But there’s a third option emerging, where the actual teams and venues are offloading excess inventory, and instead of paying face value, customers can name their price — sort of like hotel rooms on Priceline.com.

ScoreBig.com, which launched in October 2010, is promising that winning bidders will end up getting tickets up to 60 percent off, and a minimum of 10 percent off.

“Forty percent of live event tickets go unsold nationwide,” said Peter Sinclair, the company’s VP of Marketing. “Even when they fill up the building, they are giving a lot of tickets away.”

Sinclair said this is a way for those venues or teams to move that inventory without degrading the brand. He declined to say who they work with in particular, but that the Los Angeles-based company works directly with teams in every league and ticket vendors, like TicketMob.

Today, the company is opening its site to anyone after having a long wait list. Additionally, it is launching an iPhone app called ScoreBig Daily, which offers deals on three to six of the best performances that are available that evening in your city. The free app is only availalbe for iPhone, and is only currently available in San Francisco and Los Angeles. New York will be added this summer with a national roll-out following.

Both the iPhone app and the site allow customers to name their price and choose where in the auditorium they want to sit. Plus, there are no convenience fees because all of the costs are passed on to the venue or sports team.

So far, the company has been able to maintain an inventory of roughly one million tickets at any given time on the site, and Sinclair says revenues have been growing since they started marketing. As a rough indication, Sinclair said in March they doubled the number of transactions compared to January and that April is already ahead of March.

The company has raised $20 million in two rounds from Bain Capital, U.S. Venture Partners and other individuals.

Photo Credit: Lewis Howes. 

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.

ComScore said this represented the third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth rates, which are being fueled by more Americans choosing to shop online. The number of online buyers was up 16 percent, compared to the year-ago period.

Some 70 percent of all Internet users in the U.S. made at least one purchase during the second quarter.

This quarter’s numbers shouldn’t be a big shock since Amazon surprised Wall Street by reporting a 51 percent year-over-year surge in sales, despite the second quarter typically being the slowest period of the year.

ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said almost $1 of every $10 in discretionary spending is now occurring online. “E-commerce’s benefits of convenience and lower prices continue to be the drivers of the shift,” he added.

Other highlights from the quarter:

• The top-performing categories that grew by at least 15 percent compared to 2010 were: Consumer electronics, computer hardware, software and event tickets.
• Small and mid-sized retailers continued to gain market share, with the top 25 online retailers accounting for 66.4 percent of dollars spent online, down from 67.7 percent a year ago.
• The second quarter represented the seventh consecutive quarter of positive gains year over year. The last time spending online decreased was in the third quarter of 2009.

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.

The day the mall went live, Payvment said its customers’ sales quadrupled, compared to sales when they were limited to a shopping tab on their individual fan pages.

Now, Payvment’s competitor, Adgregate Markets, which also helps brands build storefronts on Facebook, is releasing data that helps define the size of the opportunity for e-commerce on Facebook.

In a study commissioned by Adgregate and conducted with the help of Webtrends, Adgregate looked at the impact of Facebook fan pages on traditional e-commerce sites.

To be sure, the idea of social commerce is so new, it’s difficult to give too much weight to early studies like these, but because everything on the topic is unknown, it’s worth taking the data into consideration.

Generally, what Adgregate found was that Facebook was generating a ton of visits to brands’ Facebook pages, providing an opportunity to convert the traffic into sales, especially as brands see visits to their traditional web sites shrink.

The study highlighted one example. Delta Airlines recently enabled customers to book tickets directly on its Facebook page. While traffic to Delta’s site lost more than a million unique visitors over a three month period, its Facebook page gained more than a 1,000 new fans.

The study analyzed the unique visits to the websites of the Fortune 100 as well as their Facebook fan pages.

From Adgregate’s customer base, the study makes a number of conclusions:

• Following the launch of a Facebook store, wall posts generate on average 1,673 percent spikes in store traffic.

• Facebook stores on average generate a 17 percent social engagement rate (merchandise “likes” and “shares” per visitor).

• Facebook stores generated on average 5.9 pages views per visit.

• Facebook commerce conversion rates range from 2 to 4 percent, which is on par with e-Commerce websites.

• Average order value of $104 with 24 percent growth month-over-month (although this largely is dependent upon retail vertical).

The fast-growing website, which specializes in mass-emails touting daily coupons, plans to unveil a promotional tie-up with a Hollywood studio Wednesday. It is the first of many offers the site says it is planning with media companies in the coming months.

