This was fantastic to see, and a valuable contribution in public awareness and negotiating position in general of GUTS. When the business side of events or organisations can be unwilling to change, the public opinion and visible demand for innovation can make a lot of difference. So, thank you!

Ticketing news part 2/4: Viral festival lifehack

The popular Youtube channel ‘Gierige Gasten’, where two guys try to live life without spending any money, dedicated an episode to getting into festivals without paying.

Their idea was to mess with the scanner system of several festivals by copying the same ticket and have it be checked in at roughly the same time by two different people. Sounds like one of those ‘what if’-stoner ideas, except it actually worked. Here’s the full video if you want to see it happen:

To give some technical context, here’s our Backend Software Developer Santos with some insight:

As seen in the video, other ticketing systems experience issues when the same ticket code is scanned in multiple devices at the same time (or within a very small time frame, a few seconds).

When the scanning network is subject to communication delays between the devices, each scanner is not fully aware of all other tickets scanned at that exact moment, at least until it re-synchronizes with the network and retrieves the full overview of all other scanned tickets.

Eventually, the ticketing company will realize the scanning incident, it just so happens that by then it will already be too late to deny entrance to the duplicate ticket holder.

GUTS employs several techniques that guarantee the integrity of the scanning process. Starting with the GUTS mobile wallets, tickets are only seen by their rightful owner or his friends if he so choses to share his tickets.

These tickets are presented in the form of dynamic QR codes that get updated regularly in the mobile wallet. This means that when scanning time arrives, ticket holders will always have the correct version of their ticket ready to be scanned. When the scanning of an event starts, a central database acts as the real time source of truth for all valid tickets, guaranteeing that those pesky double scanning attempts are quickly detected and disallowed.

Part 3/4: Google drops Viagogo as advertiser

Arguably the biggest ticketing global ticketing news this past month was the instantly applied ban of all Viagogo’s advertising on Google.

This may not seem like a huge defeat, but Google advertising is a maaaajor part of Viagogo’s business model.

The insanely high margins and fees they charge for every ticket sold, allows them to spend equally insanely high amounts of money on the advertisement of these tickets.

Viagogo spends all of this money in order to ensure they are the first to be shown as the first option when your grandma Googles ‘Elton John Tickets Where Buy Help Me Rocketman’.

By immediately being shown the Viagogo link, along with words like ‘official’ and ‘tickets available now’, a fair mount of people assume that Viagogo is the original or even only point of sale for tickets.

Fun fact: even if you googled ‘GUTS Tickets’, the Viagogo Google ads used to lead you to tickets for a French rapgroup named ‘GUTS’. Here’s what it looked like:

‘Nice, I’ve been looking for GUTS Tickets Tickets.’

In recent months, there has been a growing outrage over the way Viagogo conducts its business. This is for a variety of reasons, each more evil than the last. A few examples:

There was the selling of tickets before they were even publicly available…

Then there were the members of British Parliament who ‘issued a warning to the public against using secondary ticketing website Viagogo until it ‘fully complies with consumer law’. The report further claims that Viagogo has ‘caused distress for too many music fans for too long’.’

And the federal court in Australia that firmly decided that Viagogo has misled consumers. From the article:

‘The Federal Court has found Viagogo engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct through its Google advertisements, claims about the scarcity of tickets and added fees. Common complaints on online review sites and dedicated Facebook groups are that customers believed it to be the official ticket seller due to its top position in Google search results, felt rushed to purchase for fear of missing out on the tickets, and only later realised they may have paid well above the original ticket price. The court found that from May 1, 2017 to June 26, 2017, Viagogo misled consumers by using the word “official” in its Google advertisements.’

The Google ban is an important battle to win, but the war is far from over…

Ticket troubles part 4/4: The admission (price) of guilt

News broke this month that Live Nation has in the past sold tickets directly on the secondary marketplaces instead of through primary channels at face value. The news was originally broken by Billboard:

And quickly picked up by ticketing outlets…

…To be picked up by mainstream news.

Here’s a summary from TicketingBusiness:

Billboard said it had obtained a secret recording of Bob Roux, Live Nation’s president of US concerts, discussing how the company could assist someone claiming to represent Metallica in redirecting 88,000 tickets to resale sites like StubHub rather than selling them at face value via normal channels. The conversation reportedly took place in February 2017 ahead of Metallica’s WorldWired North American stadium tour. Billboard reports that Roux was speaking to an event promoter who had been tasked by an associate of the band to switch the tickets to resale sites. In the recording Roux suggests either a Live Nation employee or a venue box office could place the tickets into a singular account and then list them on secondary sites. He says that the action must be concealed. In a statement Live Nation admitted it had assisted artists with such requests in the past but new technology and products meant it was no longer an issue.

This news confirmed the widespread suspicion that big ticketing companies have been making insane profits by circumventing primary sales routes and opting for the unlimited secondary option. It’s not hard to guess why these companies have always been very eager to provide secondary platforms of their own…

Conclusion: The current mainstream ticketing industry is rotten. In other news: water is wet, popes and polar bears do shady stuff in the woods together, etcetera, etcetera. We’re working on it.

Wanna join the fight for a better (ticketing) world? Keep reading..