The Los Angeles-based company is focused on selling tickets at a discount. The site does not sell bikini waxes, Segway tours or fancy dinners. It’s all about targeting hardcore sports fans.

“It’s the perfect combination,” said Crowd Seats co-founder and CEO Justin Cener. “If you don’t sell it, you lose it. If any tickets are left over, they are worthless.”

Plus, Cener says, once the team gets people in the door, there are additional ways to make money on everything from parking fees to concessions.

The daily deals business really got its start in Chicago with Groupon; then LivingSocial came about in Washington, D.C.

Now it seems there’s a little niche forming in California around tickets. Just down the street from Crowd Seats, there’s a company called ScoreBig that is allowing customers to name their price — sort of like hotel rooms on Priceline.com — for a wide range of tickets, ranging from the theater to sporting events.

Both companies are promising huge discounts on tickets that would normally go unsold. As an additional benefit to consumers, neither company charges any processing fees, unlike Ticketmaster.

The concept is far from new.

Justin Cener

A year ago, Groupon announced a joint venture with Live Nation Entertainment’s Ticketmaster.com to sell a number of limited-time deals on a variety of concerts, sports, theater productions and other live events across North America; more recently, LivingSocial inked a deal with AEG, which owns and operates many concert venues.

Cener said that by focusing exclusively on sports tickets, Crowd Seats is able to sign up fewer members and still get the same results as the bigger guys, because of better targeting. He also said that members don’t get “deal fatigue,” because they aren’t getting inundated with offers they don’t care about.

But Cener faces an uphill battle because of his timing.

He started Crowd Seats in August last year, which was far too late to get the attention of investors, who had become wary of the daily deals market as Groupon and LivingSocial took the lead. As a result, the 2009 Rutgers graduate has been bootstrapping the company, and has very little money left for advertising.

Still, he has managed to launch Crowd Seats in nine markets, adding three new cities — Philadelphia, Denver and Baltimore/Washington, D.C. — at the beginning of this month.

Chris Chaney

“Basically, the Clippers were down 3-0, and the interest in going to game four fell off the cliff,” Cener said. “They were scrambling.”

With all the cards stacked against him, he has been able to achieve cash-flow positive, and is optimistic that investors will become interested once they see his progress.

Recently, Cener recruited additional help from Chris Chaney, whom he named as co-founder. Chaney was previously president and CEO of Chaney Sportainment Group, where he consulted for sports and media start-ups. Chaney was named to the Forbes “30 Under 30” list in the entertainment category.

And now it appears the e-commerce giant has even more plans in the works.

A Wells Fargo Equity Research note distributed this week writes: “A key discovery this month is that Amazon has plans to expand the Prime membership benefits beyond the Amazon.com platform.”

The note points to a number of job descriptions, disclosing that Amazon is creating a “Prime Expansion” team, tasked with driving awareness of the Prime program and expanding the scope of its benefits, geographically and on and off Amazon.

So what areas or new benefits might Amazon be expanding into?

It’s not clear, and an Amazon spokesperson did not return emails seeking comment.

But first, let’s throw out the areas where Amazon won’t be expanding to — other online retailers. Today, Amazon sells pretty much everything under the sun, so it would be very hard for it to find a retailer that would be comfortable with letting Amazon run its loyalty program, even if it does mean offering perks like free shipping.

“I think any retailer would have to have their head examined if they allowed themselves to be a customer-acquisition tool for Amazon Prime,” said Mike Golden, president of ShopRunner. “Especially if it’s under the assumption that Amazon won’t compete with them. Because people have been proven false every single time.”

Of course, Golden has his biases.

ShopRunner, which includes eBay as an investor, operates a service — much like Prime — that offers shoppers free two-day shipping across a variety of retailers, including Toys “R” Us and PetSmart, for $79 a year.

But even if other retailers are out of the question, there are still some opportunities Amazon could be pursuing. For instance, it could work with other delivery services that don’t compete with Amazon.

ShopRunner has already demonstrated this through a partnership with Domino’s Pizza, which provides free delivery to ShopRunner members. Other scenarios with national scale could include Ticketmaster or Fandango, which have service fees at checkout.

Another internal program that Amazon is working on that could be a candidate for Prime is free access to Amazon Locker, which allows consumers to pick up packages from secure mailboxes at 7-Eleven. The lockers address a segment of the market that can’t receive packages at their homes because people work during the day and there’s nowhere for a delivery to be dropped off, or because it’s likely to get stolen.

So far, Amazon Prime is considered a very successful program that increases loyalty to Amazon.com — for an annual fee. As is typical with Amazon, it does not disclose how many Prime members it has, but Baird Equity Research estimates that there’s somewhere between seven million and 11 million members.

With even more benefits, it will make Prime — and Amazon overall — even harder for consumers to walk away from.

(Image courtesy of www.cicadamania.com)

These are similar to the integrations Facebook did last fall with Yahoo, Rdio, Netflix and other sites for sharing each time a user accesses news stories, music or videos.

Now, developers can choose their own action verbs in addition to “read,” “listen” and “watch.” Some of the ones I heard tonight were “want,” “own,” “nom,” “crave,” “pin,” “pose,” “go” and “see.”

In my view, the new class of apps also includes significantly clearer privacy settings than when the first Open Graph apps launched and users were often unclear about when they were sharing what content with whom.

