Visitors to Yahoo Sports and its Rivals.com fan properties will see links to SeatGeek embedded in a team’s schedule page; links will also appear within articles, blogs and on the 130 team-specific college sports pages at Rivals.com. Yahoo has more than 51 million unique visitors a month.

The links simply say “buy tickets”; clicking through brings up a stadium seating diagram, with a list of available seats and prices on the right side of the page.

SeatGeek says it is aggregating roughly 19 million tickets for upward of 60,000 sports events from more than 50 secondary markets, including StubHub, Ticketmaster’s TicketsNow, RazorGator and others.

Russell D’Souza, co-founder of SeatGeek, said the service is free to consumers, and that the company collects an affiliate fee from the seller, which will now be split partially with Yahoo in some cases. Since the average purchase ranges between $250 to $300, SeatGeek’s cut can be between $25 to $30 per transaction, D’Souza said. SeatGeek also has partnerships with The Wall Street Journal and the New York Daily News.

D’Souza said before he and Jack Groetzinger started the company, they used to open six windows in their browsers to compare ticket prices on dozens of sites where tickets were posted for sale by smaller brokers. He said there were often hidden fees, service fees and shipping fees, which made it even more complicated.

“It would be really hard to compare, so we wanted to create an interface for any event that would expose to users where the best seats were in the stadium and how much they’ll be paying,” D’Souza said.

Generally speaking, D’Souza said, the secondary ticket market is great for finding deals on tickets for events that are sold out, but a little-known fact is that it’s also good for events that still have tickets available.

“If an event is sold out, you have to go there — there’s only one option. But if it’s not sold out, you’ll end up finding tickets from season-ticket holders and brokers who will list it below face value,” he said.

By making it easier to sort through the various marketplaces, SeatGeek hopes to make consumers more aware of the alternatives. From its site, the company also offers venue maps and price forecasts to advise users when to buy tickets.

SeatGeek has raised about $2.5 million in venture capital from Founder Collective, NYC Seed and others. Founder Collective, an early-stage investor in New York, previously invested in Get Me In, a European secondary-market ticket vendor that was acquired by Ticketmaster in 2008.

Because we love to scratch each other’s backs here at AllThingsD.com, I am going to begin every day posting here and making my usual commentary on our very own John Paczkowski’s most enjoyable Digital Daily video.
One of the things I really love about John’s videos are his funny openers, for which he has used handmade puppets of tech icons, defaced magazine covers, kooky hand-drawn graphs and many Oscar-worthy facial grimaces.

In today’s video, John uses his talented eyebrows, a music snippet from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and a movie snippet from “A Fish Called Wanda” to talk about YouTube’s new spot on what some in the Valley call the “JesusPhone,” because its coming on June 29 is the most heralded and hyped event ever for a device.

Here is a direct link to today’s video, which is also below (we are crosslinking and crossposting fools at AllThingsD.com).

FYI, although it looks like he is flashing one in the video, that’s actually a now-banned piece of software called iPhony, a faux iPhone interface, on his Treo.

(John did get to see a real iPhone that Walt is in the middle of testing for a brief moment yesterday, wherein he fell into an Apple fanboy stupor, and we had to pry it out of his hands.)

Here is his text post about it in his Digital Daily column, where he also posts about Google’s intensified lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., (they needed that) and Yahoo’s acquisition of Rivals.com (they really needed that).

It’s a savvy acquisition for Yahoo, one that delivers a pre-existing and very local audience to Yahoo Sports, which is battling it out with ESPN.com and other rivals for the desirable college-sports-fan demographic. And of course, it helps that Rivals.com is actually making money–about $22 million or so a year. That said, it’s not really the sort of major acquisition (read: Facebook) that might make up for the two big bungled acquisition chances–YouTube and DoubleClick–that allowed Google to take such a commanding business lead.