Groupon has previously served up deals for magazine and newspaper subscriptions, the Redbox movie-rental service and bundles of movie tickets, but hasn’t offered a substantial national deal for a specific movie.

Through Groupon, Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. will offer half-price, or $6, tickets to its new suspense thriller “The Lincoln Lawyer,” which hits theaters Friday. The deal goes live Wednesday at midnight and runs through late Thursday evening.

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A new feature called “Price Predictor” auto-suggests flights and prices right from the search box, according to a Bing blog post today.

As soon as you start typing “Seattle to JFK,” a menu drops down, telling you the best price, and if you should buy now because prices are going up, or if you can hold off for a better fare.

The menu drops down before you ever hit the enter key. The results are for the best flight price over the next 90 days.

Other key words that will trigger the menu include: “Fly to Chicago,” or even “Chicago Flights.” Bing will immediately recognize where you are and instantaneously display the “Price Predictor” based on your location.

To cull this price information, Bing uses ITA Software’s data.

Google is currently in the process of trying to acquire ITA for $700 million, a process that is now being reviewed by the Justice Department for its antitrust ramifications.

ITA Software maintains a database of flight information, including fare comparisons and flight schedules for many major U.S. airlines, including American and United Airlines. Companies such as Microsoft and Kayak.com, which use the data, are opposing the merger because they claim it will stifle competition.

Others, such as Expedia.com, are also opposed to the deal even though they do not rely on data from ITA. The American Antitrust Institute also recently spoke out against it, calling it a “unregulatable monopoly.”

There are two main issues. First, the companies that do rely on the data are concerned Google will not honor its contracts over the long-term, and second, they are afraid Google might become a competitor, even though it promises not to get into the business of selling tickets.

For now, Google is not even licensing data from ITA.

When conducting a similar search of “Seattle to JFK” on Google, there’s no helpful information in the drop down menu. When you hit enter, there’s a widget that lets you choose dates for your travel and where you want results from, such as Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Kayak and others.

But unlike Bing, there are no instant results on the best prices anywhere.

In a FAQ on Google’s site about the merger, it writes: “By combining ITA Software’s expertise with Google’s technology, we will be able to build new flight search tools for users that will make it easier for them to search for flights, compare flight options and prices, and get them quickly to sites where they can buy their tickets.”

A really addictive experience.

Or at least that’s the hope of YooMee Games, which is unveiling a new gaming platform today (yes, another one!) that allows developers to add features to their games, like tournament play and one-on-one challenges.

The San Francisco-based company’s founder, Prita Uppal, jokes it is the Chuck E. Cheese of the Internet because of the tickets.

It starts with players placing wagers or buying tokens for a chance to win money and tickets that can be turned in for prizes. “It’s an arcade. You buy coins and then compete with others in tournaments and get tickets based on the outcome, which can be turned into cash or prizes, based on how many tickets you have.”

Think skee ball, but with better prizes than Tootsie Rolls.

At the start, YooMee will have more than 30 games to choose from, including popular puzzle games, like Bubble Town and Cube Crasher, and word games like WordStone. Prizes include Amazon gift cards, digital cameras and other gadgets.

Uppal said the company is not a casino and people are not gambling on the site, because the games are skill-based and not based on chance. “It’s completely skill-based competition. It’s legal. All the casual games you see and play on the Web are skill games–so you can wager and compete and earn money.”

Still, the business model is complex, having to optimize winnings for the player while also distributing money back to the developer and keeping some for itself.

Users don’t have to pay to play–instead they can play for free and view ads, such as a video pre-roll. That business is doing well, and allowed the 22-employee company to reach profitability in October.

Uppal says YouMee isn’t competing against other companies that are providing developers other services, such as leaderboards, comments or rankings. Rather, it can be used in addition to those services. It also uses Facebook Connect, so friends can easily find one another from their regular social network.

Commonly, a player will be introduced to the “arcade concept,” which Uppal is also “calling social competition,” after playing one of the games. A message will appear that says something like, “If you had paid 50 cents, you would have made $10 with this score. Do you want to enter this competition?”

In founding the company, Uppal placed a few good bets of her own.

She met her first VCs on the ski-lift chair in Park City, Utah. Directly from the ski slopes, U.S. Venture Partners flew her to Silicon Valley–she was without a computer and practically still wearing her ski boots–to give a 45-minute presentation. She had a term sheet two days later.

And she found her second VC after seeing a psychic, who predicted that the letter “A” and foreign money were going to be really important. That led her to take meetings with Altos Ventures, which has roots in Asia. “I wouldn’t have ever spoken to them if it weren’t for the psychic.”