(See a screenshot above from when I installed the new USATODAY+me app today. If you’re already connected to Facebook through an older version of a participating app, next time you use it, you’ll be asked to re-approve its sharing settings.)

Before and at the launch event, I spoke to a bunch of the partners. Here are the new implementations I found most interesting.

User rewards: Facebook and other sites seem only to take, take, take your data. Fab.com will actually pay users for opting in to share their purchase activity. For the first five months, Fab users who opt into the Facebook social shopping integration will get $10 of credits per month.

Handling purchases: Another interesting thing Fab is doing is automatically hiding when users purchase an item that’s denoted as a gift or that’s an adult product. That may help avoid unhappy or unwanted sharing incidents, like that time back in 2007 when Facebook’s ill-fated Beacon product broadcast a guy’s purchase of an engagement ring on Overstock.com to his Facebook wall.

In fact, another e-commerce partner, Payvment, told me it has decided to avoid sharing when users buy things. Instead, it will focus on less controversial fare like helping users create wish lists and polls.

Mashups: Ticketmaster is doing all the normal stuff you’d expect to help users share with each other when they buy tickets to events. But it’s also the only partner that I saw mashing up multiple Open Graph applications.

If you listen to music on an Open Graph application like Spotify, Ticketmaster automatically detects (with your permission) and tells you when those artists are next playing in your town. Usually these apps depend on which artists you “Like” or explicitly follow. It seems smart to use real, dynamic listening data to figure this out.

Map and graph views: This is a bit of a tease because Facebook hasn’t enabled it yet, but apps like Foodspotting (users upload pictures of food) and Kobo (an e-book reader) told me about some neat visualizations they’d do with aggregate data in users’ Facebook Timelines. For instance, Foodspotting will show on a map all the food you’ve recorded, and Kobo will make pretty charts and timelines of your reading activity.

Right now, apps are mainly allowed to post simple activity records in users’ Timelines, plus they can compile monthly and yearly reports that are basically just pictures with captions. Kinda boring.

Some of the other applications participating in the launch tonight included RockMelt, TripAdvisor, Polyvore, Rotten Tomatoes, Pinterest, LivingSocial and Zynga’s Words With Friends and CastleVille.

Also, starting now, Facebook said it will will approve new Open Graph apps and Actions on a rolling basis.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Critics suggest that using a credit card at the register is not much harder than using a phone enabled with near field communication. But if you are having a hard time understanding, maybe it’s because you are getting too old (sorry if I’m the one breaking it to you).

In an interview, David Messenger, American Express’s head of online and mobile, tells me they have identified a major pain point among teens and others who are still using cash and checks to conduct a majority of their transactions.

Dozens of companies are rushing into the space, including eBay-owned PayPal, American Express, Google, Visa, Mastercard and start-ups, too, like Square and others, but it’s not clear how quickly consumers will find reasons to use new payment technologies.

“The key thing that we’ve found resonates is the social aspects,” Messenger said. “This is about new growth opportunities and people who use cash and checks. … It’s the social experiences that don’t have great solutions. It’s awkward.”

Messenger also sat on panel yesterday at Mobile Future Forward in Seattle to discuss the topic with other executives from Google, Walmart, T-Mobile USA and OpenMarket.

The conversation got heated when a woman raised her hand to say she didn’t understand why she would ever adopt mobile payments: Seriously, how could a phone be easier than swiping a card?

Walmart’s SVP of online and mobile, Gibu Thomas, explained that the discount retail conglomerate would never pressure users to adopt it, while T-Mobile Chief Strategy Officer Peter Ewens defended the technology by saying that it improved security.

But Messenger said in an interview to me that the bigger opportunity is in the international markets, and for now it’s focused on teenagers in North America, who struggle in social settings.

He said the benefits are obvious when splitting a check at a restaurant, divvying up rent and utilities among five roommates every month, or being the person who fronts the money to buy tickets to a concert for a group of 10. Those transactions today are largely conducted with cash and checks.

Earlier this year, American Express unveiled a new business called Serve that competes with PayPal and other emerging payment platforms. It lets consumers make purchases at retail, withdraw cash from ATMs and make person-to-person payments from their computer or their phone.

Serve recently inked a deal with Ticketmaster to be integrated into the check-out process. People frequently abandon the purchase at the check-out in fear that their friends won’t repay them the hundreds of dollars owed for a concert or sports event.

Once Serve is integrated, he said, Ticketmaster will hold the tickets for a certain period of time and send an email to friends, alerting them to pay directly for the ticket. At that point, it’s simple: If they don’t pay, they won’t go.

American Express is also experimenting with using social networks by creating a Facebook application called “Pay Me Fool,” which uses humor as a way to make it more comfortable for someone to bug a friend to pay them back for beers last weekend.

For now, Serve mostly works as a prepaid card, but in the future, the platform could be used in conjunction with NFC or other emerging technologies. Messenger said they aren’t ruling anything out and are trying to be as open as possible.

The card can even be topped off with a Visa or Mastercard.

But right now, Messenger and the other participants on yesterday’s panel agreed on one thing: NFC is still about three years away from hitting the mainstream. It will take a while for users to get NFC-enabled phones and for retailers to have NFC-enabled payment terminals.

“NFC gets a disproportionate amount of attention,” said Messenger, who attributed the fixation to our “gadget-driven culture.”

A look into his wallet suggests how far the industry is from any major changes. Messenger’s thick leather wallet contained cash, a Connecticut driver’s license, 10 loyalty cards and five credit cards, including two from American Express, one from Serve and two from Mastercard.

