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A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

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Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#171

Post by creativityhurts »

M_Grey wrote: post #161
brudgers wrote: post #151

When the Rolling Stones did their last tour in 1981 --those were still the days when rock and rollers hoped to die before their geriatric years and The Who would perform their Final Tour just a year later -- the tickets (at least in the US) were by mail and via lottery. Payment was with cashier's check only and only two tickets per order. [1] It would still work today. For fans with money, it would be less convenient…

Is it cool if I just sit on your lawn and listen to your interesting stories? I'll pluck weeds!

My bot already purchased all the tickets for his lawn in case you'd like to buy one.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#172

Post by ChuckMcM »

I've wondered if you could price tickets with an algorihm where they start out high and then over time or volume get cheaper and cheaper. If a scalper jumped in first they would pay a high price, later buyers could get tickets much more cheaply, if they come in later they won't have the desirable tickets which sold early.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#173

Post by ikeboy »

mattnewton wrote: post #153
ikeboy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, say there simply aren't enough teenagers to make it reach an equilibrium point on price alone. If there are scalpers, that means there are more people who want to come than seats available. If the price is, say, $50, then there's a certain number of people who would buy at $50. If that number of seats is made available, then the scalper incentive disappears. >A sold out venue of trendy twenty-something's is ca…

It makes the market for the tickets more efficient, but that isn't what the artists are optimizing for. They want to be able to sacrifice ticket revenue for exposure. Maybe they want to select their audience for hardcore fans willing to spend time on getting tickets rather than money, maybe that translates into better brand referrals because it selects more devoted fans. You're more okay with barring people over 25 a…

>Right, but this assumes that there isn't an equivalently sized population of people willing to pay more that will buy them instead. My argument is that audiences aren't interchangable and that real harm is done when you force the artist to select the audience on ability to pay alone, as you are proposing.

The set of all people willing to buy at $50 is at least as big as the set of all people willing to buy at more than $50. Demand curves slope downwards. If you supply enough to meet all demand at $50 and price at $50, then everyone who would buy at $50 does and there's no extra seats.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#174

Post by logfromblammo »

qbrass wrote: post #154
logfromblammo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Release a gratis band-themed mobile game, with user ID tied to the phone owner. In this app, allow the user to collect a free sweepstakes entry, with a 60 minute cooldown timer, to a maximum of 8 entries per calendar day. Whenever concert tickets go on sale, reserve a block on the floor from the Nth row to the back of the floor. (We all know that the spots all the way up front are for the groupies, superfans, and ric…

Buy a bunch of cheap phones, farm out or automate playing the app. Sell the winning phones for profit.

Use app activity to scale the reserved bloc of tickets. Dedicated fans still get to attend shows. The goal isn't to maximize ticket revenue, but to fill venues with a quorum of fans and sell them status-signaling merch.

You can realistically expect your real fans to buy one tee per tour. Farmer accounts will likely show maximum sweepstakes entry activity and no game-play activity until winning a lottery, then will refuse all the merch upsells and never be active again. You can just dump those user ids into the "ignore" bucket and rescale your reserved bloc so that there are still enough seats for the real fans.

In any case, why would anyone buy a transferred fan club burner phone instead of a transferable dollar-priced ticket from a scalper? Why crack the proof-of-fandom test for a single artist, when you could break the CAPTCHA for all of Ticketmaster? The hypothetical attack you imagined requires greater effort and produces less profit than if you were just a regular ticket scalper.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#175

Post by greeneggs »

1024core wrote: post #116
laurencei wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is more interesting about that statement is how did he learn that fact? Possibly some help from the inside? Or some other method...?

If they had just scraped ~205 images, they would have a > 50% chance of getting a repeat.

Indeed, by the "birthday paradox." And, by the "coupon collector's problem," the expected time to have seen all 30,000 images is about n*log(n) ~= 310,000 random images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collector's_problem

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#176

Post by kbenson »

Pigo wrote: post #86
simonsarris wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You reasoning is a pretty good example of why the median person should be very wary of anyone saying that free markets and their "efficiency" are a good thing, or will result in good outcomes for them. They will result in good outcomes for the richest, sure. We can agree to that. You are conflating die-hard fans with die-hard wealthy fans which is a little silly. Not all fans have the same marginal value of pocket ch…

However justifiable it might be, this ticket gouging is the reason I haven't seen a concert in almost a decade. Maybe I'm a cheap bastard because I refuse to pay hundreds for the few decent artists I've seen on tour, but it's not that I don't have the money. The first NIN concert I went to, I only had to steer clear of certain mosh-pits. The last one I had to put up with a sea of "brighter than the stage" phones uphe…

> I do think Kid Rock's approach to sales

Kid Rock is one of the few artists to actually solve the problem (if you view it as one) of a secondary ticket market. It's a market, it responds to supply and demand. He just increases supply until demand falls. For example, he's playing Detroit for 6 consecutive days in 2017. He did similar in the past.

You'll still have some premium tickets being resold over cost, but he's neatly solved the problem of fans not being able to make it to the show by actually addressing the underlying economics.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#177

Post by kbenson »

mattnewton wrote: post #153
ikeboy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, say there simply aren't enough teenagers to make it reach an equilibrium point on price alone. If there are scalpers, that means there are more people who want to come than seats available. If the price is, say, $50, then there's a certain number of people who would buy at $50. If that number of seats is made available, then the scalper incentive disappears. >A sold out venue of trendy twenty-something's is ca…

It makes the market for the tickets more efficient, but that isn't what the artists are optimizing for. They want to be able to sacrifice ticket revenue for exposure. Maybe they want to select their audience for hardcore fans willing to spend time on getting tickets rather than money, maybe that translates into better brand referrals because it selects more devoted fans. You're more okay with barring people over 25 a…

> It makes the market for the tickets more efficient, but that isn't what the artists are optimizing for.

As soon as you are selling tickets, you no longer have full control over that. If you want to optimize your audience, you need to make allowances, and that may mean a lottery of will-call tickets or something. You don't get to make money on those tickets by selling publicly and also have the the ability to fully craft who goes. That goes out the window once you decide you want to sell publicly, and IMO that's the way it should be. That's how markets work.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#178

Post by amelius »

kamikaz1k wrote: post #74
amelius wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solution: when buying a ticket, you pay an additional amount in deposit, which you receive back when you actually arrive at the venue.

This is easily circumvented because the deposit will simply be priced into the scalped price...

But it will become much harder to hoard lots of tickets. And it will be expensive to not be able to sell them all. It guarantees that all seats (for which a ticket has been sold) are actually filled.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#179

Post by supercanuck »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #172

I've wondered if you could price tickets with an algorihm where they start out high and then over time or volume get cheaper and cheaper. If a scalper jumped in first they would pay a high price, later buyers could get tickets much more cheaply, if they come in later they won't have the desirable tickets which sold early.

How would this be in the best interest of the venue/artist who want to move tickets quickly and reduce risk? Seems like this would favor only those concerts destined to sell out or be popular.

Re: A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

#180

Post by criddell »

LordKano wrote: post #170
criddell wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let the market handle it? You mean sell to those willing to pay the most? If you are a performer, sometimes you want to sell to the biggest fans. What's the market mechanism for that?

Yes. That's how things have always been. As long as we live in a capitalist society, that's how they'll always be. The market value of a thing is not just what someone tries to sell it for, it's what someone else is willing to pay for it. There have long been mechanisms by which the most dedicated fans have access to some of the tickets for less than market rates. Call it old fashioned if you like but fan clubs or th…

Right. The market doesn't work very well except for the very simple scenario of maximizing revenue.
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