Ticketing platform SeatGeek has signed Facebook up as a distribution partner, allowing sports fans and gig-goers to buy tickets directly through the world’s biggest social network.
Though SeatGeek is better known as an aggregator and secondary ticketing marketplace for resellers, the company announced last year that it would begin to target rightsholders with a new primary ticketing platform. However, SeatGeek Open wasn’t pitched as a destination for buying and selling tickets; rather, it offered an API for third-party companies to implement wherever they wished.
A ride-sharing company may want to sell tickets to events it regularly drives to, for example, or a record label may wish to sell to fans through its website. And a sports team may want to leverage SeatGeek to sell its own tickets through Facebook.
And this is exactly how SeatGeek’s partnership with Facebook is kicking off.
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SeatGeek + Facebook
The first company to tap this new tie-up between SeatGeek and Facebook is Sporting Kansas City, a soccer team with an average attendance of around 20,000.
SeatGeek was already an official primary ticketing partner of Major League Soccer (MLS), and by extension Sporting Kansas City, which effectively allows a club’s tickets to be sold on any website or application of a team’s choosing, providing the website or app in question is under the organizer’s direct control or in a partnership with SeatGeek. And that is basically what today’s announcement with Facebook is all about — it will allow any company that runs events to sell tickets through SeatGeek on Facebook.
Above: Sporting KC tickets on Facebook
Above: Sporting KC: Buy ticket
For Facebook, this partnership serves as yet another conduit to increase its stickiness and ensure people stay on the site. It’s similar to tie-ups Facebook previously announced with Eventbrite and Ticketmaster. And for SeatGeek, well, it’s a major step forward in terms of encouraging other companies to adopt its primary ticketing API, as Facebook has one of the biggest reaches of any platform on earth.
“Through our open API approach, an open ticketing ecosystem will create opportunities to increase distribution, empower teams and artists to sell on the platforms of their choice, and eliminate fraud through a process of barcode verification,” the company said in a statement. “At the end of the day, our goal is to increase discovery of live events by using the power of the open web, putting tickets where fans are already spending time online.”