However, I’ve found that asking mobile payment executives what is in their wallet is far from a window into the future.

Messenger said most importantly, the prepaid product addresses a whole new segment of the population that its corporate-heavy image would not normally attract. He hopes new types of commerce models will flip its business upside down.

For example, today, Amex markets heavily to acquire new customers and then keeps existing users happy by offering them rewards. He suggests that Serve will make it much easier to acquire new customers because of partnerships, such as the deal with Ticketmaster or another deal it has with Verizon Wireless. From there, he said, they will have to keep giving Serve users reasons to come back.

[image via if-youcantsleep.tumblr.com]

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.

Lockerz’s CEO Kathy Savitt said so far $36 million has been raised, but that the total amount should be final in the next 60 days.

The led investor is DAG Ventures, with Lockerz’s previous investors, Liberty Media and Liberty’s CEO, Greg Maffei, as well as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers also participating.

New to the round is Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster. Already, Live Nation has started to work with Lockerz to sell concert tickets for Britney Spears, Rihanna, Blink-182 and others. Members of the Lockerz community can use points they earn to get discounts on those tickets.

Savitt, who started the company in 2009, said it has started to see some significant traction, clocking 46 million unique users a month, who spend an average of 17 minutes on the site, and with most of the users falling between the ages of 13 and 35.

With the round of funding, Savitt said they will be expanding the number of places users can redeem their points, making them more valuable. To date, they’ve only been used in Lockerz’s own shop, but going forward, she said, they can be used for concert tickets, like with Live Nation, but also in restaurants and retailers.

“The whole notion of points is to be a social loyalty currency that would reward engagement in a meaningful way. The first phase offered a limited number of prizes, and then discounts on merchandise, and now we are taking that next step to make it a true global currency, by making them redeemable all over — on Lockerz and off of Lockerz,” Savitt said. “We have a lot coming in the next 60 to 90 days.”

Members of Lockerz can earn points, technically called PTZ, in more than 10 ways, including uploading photos, answering polls, watching videos, listening to music, inviting friends, or just logging in. More information on how Lockerz works and its target demographic of Gen Z can be found in this interview with Savitt from February.

The money will also go toward future acquisitions. Earlier this year it acquired Plixi, a photo-sharing site, and more recently purchased AddToAny, a content sharing site, which will ultimately become Lockerz Share. Savitt said they have a third acquisition coming in the next few weeks in the social content space.

The company has about 65 employees, and previously raised $30 million in capital.

The announcement is being made today at the D Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., before Groupon CEO Andrew Mason gets on stage.

“Groupon Getaways with Expedia” will work similarly to the daily emails sent by Groupon today, but instead of offers for spas, restaurants and other local services, consumers can buy vouchers for airline tickets, car rentals, cruises and other activities.

Travelers can sign up for the emails starting today at Expedia.com or Groupon.com/getaways, and the service is expected to launch in late June.

“Travel is a very popular category on our normal site, and Expedia is the biggest and best brand in travel. The partnership made a ton of sense,” Mason said.

Together, the two will leverage their combined sales forces to find travel deals across the U.S. Initially, it will offer discounts on hotels and expand to other segments, like air and cars, as well as internationally.

Scott Durchslag, Expedia’s president, said the partnership with Groupon will allow them to serve a new customer segment. Expedia customers typically know when and where they want to go on a trip. ”This is spontaneous travel. You get the best offer you can find and then you can choose when you want to go,” he said.

The partnership model is one that Groupon is using to expand into new categories.

In May, Groupon announced a joint venture with Live Nation’s Ticketmaster, which allows it to expand its group-buying model to concerts, sports, theater productions and other live events across North America. That partnership is expected to launch later this summer.

Mason said the daily deals business model stays the same with partnerships, except that the margins will be lower. The merchant still receives about half of what the consumer pays, but the other half will be split between Expedia and Groupon (specific terms were not disclosed).

Together, the two will be able to market to about 50 million people with their combined email subscriber lists in the U.S.

Groupon and Expedia are entering a crowded market full of discount travel sites, ranging from Groupon’s next-nearest competitor LivingSocial’s own branded Escapes business to other companies, such as Gilt Groupe’s Jetsetter and even Overstock.com.

The two believe the value they are offering is in the fine print and by making it as straightforward as possible. For example, once a customer purchases a voucher, they will be able to redeem it over the next year based on availability, and that they’ll do their best to avoid the dreaded blackout travel dates.

Here’s an illustrative video with Mason and Durchslag:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110601/exclusive-groupon-books-travel-plans-through-expedia-partnership/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110518/thats-the-ticket-eventbrite-scores-50-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20110518/thats-the-ticket-eventbrite-scores-50-million/#comments Wed, 18 May 2011 17:48:38 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=63136 This year, Ticketmaster, the world’s largest concert promoter, will put on some 20,000 live shows–each one attended by folks carping about the asinine “convenience,” “facility,” “order processing” and “print-at-home” fees the company typically tacks on to ticket purchases. Fascinating how quickly a $35 show can become a $60 one, isn’t it?

So it’s nice to see some of the company’s upstart rivals racking up new funding with which to steal some of its business.

