to entry very high for new ticket sites. Eventhlough you are aggregating these sites, they are your competitors too and I hope you guys have a lot of money to buy market share.
I haven’t done a comparison between FanSnap and other sites attempting to do the same thing. In fact, I don’t buy event tickets on the secondary market. However, I have been very impressed with Kayak, so if they can offer the same for this business, I am looking forward to it.
Thanks Suzanne. Give the dynamic maps on FanSnap a spin, and please let us know what you think. You can also see a pretty quick demo on the Scoble site, or at http://www.blip...tv/file/1874114 as noted above. We are benefiting from really good and useful feedback, and we remained focused on quickly improving the ticket search engine.
Nice post! Check out my site too at http://macmaniapodcast.com.
Great looking service and site. Lots of $$$ in this industry.
Definitely not just another search engine that will go straight to the deadpool.
Definitely not another search engine that will go straight to the deadpool.
You guys are doing a good job, the Idea is not new at all though, fatlens started it in 2004, Ticketwood capitalized on it for a while, and now lot’s of sites are doing the same thing you guys are doing!
You guys did a good job but you forgot to study your customers, customers of the event business are not loyal so whatever money you spending on branding, it’s useless. My prediction and I m usually right, you guys are going out of business in 3 years afters spending the money you guys raised.
Hi Al – We are focused on the product. Happy customers create brands. Read above, I mentioned FatLens in the previous comments and Ranjit from their original team chimed in, both on Mar 13.
Al, you are right to some extent, and may have accidentally hit the nail on the head … even though you are wrong.
If your argument is that customers in the ticket business aren’t loyal, this site will thrive because it is an aggregator of tickets across all providers. People don’t care where they buy their tickets, they just want to feel safe and get the best deal. This site lets people do that by showing ALL the tickets across ALL providers. Why would you shop at StubHub, when all of StubHub’s inventory is on this site along with every other provider?
What many dont know is that the majority of StubHub’s tickets actually come from brokers you probably have never heard of. Barrys, RazorGator, GoldCoast, Empire and so on. StubHub, as well as all the other ticket sites, take these tickets and mark them up 25% to consumers. If FanSnap can get the actual suppliers of the tickets to participate (and they have), then they have a HUGE price advantage in this industry. If RazorGator uploads all of their inventory to both StubHub and FanSnap (which they do), you would save approx 25% if you purchased any one of RG’s tickets on FanSnap instead of StubHub. And this is true for every other ticket provider.
People will go where they can get the best seats at the best prices and this model does that. FanSnap has pulled away from the rest of the pack (ticketwood, ticketstumbler) by forging the relationships with the brokers and making a really slick and intuative site.
Very well done.
Hi Kris- Thank you for the positive comments. I do want to make two clarifying points. One, FanSnap vets the ticket companies that we partner with specifically based on their service quality. All of our partners have very high repeat purchase rates which suggests a level of loyalty exceeding Al’s initial assessment. Second, a very significant proportion of StubHub’s listings come from individual sellers rather than professional resellers. This should not be surprising given their advertising and partnerships with teams and leagues, where they are the endorsed marketplace for season ticketholders. Our goal is to provide fans the information to make ticket choices based on what is important to them personally – whether it is price, location of seat, previous experience with ticket company, type of ticket, shipped vs. will call, etc. You are also correct that some fans may not have heard of some or any of these companies. We believe FanSnap can really help grow the ticket market by connecting fans who need tickets with the companies that have them.
I have used this site, and I actually really like it. The interactive maps are great. There is plenty of room for sites like this in this market.
In my opinion, this is the future of the secondary ticket market. I have done a little research and in my opinion best in show is this site & Seathound.com.
The reason I say that is that I get tired of going to these sites that have dead or already sold tickets, so frustrating. You try to buy tickets, then you are sent to a dead ticket link and have to start your search all over. Biggest problem with this type of site. Neither Seathound.com nor Fansnap.com seems to have this issue.
Keep up the good work, this is a site for the consumer.
Mike,
Hi. To be a true aggregated offering, wouldn’t you need to partner with the primary market sellers as well, such as TM, Tickets.com and others? Is that something that is realistic given their strangehold on the market, particularly TM? I would think a benefit of this type of site would be to also show when face value tickets are available for an event.
I like the idea and the site. The real question si whether or not the simple referral based economic model will pay the bills when you don’t “own” the customer and the only benefit of the site is comparison shopping (which I think is big, but there is no chance for you to offer a lower price than anywhere else like orbitz/travelocity do with hotels).
Great questions! On the first – yes, our objective is to work with the primary providers as well. They do not sell 40+% of the tickets they list so there is economic incentive for them to find new channels. On the second, there are a number of good examples of vertical search or shopping comparison lead gen businesses such as Kayak or NexTag (where our CTO is from). Last, I would note that in this day and age, no one “owns” customers any more. We are focused on providing and constantly improving such a useful ticket search engine that we will continually earn repeat and referral visits.