Someone told me another trick not mentioned in this article [written by the former CEO of ticketmaster]. Can't find a citation, though, so take it with a grain

Someone told me another trick not mentioned in this article [written by the former CEO of ticketmaster]. Can't find a citation, though, so take it with a grain of salt. It seems odd at first that certain ticket sites are the exclusive ticket dealers for some venues. It would seem that in a competitive market where you can spin up a whole fleet of machines to handle the public sale onslaught that used to be nothing short of a ddos against your ticketing site, there would be competition across ticket vendors and that would drive down those service fees. It's not a competitive market though. Ticket vendors realize the difference between face value and market value is uncaptured consumer surplus. To capture some of it away from the second-hand dealers, they vary the service fees for venue to venue and show to show. That's the expected part. The (admittedly I-don't-have-a-citation-for-it) interesting part is a portion of that service fee is a direct kickback to the venue. Some of it may be to cover the performer's higher-than-the-sum-of-face-value-tickets performance fee mentioned in the article, but some of it is to make sure The Venue deals exclusively with Large Ticket Site and ignores offers from small ticket.ly startup armed with some EC2 autoscaling groups. After all, why go for a more efficient operator when Large Ticket Site offers you a guaranteed percentage of the uncaptured consumer surplus? That's a service you would almost pay a fee for!