The latest to do so is online ticketing start-up Eventbrite, which raised $50 million in new financing this week. Led by Tiger Global, the Series E round brings the total funds raised by Eventbrite to nearly $80 million since its founding in 2006. And as it’s done in the past, the company will use the new cash to build out its infrastructure and further globalize its operations. “We’re looking at ways to move faster and expand faster,” CEO Kevin Hartz told the New York Times.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110518/thats-the-ticket-eventbrite-scores-50-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110509/groupon-brings-group-buying-concept-to-concert-goers-with-ticketmaster-partnership/ http://allthingsd.com/20110509/groupon-brings-group-buying-concept-to-concert-goers-with-ticketmaster-partnership/#comments Mon, 09 May 2011 17:10:15 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=5243 Groupon users will soon have access to limited-time deals on a variety of concerts, sports, theater productions and other live events across North America through a joint venture with Live Nation Entertainment–in other words, with the top dog of them all: Ticketmaster.com.

The site is anticipated to go live by the summer concert season at GrouponLive.

It’s becoming common for group-buying sites, like Groupon and LivingSocial, to enter new niches. This, however, marks one of the most high-profile launches for Groupon, which has been fairly discreet about entering new markets. Additionally, getting access to Live Nation’s calendar of events and its marketing machine will be a huge boost to the company’s two-and-a-half-year-old brand.

The companies explained in a press release that GrouponLive will serve as “a local resource” for Live Nation events and Ticketmaster. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. “With unprecedented access to Live Nation’s expansive roster of performers and events, GrouponLive will be the destination for exclusive live event deals,” said Groupon’s founder and CEO Andrew Mason.

Groupon’s closest competitor, LivingSocial, has been a little more methodical about new specialties. It has already launched a travel vertical and an adventures vertical, which sells one-off experiences, such as cocktail mixing classes or trips to a shooting range.

In an interview, Doug Miller, who heads up new business initiatives for LivingSocial, said next on the agenda was something in the live entertainment space, leveraging his time with none other than Ticketmaster.com. “You can only imagine what we can do when we are the producer, and we have a massive marketing channel of 26 million people,” he said.

Besides LivingSocial, Gilt Groupe, which announced this morning that it raised $138 million, has also been testing the market for live events through its Gilt City daily deals brand, which is live in only six markets.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110509/groupon-brings-group-buying-concept-to-concert-goers-with-ticketmaster-partnership/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110419/ticketfly-raises-another-12-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20110419/ticketfly-raises-another-12-million/#comments Tue, 19 Apr 2011 15:09:44 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=31938 TicketFly, the live event start-up that wants to take a piece of the market dominated by LiveNation’s Ticketmaster, has raised $12 million in a round led by Mohr Davidow Ventures. The company, which had previously raised $3 million, helps small venues run their own ticketing operations on the Web, and plays up its Facebook and Twitter hooks.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110419/ticketfly-raises-another-12-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110418/livingsocials-head-of-new-business-initiatives-dishes-on-whats-next-for-daily-deals/ http://allthingsd.com/20110418/livingsocials-head-of-new-business-initiatives-dishes-on-whats-next-for-daily-deals/#comments Mon, 18 Apr 2011 11:30:26 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=4555 On a recent vacation, Doug Miller hiked in the dark to the top of a volcano on Hawaii’s Oahu island to see the sunrise.

For his full-time job, Miller is the vice president of new business initiatives at LivingSocial, where he’s all about trying to replicate those kinds of experiences for others.

Under his close watch, he’s helped to expand the daily-deals company into two new niches, broadening its scope from restaurants and spas into vacations and activities.

LivingSocial Escapes offers weekly discounts on vacations in the U.S. and around the world. And then there’s LivingSocial Adventures, which came about from the company’s acquisition of Urban Escapes.

Recent offers range from a bed and breakfast in New York to a Vancouver Island retreat–complete with a seven-course dinner–to a five-night tour in Panama that takes you to two different resorts. LivingSocial Adventures, which has launched in 30 markets, offers deals on such activities as a mixology class, where you learn how to whip up various cocktails, to an experience called Shootin’ and Drinkin’, which features a trip to the shooting range followed by drinks (and not in the reverse order).

To be sure, LivingSocial is not the only one trying to sell vacations at a discount. Other group-sales sites have rolled out ambitious plans.

Gilt Groupe has its high-end travel site called JetSetter, which offers very high-end offers for affluent young professionals. More recently, Exclusively.In, a site focused on selling India-inspired clothing, has branched into selling exotic trips to Asia. On the lower end, Overstock has launched a travel site, which offers discounted hotel rooms to a couple dozen locations.

Miller has an ideal background for the job. He most recently spent eight years as a VP at Expedia and had earlier stints at both Ticketmaster.com and Citysearch.

I sat down with Miller, who joined the company in August and commutes between his home in Seattle and the company’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., to discuss how LivingSocial is changing travel and what he might be investing in next. A big part of his job will be to explore new areas that fit in well, and help maintain the company’s crazy growth rates.

Miller also discussed the importance of social media and how he believes it is important for us all to unplug once in awhile (after, presumably, buying an $1,800 trip to Panama).

I caught up with him at LivingSocial’s Seattle offices, coincidentally on the same day that the Justice Department approved the merger between Google and ITA Software.

Here’s an edited version of our conversation:

On the subject of whether social networking is making us less social:

“What I love about LivingSocial is that it harnesses social media and encourages us to get out and travel and experience life in some new way, including dinner, spas, or go-karting. We sold 5,000 vouchers for sky-diving.”

