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Ticket Reseller War Stories

January 30, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

About three years ago I wrote about the problem of ticket resellers creating website names that approximate that of performance venues or using names that imply they are the central ticketing source for your city. At the time, my venue saw people who had bought tickets at a big mark up or for events that weren’t actually happening once a year or so. Now that I have moved to new position in a new city, I see it happening ALL THE TIME.

Perhaps one of the reasons this issue is coming to light regularly is that we changed our seating configuration about two years ago resulting in the removal of two rows and various individual seats. The resellers are selling people tickets to those non-existent seats so the problems is very evident very quickly. I just attended a meeting of colleagues around the state and many of them are reporting similar issues with ticket resellers.

Right around Christmas this year, we had a show cancel and in the process of issuing refunds, we had to tell a gentleman that we couldn’t process a refund to his credit card because it wasn’t the card that purchased the tickets–it was the ticket resller’s. He was irate to say the least, especially since he paid about triple the actual cost of the tickets. He demanded we call the company and tell them the show was cancelled since he felt, perhaps correctly, that they wouldn’t believe him.

Much to my surprise, after waiting on hold for quite some time, I was able to get the company to process a refund for him.

We include a warning in all our email newsletters encouraging people to only purchase from us–but that only reaches people who have already successfully purchased tickets from us, not those wishing to attend for the first time.

If you are running into this, there are a couple things you can do. First is to do an online search using various terms like “tickets venuename theater yourtown,” varying the order and removing your venue name and only using generic terms like theater, dance, music. See what sites come up and see what they are selling your tickets for.

Contacting them to tell them to stop probably won’t work, but at least you will be aware of what customers might be seeing. I don’t know if Google is doing a better job fighting SEO attempts by these sites, but when I ran a search before writing this post, there were far fewer reseller sites appearing as results before my venue or even on the first page than there were in December.

However, the one that did come up before us is offering tickets in rows that no longer exist to a show that sold out in October.

Something we have done is worked with our ticket vendor to disallow credit card sales from out of state ZIP codes. We are smack in the middle of a state so it isn’t a big deal. Even if you are on a border, you may be able to do this for a significant geographic region across borders. Most ticket reseller purchases we have encountered are from the West Coast or Mountain West.

Be aware though that resellers get around this by using Visa/MasterCard branded gift cards which don’t require ZIP codes.

Another thing to watch out for is people posting on your Facebook events page saying they bought tickets but can’t make the show, encouraging people to send them a direct message and they will sell them cheaply.

Generally what these people, as well as many of the reseller sites will do, is place an order with you after people have contacted them about their “extra tickets.” I would encourage you to delete these messages when you come across them. One of the big giveaways is that the Facebook account has been created in the last couple months and the person doesn’t live anywhere near you. They probably won’t have a record of purchasing tickets from you either. They may populate their page with pictures and friends connections to add some verisimilitude, but if you look carefully there are some clues.

Today we had a guy offering tickets for an event tonight that was born in Canada, apparently lives 300 miles or so away from us in Florida and is the CEO of a company in Poland.

I am sure there are much more sophisticated techniques other groups are using on larger venues where the return on investment makes it worth it, but I figure this will provide people with a general sense of what to watch out for.

Anyone got any stories or tips they want to share?

Arts Facilities, General Musings, Info You Can Use, Working In The Arts

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Your Site Has 4 3 Seconds To Load Or I Am Leaving

January 29, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

Big hat tip to Thomas Cott for linking to an article about how quickly people will abandon a webpage if it is loading slowly. The title tells pretty much everything you need to know about the problem – Slow pages hurt conversions, but marketers aren’t in a hurry to fix them. (my emphasis below)

[Unbounce] then conducted two parallel surveys of consumers and marketers to understand their respective attitudes toward page speed. Nearly 75 percent of consumers surveyed said they’d wait four or more seconds for a mobile site to load. However, Google data show that most people abandon sites after three seconds if content hasn’t loaded.

The majority of survey respondents indicated that slow-loading sites would negatively affect their willingness to buy and even return to the particular site. Surprisingly, women were more impatient than men in this regard.

Interestingly a majority of consumers said they wanted faster-loading sites even it meant giving up animations, video and images. The good news for brands and publishers is that most consumers were more inclined to blame their ISP (50.5 percent) than the site itself (34.2 percent).

Even though people were willing to blame their ISP over the site, that is no reason to think you can get by. Over 1/3 of respondents blamed the site itself. People are experienced enough to have a good sense where the blame lay.

Among the top suggestions for solving this issue are optimizing image and video size; improving caching and hosting and running speed tests.

