What if…

What if your favourite blogger didn’t just write features about your preferred sports teams but also had the ability to sell tickets for their upcoming events? If they could, then not only would you be able to get all of your daily information about your favourite teams, but you would also be able to buy tickets to see them play. You would not have to open a new tab, find TicketMaster, and look for tickets; they would be right there, in a widget, being sold on the blog!

At Aventus, one of our primary objectives is to enable this type of third party integration to happen as frictionlessly as possible for anyone from a social influencer, to a blog, to a streaming platform, to a general event listing site.

Why this matters

One of the biggest problems in ticketing is unsold inventory; in particular, sporting events suffer considerably from this phenomenon. The ex-CEO of TicketMaster, Sean Moriarty, estimated that 35% of ticketing inventory on TicketMaster goes unsold, and when you ask fans why they did not attend, their main reason is that they did not know about the event.

The primary reason for this is the siloed nature of the ticketing industry; a promoter is in charge of filling the full allocation, and finds sub-promoters, ticketing agents, and other entities to fill portions of this allocation. Hence, the reach of the event is limited by the audiences of the promoters, sub promoters, and ticketing agencies that the event organisers know to begin with.

Nowadays, if an entity like Spotify wishes to sell some of Adele’s ticketing inventory, an affiliate agreement must be crafted between Spotify and an entity owning the allocation in question, which specifies the rules of sale amongst other contractual requirements. It is a fairly long process, and most ticketing agents and promoters still use Excel spreadsheets to track allocations!

Enter Aventus and the blockchain.

With the Aventus protocol, we aim to de-silo the ticketing industry and bring the full ticketing inventory to the blockchain. The core idea: since we eliminate black markets and allow event organisers to control the entirety of the ticketing lifecycle, those contractual clauses in the affiliate programmes live as rules in smart contracts in the Aventus protocol that cannot be broken. Further, via the creation of a decentralised bidding process on portions of the ticketing inventory on the blockchain, we allow this ticket distribution process to occur with ease. No more 6 month negotiations; affiliates can bid, be approved, and start selling tickets in a matter of minutes.

Now, events will not be limited in reach by the promoters and sub-promoters they know; now, anyone who has a target audience that overlaps with the event can bid on inventory, sell tickets, and allow the event organiser to expand his possible reach! This results in less unsold inventory, a more diverse attending audience, and more prospective customers for the event organiser.

How would it work?

For the purpose of this post we’ve decided to use The Sports Daily as our sporting events use case and a platform that needs no introduction, Spotify, as our concert & music festival use case.

The Sports Daily is a blogging platform that writes about various sports features (hence the name, The Sports Daily). The night before Sports Daily publishes an article hyping the Connor McGregor/Floyd Mayweather fight for example, they can either use the Aventus services API or the Aventus inventory dashboard to bid on a portion of ticketing inventory for the fight. Once approved, they can place the white-label Aventus ticket sale widget next to the article, and allow their readers to frictionlessly buy tickets to the event.

Not only does this make life easier for consumers, but it also opens up an entirely new revenue stream to Sports Daily.

For Spotify for example, the integration could be even more interesting, and very much data-driven. Since an anonymous ticket purchase history is available on the blockchain, if consumers give Spotify (in exchange for some sort of reward) access to their purchase history, Spotify can now targetedly place ticket-buy buttons next to songs or artists that their consumers are listening to. This is beneficial for Spotify in terms of a new revenue stream, but also for their consumers as they will now get targeted ads that add value to their listening experience.