What they are doing is true social commerce because they help people get out into the world and experience new things. It’s not about Facebook all of the time. ”I’m optimistic that Millennials will take control of the tool and won’t let themselves be controlled by the machine. We need to wrestle back control from devices and not the opposite.”

“I am therefore I update,” vs. “I update therefore I am.”

On being a tour operator:

There’s a natural intersection between daily deals and travel, or what he calls “near-cations,” which are trips within two to three hours away.

“There’s not a great platform on the Web today. LivingSocial Escapes is a weekly collection of offers across the country and world. In the first five months, we booked 200,000 room nights for 200 properties, or roughly 1,000 room nights per property. In some cases that equaled to 25 percent of a destination’s annual occupancy.”

On offering a point of view:

Miller says their approach is “approachable sophistication.” They don’t just offer a discounted room. They are packages and experiences he calls “weekend in a box.” That means a hotel room plus cooking classes, or a hotel room and tickets to a water park for the whole family.

On whether it competes with his previous employer, Expedia:

“That would be very egotistical for me to think I will disrupt a $20 billion business. We are in very different spaces. We are trying to inspire and speak to you about something you didn’t know you wanted. Expedia reacts to demand with dates and an origin and destination. I’m upstream. You see a deal to Mendocino, and all of the sudden I say, ‘I want to go to Mendocino, but I didn’t know I wanted to go’.”

On storytelling:

Miller said he’s in the storytelling business.

Expedia and Ticketmaster were revolutionary because they gave consumers access to information that had never before been transparent (it used to be you went to a ticket vendor or a travel agent). What he thinks LivingSocial is doing is turning a very logical and rational experience you find online into a very emotional experience, full of rich imagery and well-crafted explanations that sell a destination.

“Google is responding to a query, whereas I’m pitching something to you that you didn’t know you wanted. That’s different from the OTAs and Google’s of the world.”

On lessons learned in local commerce between his days at Citysearch and now:

He said CitySearch represented the first platform that aggregated local commerce information, which had been very fragmented. “But the market wasn’t ready and our model was wrong. I also think the rise of social media is important.”

First came Escapes, second came Adventures, what’s next?

Miller declined to say, but hinted that “there’s an opportunity in live entertainment,” which would leverage his time spent at TicketMaster. “You can only imagine what we can do when we are the producer, and we have a massive marketing channel of 26 million people.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110418/livingsocials-head-of-new-business-initiatives-dishes-on-whats-next-for-daily-deals/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110203/promoter-crowds-ticketmaster/ http://allthingsd.com/20110203/promoter-crowds-ticketmaster/#comments Thu, 03 Feb 2011 22:28:03 +0000 Ethan Smith http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=35894 One of the nation’s biggest concert and sports promoters said it is joining forces with a start-up technology company to sell tickets to events at 105 arenas and theaters, in what could become a broader battle with Live Nation Entertainment Inc.’s Ticketmaster.

The promoter, Anschutz Entertainment Group, had been expected to distance itself from Ticketmaster since early last year, when the Justice Department approved the ticketing giant’s merger with Live Nation Inc., AEG’s only larger rival in concert promotion.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110203/promoter-crowds-ticketmaster/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100512/ticketfly-rounds-up-3-million-to-fight-ticketmaster/ http://allthingsd.com/20100512/ticketfly-rounds-up-3-million-to-fight-ticketmaster/#comments Wed, 12 May 2010 15:30:10 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19346 Average concertgoers go to two shows a year, and there’s a very good chance some of the money they spend on those shows goes to Ticketmaster, which dominates the ticketing business.

So here’s a company that wants a piece of that: TicketFly, a New York-based start-up that just raised a $2 million Series A round led by High Peaks Venture Partners and Contour Venture Partners. The company had previously raised $1 million in convertible debt last year, via angels Howard Lindzon and Roger Ehrenberg, among others.

If TicketFly works, there’s a good chance you won’t ever know about it, because it’s a B2B business: Consumers fund the operation via surcharges on their tickets, but the real customers are the concert venues, which strike exclusive deals with ticketing companies.

So most of the features are designed with the venues and promoters in mind. TicketFly says it can help with Web site design and management, promoting shows on Twitter and Facebook, tracking sales data in real time, etc.

All of this sounds like fairly straightforward stuff, but the ticketing business is an old, archaic one. And Ticketmaster, the industry’s eight million-pound gorilla, now owned by Live Nation (LYV), is particularly slow-moving when it comes to all things tech. So some of this really will feel fresh for the concert guys.

More interesting are TicketFly’s plans, which involve giving venues the chance to sell tickets using the same dynamic pricing/yield management techniques hotels and airlines use: That is, prices for hot shows may shoot up, and if you want to see a band no one else wants to see, you may end up paying very little.

TicketFly has about 50 venues signed up so far, and most are fairly intimate places like Maxwell’s in Hoboken, N.J., or the Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis–the kinds of of places where you could see Nirvana before Nirvana became Nirvana.

They’re also the kinds of places that used be served by TicketWeb, another Web-based upstart that Ticketmaster acquired a few years back. No coincidence: TicketFly co-founder Andrew Dreskin used to run that company.

Here’s a little wayback machine: Nirvana at Maxwell’s in 1989. Audio and video quality is about as rough as you’d imagine:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100512/ticketfly-rounds-up-3-million-to-fight-ticketmaster/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100216/almost-famous-julia-hartz-of-eventbrite/ http://allthingsd.com/20100216/almost-famous-julia-hartz-of-eventbrite/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:50:05 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=21190 A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We got all-access passes to Skype for an interview with Julia Hartz, co-founder and president of Eventbrite, the four-year-old Web-based ticketing service aiming to unseat the big guys.