If you are at a loss for where to even start to learn how to do these things–ArtsHacker has a whole series devoted to this. The impetus for this was anticipated slow downs due to net neutrality rulings by the FCC so there are a number of strategies in that series that you can use. You will definitely find pieces on image compression, speed tests, database optimization and minimizing the impact of page requests.

Granted, some of these procedures should not be undertaken if you are inexperienced working under the hood of your website. By the same token, if you don’t know much about how website traffic works, the articles can give you new information and a better sense of what things contribute to slow downs on your website.

Something I am curious about that is tangentially related is how quickly people will abandon a video if an ad they can’t quickly skip starts playing. This doesn’t usually impact videos embedded as performance samples in website that I have seen, but there have been a number of times I decided I wasn’t interested enough in a news piece to wait for an ad to finish. I suspect I am more patient with those ads than most so it makes me wonder about the long term viability of those ads. Especially as YouTube seems to be getting increasingly insistent in their offers to sign up for their paid service.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, Marketing/PR

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Why Do I Have To Call Dun & Bradstreet To Apply For A State Arts Grant?

January 28, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

As we move further into the new year, many grant deadlines are starting to creep up en masse upon arts organizations. As you are filling out all the mandatory fields in your grant application, you may be wondering why you have to have a DUNS (Data Universal Numbering System) number in addition to your Employer Id Number (EIN), especially since they are both the same number of digits.

You may also be wondering why a commercial data firm like Dun and Bradstreet gets to dole out these numbers, instead of a governmental entity. Well, I don’t have all the answers, but I did provide a good number of them in an ArtsHacker post on the subject a couple weeks ago.

As I write in that post,

The simple answer is that your EIN is associated with your IRS tax records and the DUNS number is associated with your business credit score.

[…]

One reason the DUNS numbers are separate from EIN is that a DUNS number is tied to a physical address. This makes sense in the commercial for-profit realm since a branch of a company in California may have better credit than one in Florida, but there aren’t many non-profits that are so large that they have a single EIN but require different DUNS numbers.

Learning that your DUNS number is associated with your credit score may be cause for concern—how many non-profits are going to have a great credit score after all?

Given that overhead ratio has been used as a measure of effectiveness for non-profits, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that someone is going to get the bright idea that credit score is a good shorthand for deciding whether a non-profit is being run well. This would be a really bad idea since the standards used to assess credit worthiness of a for-profit entity are inappropriate for non-profits.

But you know, non-profits should be run more like a business right?

In any case, if you would like to know a little more about DUNS numbers and how to get one for your organization, (or see if you already have one), check out my ArtsHacker post.

What Is A DUNS Number And Why Do I Need It?

Fundraising, Info You Can Use, Working In The Arts

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Are Audiences Ready To Directly Participate In Gamified Performances?

January 23, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

Jonathan Mandell writes about an off-off-Broadway show that has audience members to take part in the show and prepares them by sending a packet of character background information in advance. At one time, I would be skeptical about whether people would be interested in participating in this way, but the success of interactive and immersive shows like Sleep No More and The Donkey Show makes me think people might be ready for the next step of participating themselves.

Likewise, the relentlessness with which people have pursued all the possible endings in Black Mirror Bandersnatch suggests that there may be a growing interest in gamified programming.

The experience won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but we may be reaching a place where the desire to have an active experience and the ability of an arts entity to deliver it may be converging.

That said, even though it will diminish over time as a process is developed, there is a lot of time and effort that needs to be invested in the creation of shows like The Mortality Machine that Mandell writes about. The creative team invested thousands of hours in preparing the show.

Then they have to go through communicating to potential audience members what they will be expected to do. The show sends audience members

“…articles about the tragedy, obituaries of the victims, a lawyer’s letter explaining how the scene of the crime is being unsealed just for them and, most importantly, information on the characters they’ll be playing.

[…]

The Mortality Machine welcomes LARP beginners, though it may take them some time to catch on. At each performance, the 20-odd participants are given cards that include descriptions of the respective characters they’ve been assigned, and their relationships to the others. “Your name is Mars McKinsey,” one says. “You lost your fiancée Omi Johnson.” Mars knows three other characters who are also present, including Omi’s aunt and a man named Riley. Meanwhile, the character description for Riley reveals that he slept with Omi — a fact Mars is unaware of.

“A number of the characters have a secret like that,” explains Jason Knox, another Sinking Ship co-founder, who believes these complicated intertwined backstories allow audiences to have “a more emotional experience.”

[…]

“There are 13 possible endings,” Hart says. “In one, everybody dies.”

The company presenting The Mortality Machine refers to their process as LARP Theater. LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing. The term will either work against them because of the historically derisive use of the term, or they may end up redeeming the term if people are impressed with the experience.

Audience Relations, State of the Arts

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