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.

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The police’s goal was to cut down on cellphone use while behind the wheel in accordance with New York law, and in light of newly released research showing that texting while driving is particularly risky. Officers gave fair warning of its planned blitz, but studies have shown that New York drivers typically ignore the law.

Thursday was no different. While the NYPD reportedly gives about 580 tickets a day for drivers who ignore the cellphone ban, on August 24, they wrote 7,432 tickets at $130 a pop.

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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]

But even though you can use these services without leaving home, many of them still require you to go to a specific Web site — one you wouldn’t necessarily visit regularly. Sites like Gazelle.com and Venjuvo.com that pay cash for old electronics (or just recycle them) aren’t exactly online destinations.

Now one of those ways to unload your stuff involves a Web site you might visit many times a day. A site that has considerable sway in the social-networking world, where over 175 million active users go to share personal stories, photos and videos with hundreds of “friends.”

That’s right, I’m talking about Facebook. Tuesday, the social-networking giant announced its new Facebook Marketplace, Facebook.com/Marketplace, an integrated application powered by Oodle, known for its work with online classified ads. Marketplace uses colorful icons to represent four actions you can take in its app: Sell It; Sell for a Cause; Give it Away; and Ask for It.

Facebook Marketplace users can pick from 12 categories of listings, as well as buy or sell items for a favorite cause.

Oodle granted me early access to the Marketplace app before it became available Tuesday. A friend of mine and I were both set up with test accounts so that we could see one another’s fake Marketplace items and interact with one another within Marketplace; hundreds of Oodle employees also were testing this. (It was fun to see what people offer for sale when they’re just pretending, like one person who offered to sell everything on a colleague’s desk when he was out.)

Facebook’s original iteration of Marketplace started back in 2007, but was geared toward services like housing and jobs. The Oodle-powered Marketplace is merchandise-centric and includes more detailed organization, deeper integration with Facebook, and ways to buy or sell things to raise money for 1.7 million causes.

It still lacks a built-in electronic payment system, such as PayPal or Discover card, for exchanges between users or donations to causes. Instead, Marketplace encourages its users to exchange money however they choose, like traditional classified ads. And that could cause some obvious problems. For instance, if an item were sold for a cause, the seller could later donate the amount via credit card after closing a listing. But there’s no guarantee that the seller will actually do this. Oodle says it will listen to feedback from the Facebook audience and will try to integrate e-payments, if preferred.

Every posted item can include a location, description, category, photo and an explanation of why it’s in the Marketplace. Each item is reviewed by Oodle’s fraud-detection program, which looks for inappropriate content and suspicious activity, and a post could take up to 30 minutes to appear online after you submit it. My posts displayed almost instantly in the Marketplace newsfeed. Users also can opt to publish their posts to their Facebook profiles.

One example of Marketplace’s newly detailed organization comes in its browsing options. The old version of Marketplace had options to browse through jobs and housing, but not specific categories of items for sale. Now, users can browse through 12 categories of specific items including “Home & Garden,” “Baby & Kid Stuff,” “Tickets” and “Musical Instruments.” Items that don’t fit into these 12 categories are put into an “Everything Else” category.

Each item in Marketplace integrates with Facebook’s familiar format, like having its own online “wall” where questions and comments appear. If you’re looking for something in Marketplace by using the “Ask for It” option, you can recruit people to help you find the item by selecting from your list of friends, which works the same way people can suggest Facebook people to friends who might know them. Glancing at an item shows the seller’s profile photo, a link to all of the person’s listings and a brief history of his or her overall Marketplace activity, such as “3 listings in the last month.”

The integration of charitable causes into Marketplace gives supporters new ways to raise money for a favorite group like the World Wildlife Fund or Habitat for Humanity International. On the Marketplace home page, causes are displayed in a right-hand panel with a daily featured cause. This Featured Cause shows who else supports it and how many items you can buy or sell to support it.

Privacy is a natural concern in online marketplaces. By default, your posted listings are visible to any Facebook member in Marketplace. Users can opt to remain anonymous — they’re listed as “Facebook user is selling a bike,” for example. In that case, the only way someone can contact that person is by posting a comment and waiting for the seller to respond.

People who aren’t members of Facebook can see your listings by browsing and searching Marketplace, but they can’t post, comment or contact users. Unlike online marketplaces or services that can be used by anyone, Marketplace requires that users be members of the site to interact with sellers, which can be a downside. Plenty of people who aren’t on Facebook might not want to join the social-networking phenomenon just to offload the old couch gathering dust in the garage.