Using the Eventbrite Web interface, organizers can set up ticket sales and publicize their events using social media tools. It’s a labor of love, too, as Julia shares the big office with co-founder and husband Kevin.

Who: Julia Hartz

What: President and co-founder

Why: Hartz said Eventbrite has cracked the code on merging business and the social graph. It enables event organizers to publish events online and sell tickets, then publish the events to Facebook. And if your event is free, so are Eventbrite services. Julia says it is democratizing the ticketing industry, but it can’t all be free. Eventbrite saw $100 million in ticket sales in 2009.

Where: eventbrite.com (Web site); @eventbrite (Twitter); San Francisco, Calif. (analog place)

Who else: Eventbrite services put it in competition with most of the ticket-selling world, especially Ticketmaster, which is now owned by Live Nation (LYV). But Hartz said most of the people using Eventbrite for the first time are switching from using spreadsheets.

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Five Stats You Won’t Find in Her Facebook Profile

Worst Job Ever: I was an intern on the set of “Friends.” It was this awful experience taking place in this wondrous environment. There was a serious level of paranoia there. And basically, my job was to hold a phone and anytime it rang, I had to go find that person on the set. My second worst job was as a barista at The Ugly Mug in Santa Cruz. I would drink like three mochas and eat some pastries during my shift and then be depressed for the rest of the day.

Her Big Event of 2010: I’m really looking forward to Chirp, the upcoming Twitter conference. That and maybe F8, the Facebook conference.

Gadget of the Moment: My new iPad…just kidding. I guess just my Apple (AAPL) iPhone. We’re kind of a gadget family. Our two-year-old has a Pleo, because we can’t get a puppy in our place.

Wants to Be When She Grows Up: I want to be a great mom.

Fails At: Being a working mom and running the start-up. I feel like I’m never doing 100 percent in either. I feel 80 percent in everything. Kevin would say I fail at taking big risks–stuff like skydiving or petting a spider at the children’s museum.

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Bio in 140 Characters

Hartz grew up in Santa Cruz. She went to Pepperdine for a degree in being a TV exec. She was at MTV, FX, then left for the start-up world.

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The Five Questions

You started Eventbrite in 2006–why this and why then?

Well, I’ll just be honest; it had a lot to do with logistics. I’d just moved up here and Kevin and I had just gotten engaged. I was about to go to Current TV and didn’t know if that was the right move. We got to talking about all the events we heard about after the fact, and all the event “postcards” we got on our car windshields. There was little to no innovation in the events market. Unless you were using Ticketmaster, you really had no access to tools and technology that could help you as a smaller events planner. Also, Kevin was very close to PayPal, so we were looking at what we could do based on the PayPal API. The transaction is where it began.

So, you and Kevin have sort of made Eventbrite your baby. How does being a start-up couple change things?

Well, in working with somebody you know quite well, we sort of divide and conquer. We sort of have our own areas of the business that we strive to excel in, and we try to support each other. We received some really great advice early on from Michael and Xochi Birch, who co-founded Bebo. When we asked them how they worked together, they said divide and conquer–don’t work on anything together. That’s sorta what we do. And we do really well on a day-to-day basis. But if you get us behind the same spreadsheet, we’ll definitely be fighting for the mouse.

What sorts of mistakes have you guys made doing this?

I think we’ve been pretty good on avoiding most big mistakes, but I do think we’ve been too focused on making decisions around customer reactions…that sounds a little weird. Let me give you an example. So, we were a free service early on, then we were freemium. The problem was that our basic service was so robust that our premium service was only a little better. We were toying with the idea of going all paid for too long. When we finally bit the bullet and did it, we had very little decrease in use. We think it’s because event organizers don’t have to make an additional choice now about which service to use. The cost just scales with the ticket price. We just took too long to make the decision, I think.

You guys are building a pretty interesting picture of who attends what events. Are you planning to tread further into the social graph and begin recommending events to people based on past attendance?

Yes. We see that to be something that’s very exciting, but we want to do it in the right way. Hyper-relevancy is key to us, so, um, I can’t say how we’ll do it, but when we do it, we’ll definitely take into account what’s out there right now and try to innovate on that. I’d say that will happen in the broad window of the next two years.

What are your major moves going to be in 2010?

How about this? How about the fact that in five years, Eventbrite will be the only place that you will ever go to buy a ticket for any event that you would ever attend. I truly believe that, and I can actually see how we’ll get there. We are a smaller business and can move quite quickly. We don’t have a bullseye in your office with the Ticketmaster logo in the middle. We aren’t a Ticketmaster killer, but we see our model as becoming the status quo for all ticketing.

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The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100216/almost-famous-julia-hartz-of-eventbrite/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100125/ticketmaster-live-nation-merger-gets-conditional-thumbs-up-from-doj-plus-d7-video-with-ceo-azoff/ http://allthingsd.com/20100125/ticketmaster-live-nation-merger-gets-conditional-thumbs-up-from-doj-plus-d7-video-with-ceo-azoff/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:46:31 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=23474

While many thought it would not sail through regulatory scrutiny easily, and it has taken a year, the merger of two entertainment industry giants–Ticketmaster and Live Nation–can go forward as long as a certain set of conditions is met, the Department of Justice said.

