Ticketing Industry News: Smartphone use drives mobile ticketing

Sports Business Journal
By ERIC FISHER
Staff writer

Ticketing thus far has been slower than many other industries to adapt to today’s lightning-quick, “there’s an app for that” digital world. But full end-to-end mobile ticketing is now rapidly becoming a widespread reality.

Tickets.com, which late last summer introduced its ProVenueMobile product with the Oakland A’s, has since expanded the program to all 13 of its regular-season MLB clients. The program builds in part off its prior Tickets@Phone effort in which bar codes good for entry into a facility are e-mailed to a ticket purchaser’s smartphone. ProVenueMobile goes significantly further by also providing real-time mobile search, seat selection and payment.

Ticketmaster provides similar functionality for BlackBerry devices, as the industry giant holds an official partnership with BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Inc. StubHub, the dominant player in secondary ticketing, is putting the finishing touches on its own iPhone application. And a fast-growing collection of smaller primary and secondary ticket sellers, such as Arizona-based eSeats, similarly are embracing mobile-based ticket purchasing.

Providers of mobile ticketing systems earn their revenue from a variety of sources, such as convenience charges on purchases or revenue sharing with client teams.

“We love mobile and we’re huge believers in it,” said Derek Palmer, Tickets.com chief commercial officer. “By allowing fans to complete an entire transaction anywhere, we think this is going to spur a lot more last-minute purchasing. What’s basically happened is that we’ve opened up a major new retail sales channel, and one that people have constantly with them.”

The spike in mobile ticketing owes in part to surging smartphone sales, as well as consumers’ increasing comfort with making purchases over the devices. Market research firm Gartner recently estimated that 54.3 million smartphones were sold worldwide during the first quarter of 2010, a 49 percent increase over the first quarter a year ago. And smartphones are assuming a greater percentage of all mobile phone sales, with the devices representing 17.3 percent of all mobile unit purchases, up from 13.6 percent a year ago.

Within those rising numbers are particularly meteoric sales for iPhone and Android devices, each of which are posting triple-digit percentage sales increases compared with a year ago.

The Mobile Marketing Association earlier this month released similar research estimating that one in five U.S. mobile phone owners have used their device for a mobile-based purchase in the last month, a percentage certain to rise. And those figures are much higher for smartphone owners, as more than half of iPhone owners and 34 percent of BlackBerry owners have bought content through their devices, also suggesting greater user comfort with mobile as a purchasing platform.

Utilization of mobile ticketing thus far predictably has been small. In early tests of Tickets.com’s ProVenueMobile system, purchasing over the mobile platform has represented less than 1 percent of available single-game tickets. But a quick escalation to at least mid-single-digit percentages is anticipated.

Mobile ticketing also is not just a consumer-facing application, either. Veritix for several years has used mobile authentication units that ticket agents wear over their shoulder to swipe electronic fan identification such as credit cards or driver’s licenses to help enable their digital ticket platform.

“We as a culture are still a little slow to let go of our physical tickets, but we’re anticipating a very quick ramp-up into more all-digital events and all-digital venues,” said Sam Gerace, Veritix chief executive.