All user notifications — messages indicated in red at the bottom right of a Facebook page — will reflect friends’ activities in the Marketplace, unless you reset the notifications of the Facebook Marketplace app to not notify you. I suggest doing this, unless you really want to know about all your friends’ activities in Marketplace.

Four color-coded icons represent activities in Marketplace and are useful when reading lists of items at a glance: A green dollar sign represents Sell It and a red heart represents Sell for a Cause, for example. And details about each cause are integrated within Marketplace.

The Oodle-powered Facebook Marketplace is straightforward and well organized, and if you’re a Facebook user, its format will be familiar. If you’re not, and you’re looking for a way to sell or give items away for a charity or otherwise, Marketplace might encourage you to join the giant social network. But its payment program could be made a lot easier with electronic options.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

Ticketmaster (TKTM) and Live Nation (LYV) formally rolled out their merger agreement today, which calls for Live Nation to buy out Ticketmaster shareholders for $575 million in stock. But the financials here are less important than the public relations: To get this deal done, the two companies are going to have to convince regulators that they come in peace and mean no harm–no matter how loudly their constituents disagree.

So far, we’ve only heard the carping about the deal, but it’s been loud, and prominent: Bruce Springsteen has weighed in. So has the New York Times. And now Congress is getting warmed up, too.

Today, argues Ticketmaster chairman Barry Diller, the companies get to start making their case, which they couldn’t do until the deal was formally announced. Now “we are going to really explain and explain and explain and make all of this clear to all our constituencies.”

Diller gave a preview of his talking points during this morning’s conference call:

Argument 1: Don’t blame us for high ticket prices–blame Madonna, or U2, or Phish.

“Ticketmaster does not set prices,” Diller said. “Live Nation does not set ticket prices. Artists set ticket prices.”

That’s true. And then Ticketmaster and Live Nation add supplementary charges, which can jack up the price by 30 percent or more. That’s standard operating procedure for all sorts of transactions–check the invoice for your last plane ticket or give your hotel bill a once-over–but it doesn’t seem to inspire the same rage as it does in concert ticket buyers.

The other problem with this argument: Live Nation is run by Irving Azoff, who is one of the sharpest dealmakers in the music business and who also runs one of the biggest management companies in the business. And since managers are now the most powerful players in the business, they’ve got a great deal to say about how their clients price concert tickets. See the problem here?

Argument 2: Don’t blame us if you can’t get tickets for that Hannah Montana show your kids are demanding. But if you do want a ticket for a sold-out show, we can help you–at a price.

This is what Bruce Springsteen was complaining about. In addition to its core business, Ticketmaster also runs “TicketsNow,” a “secondary marketplace” for tickets. The other word for that is scalping, which is now a legal and booming business on the Web.

But when a concert ticket company also sells “aftermarket” tickets, it makes people feel queasy in a way that they don’t about eBay’s (EBAY) Stubhub, which only does resale.

That feeling is exacerbated when people suspect that Ticketmaster is directing buyers away from its regular tickets and toward its marked-up TicketsNow inventory, which is what happened to Springsteen ticket buyers this month.

Diller says the Springsteen incident was a “technological glitch.” Which may well be true. But you’re going to hear about that one a lot in the coming months.

Argument 3: Whaddaya gonna do? We sell tickets. People are never going to send us thank you cards.

Diller: “This is such a sexy issue. Ticketmaster is never perceived to be on the side of the angels.”

Remember when Pearl Jam testified against Ticketmaster in Congress in the ’90s, convinced the Department of Justice to investigate the company and led a boycott against any venue that did business with them? Those were the days.

Except that Pearl Jam ended up playing small venues, the DOJ (that’s the Clinton-era DOJ, mind you) gave Ticketmaster a pass, and by the end of the decade Eddie Vedder and crew were working with Ticketmaster again.

So maybe this one goes through, too. I’ve heard from plenty of folks who hate the proposed merger (“These two companies SHOULD NEVER be allowed to merge and reproduce,” a former Live Nation employee tells me via email), but I’d love to hear someone who knows both the music business and antitrust law make a cogent defense: You can reach me directly at peter@allthingsd.com and I’ll give you an open forum.

Until then, here’s the slideshow Live Nation is using to explain the deal:

live nation dek – Get more Business Documents

[Eddie Vedder image credit: sick of goodbyes]