And while DOJ’s antitrust head, Christine Varney, told reporters today that she warned the two companies that the federal government was prepared to litigate if necessary, it–well–did not.

“We concluded the transaction as originally proposed was anti-competitive,” said Varney, a statement that was pretty much negated by her decision not to block the merger, given that the conditions she set were not a stretch for the parties to meet.

Still, Varney noted: “The proposed settlement allows for strong competitors to Ticketmaster, allowing concert venues to have more and better choices for their ticketing needs, and provides for anti-retaliation provisions, which will keep the merged company in check.”

We shall see about that–many are expecting even higher ticket prices and “fees.”

The companies also reached an agreement with 17 State Attorneys General as part of the U.S. consent decree, as well as with the Canadian Commissioner of Competition.

Not surprisingly, shares of both West Hollywood-based Ticketmaster (TKTM) and Live Nation (LYV) of Beverly Hills, Calif., were up about 15 percent today, even though the deal still has to undergo public comment and be approved by a judge.

But after today, Ticketmaster investors will get Live Nation stock, valued at $15.49, and with its ticker retired, Ticketmaster shares will no longer trade.

Now the combined company will be able to do everything from selling tickets to booking artists to selling their T-shirts and more.

And all Live Nation and Ticketmaster have to do to operate like this is sell off a college sports ticketing unit to Comcast (CMCSA) and license ticketing software to Live Nation’s nearest competitor, the Anschutz Entertainment Group.

Also, for a decade, the merged company cannot play dirty, blackballing those who decide they don’t want to use its services.

With 75 big venues across the U.S. under the purview of Live Nation, that’s a lot of places the world’s largest concert promoter could apply pressure.

And because Ticketmaster is the dominant player in ticketing for sports and entertainment events, as well as the manager of a spate of major acts that play at those Live Nation venues, it’s clear you have a very powerful entity.

It will all be led, in part, by Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff, who can be seen below in an interview with BoomTown at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference last May.

One of the most influential behind-the-scenes movers and shakers in the music industry for a long time now, Azoff talked about with me about the merger and digital forces buffeting the entertainment business.

Azoff will be the executive chairman of the merged company, which will be called Live Nation Entertainment, as well as CEO of Front Line artist management. Longtime Hollywood and Internet mogul Barry Diller is set to be chairman, and Michael Rapino will be CEO and president.

Here’s the video of the D7 interview, including the very funny intro that music legend Joe Walsh of the Eagles did for Azoff (and below it, a video of a terrific version of “Life’s Been Good,” sung by Walsh, which it certainly is today for Ticketmaster-Live Nation):

And here’s the press release from Live Nation and Ticketmaster:

LOS ANGELES and WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Jan 25, 2010–Live Nation, Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc. today announced that they have reached agreements with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and with the Canadian Commissioner of Competition, clearing the way for the merger of the companies. Upon closing, the company will be renamed Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. to reflect the combination of Live Nation’s concert promotions expertise with Ticketmaster’s world-class ticketing solutions and artist relationships.

Under the terms of the proposed final judgment filed today in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the companies have agreed to divest Ticketmaster’s self-ticketing subsidiary, Paciolan, to Comcast-Spectacor and to license the Ticketmaster Host technology to Anschutz Entertainment Group, Inc., as well as to other terms that protect competitive conditions in ticketing and promotions. Seventeen State Attorneys General also participated in the matter and have joined in the U.S. consent decree. The parties’ consent agreement with the Canadian Commissioner of Competition is on substantially equivalent terms.

As previously announced, in connection with the merger, each issued and outstanding share of Ticketmaster common stock will be cancelled and converted into the right to receive a number of shares of Live Nation common stock such that Ticketmaster stockholders will receive approximately 50.01% of the voting power of the combined company. Subject to final confirmation, the companies expect each share of Ticketmaster common stock to be cancelled and converted into the right to receive 1.474 shares of Live Nation common stock in connection with the merger and for Live Nation to issue approximately 84,613,661 shares of Live Nation common stock to Ticketmaster stockholders in the aggregate.

The combined company will be led by Michael Rapino as CEO and President of Live Nation Entertainment and Irving Azoff as Executive Chairman of Live Nation Entertainment and CEO of Front Line. Barry Diller will serve as Chairman of the Board of Live Nation Entertainment. The Board will consist of 14 directors, seven from each company.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100125/ticketmaster-live-nation-merger-gets-conditional-thumbs-up-from-doj-plus-d7-video-with-ceo-azoff/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20091109/live-nation-sees-ticketmaster-deal-closing-in-q1/ http://allthingsd.com/20091109/live-nation-sees-ticketmaster-deal-closing-in-q1/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:34:23 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=17614 Live Nation (LYV) today said it expects the acquisition of the company by Ticketmaster (TKTM) to close in the first quarter of next year. Meanwhile, both companies today posted solid results for the third quarter.

Live Nation posted Q3 revenue of $1.81 billion, up from $1.59 billion a year ago, and ahead of the Street consensus at $1.62 billion. The company said the 14 percent increase in revenue was driven by a 12 percent increase in event attendance. Adjusted operating income of 160.8 million was up sharply from $109.5 million; free cash flow of $123.2 million was nearly double the $64.4 million reported for the year-ago quarter.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091109/live-nation-sees-ticketmaster-deal-closing-in-q1/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090612/ticketmaster-ceo-irving-azoff-the-full-d7-session/ http://allthingsd.com/20090612/ticketmaster-ceo-irving-azoff-the-full-d7-session/#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:42:46 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://d7.allthingsd.com/?p=2202

Today, the full sessions of the seventh D: All Things Digital conference get rocking–literally–by posting Kara’s onstage interview with music powerhouse and Ticketmaster (TKTM) CEO Irving Azoff.

