Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
MHT's Galen Moore: New 'hyperlocal' web trend
MHT's Galen Moore: Charities score with online fundraising
Any fan knows the feeling. Concerts and big games sell out in five minutes, but soon enough, tickets are on sale via various ticket resellers at double the price.
Boston-based Tickets for Charity LLC hopes to take some of the sting out of paying huge sums of cash over face value — by donating most of that cash to charities that fans might be supporting anyway.
The company, a subsidiary of Charity Partners Inc., founded by Priceline.com co-founder Jord Poster, has worked with the Boston Red Sox, the Celtics, the Rolling Stones, Barbara Streisand, James Taylor, Paul McCartney and Usher, among others.
Tickets come direct from the sports teams and musicians at face value. Buyers pay about the same markup as a typical reseller charges. The face value goes to the venue or ticket agency, and the remainder goes to a charity chosen by the fan, artist or team. Tickets for Charity charges about a $4 to $12 fee per ticket, Poster said.
“If we capture half of one percent of that market we’re doing a great thing for society,” Poster said. Tickets for Charity has brought in $7 million in total revenues, with $3 million going back to charities including The Boys and Girls Clubs of America, City Year, Oxfam and the United Way.
The most recent analyst estimates available pegged the ticket resale market at anywhere between $3 billion and $10 billion in 2007. It has nearly doubled since then, said James Holzman, president of Boston-based Ace Ticket Inc. Tickets for Charity is a commendable initiative, he said, and it won’t take money out of the pockets of legitimate ticket resellers. Tickets are not set aside for resellers, he said. “It’s not Jim Holzman or Ace Ticket running to the well to get them.”
That may be true of Ace Ticket, but plenty of resellers do operate like a scalper with an inside track, said Dan Haubert, founder of the Somerville-based online ticket marketplace Ticketstumbler. Often, artists and promoters like Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc. (Nasdaq: TKTM) will use resellers to get a piece of the markup their tickets can command on the street, without taking flak for raising the ticket price, he said. “Think about it,” Haubert said. “You’ve got to tell shareholders these tickets are selling on the street for $80, and we’re selling them for $40?”
Sen. Charles Schumer (D N.Y.) introduced legislation proposing to regulate ticket resale this year, after public outrage over how Ticketmaster handled tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert, shuttling tickets to subsidiary reseller TicketsNow at a steep mark-up. In a March blog post, artist Trent Reznor lashed out at resellers, calling them scalpers and parasites.
The Red Sox do set aside tickets for fans to buy at the box office, said Red Sox Foundation executive director Meg Vaillancourt, who heads the team’s partnership with Tickets for Charity. But ticket resellers provide a service to fans who want premium tickets at the last minute. Tickets for Charity can make those fans feel better about the price they pay, she said.
“We think it’s a brilliant business model and a brilliant philanthropic model,” Vaillancourt said. “We’re keen to seize that model.”
RSS Feeds
Comments
Please Login/Register to post comments.
No comments have been added or approved.