Here’s the video of the D7 interview (including the very funny intro that music legend Joe Walsh did for Azoff) :

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090612/ticketmaster-ceo-irving-azoff-the-full-d7-session/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090612/ticketmaster-ceo-irving-azoff-the-full-d7-interview/ http://allthingsd.com/20090612/ticketmaster-ceo-irving-azoff-the-full-d7-interview/#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:23:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=14443

Today, the full sessions of the seventh D: All Things Digital conference get rocking–literally–by posting my onstage interview with music powerhouse and Ticketmaster (TKTM) CEO Irving Azoff.

One of the most important behind-the-scenes movers and shakers in the industry, Azoff is now running the world’s biggest entertainment ticketing company while still heading one of the largest music management companies. He is also personal manager for the Eagles and many others.

He and I talked about all this and more, focusing on the digital forces buffeting the music business.

Here’s the video of the D7 interview (including the very funny intro that music legend Joe Walsh did for Azoff) :

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090612/ticketmaster-ceo-irving-azoff-the-full-d7-interview/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090611/ticket-resales-thriving-in-recession-stubhub-says/ http://allthingsd.com/20090611/ticket-resales-thriving-in-recession-stubhub-says/#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:03:47 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=12583 The ticket-reseller market is going strong despite lower selling prices and new challenges from primary sellers, such as Ticketmaster’s (TKTM) paperless initiative, says StubHub.

Though the average price of a ticket on eBay (EBAY)-owned StubHub fell to $102 in 2008 from $112 in 2007, it began seeing gains in transaction volume and sales late in the year. Its first-quarter ticket sales rose 16 percent, while transaction volume climbed 26 percent, and StubHub President Chris Tsakalakis said it expects even stronger results in the second quarter.

“We see that, despite prices coming down, that we’re able to more than offset that with an increase in transaction volume,” he said.

StubHub sold more than 9,000 tickets to this year’s Bowl Championship Series, compared with about 3,500 last year, for example.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090611/ticket-resales-thriving-in-recession-stubhub-says/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090527/d7-ticketmaster-entertainment-ceo-irving-azoff/ http://allthingsd.com/20090527/d7-ticketmaster-entertainment-ceo-irving-azoff/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 17:01:25 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://d7.allthingsd.com/?p=856 Irving Azoff hopes to pull off the deal of a lifetime by merging Ticketmaster Entertainment (TKTM) and Live Nation (LYV)–in effect, covering both ends of the live music spectrum. In order to do so, he has to convince Washington D.C and face a range of skeptics that includes Bruce Springsteen. He takes the stage with Kara Swisher to talk about the company and the future of the music business.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090527/d7-ticketmaster-entertainment-ceo-irving-azoff/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090527/joe-walsh-introduces-irving-azoff-at-d7/ http://allthingsd.com/20090527/joe-walsh-introduces-irving-azoff-at-d7/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 16:30:59 +0000 Adam Tow http://d7.allthingsd.com/?p=1182 Former Eagles band member, Joe Walsh, introduces Ticketmaster Entertainment CEO Irving Azoff to the stage at the D7 Conference.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090527/joe-walsh-introduces-irving-azoff-at-d7/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090415/will-ebay-dump-stubhub-too/ http://allthingsd.com/20090415/will-ebay-dump-stubhub-too/#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:33:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6293 Now that eBay has sloughed off StumbleUpon and made plans to dump Skype, theoretically via an IPO, will it drop StubHub, too?

That’s the possibility floated, albeit in an offhand way, via Bernstein Research’s Jeffrey Lindsay in a note published this morning: “We would likely expect further divestments of non-core businesses, possibly including StubHub.”

I understand why the auction site dropped StumbleUpon, a Web 2.0 publishing business with a novel and unproven revenue model. And it makes sense to stop carrying Skype, a telecom business that requires a lot of time, money and maintenance.

But Stubhub, which eBay bought for $307 million a little more than two years ago, seemed like a bona fide fit: The ticket resale business mirrors eBay’s (EBAY) core auction in pretty obvious ways. I’ve asked Lindsay to tease out his thinking for us, and will update if he does.

UPDATE: Here’s Lindsay, via email: “It seems that eBay is going right back to basics, and is dispensing with the ‘we are an auction company’ ethos that got them into so much trouble. We see StubHub as coming out of that era. We think the market in tickets is changing rapidly and there is a chance to sell StubHub at the very top. They might well take it and pursue a much more pure play retail/second hand portfolio and go back to geographic expansion of the marketplaces/PayPal core.”

Meanwhile, if eBay does decide to jettison StubHub, now would be a very interesting time to do so. TicketsNow, its primary competitor, is likely to go on the block in the near future: Parent company Ticketmaster (TKTM), which acquired the business for $265 million a year ago, has said it would dump the business in order to mollify antitrust critics (and Bruce Springsteen fans) who want to stop the company’s proposed merger with Live Nation (LYV).

Anyone want to corner the market on the ticket-scalping industry?

[Image credit: Hyrck]

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