Seatwave

Online ticket marketplace Seatwave picked up two gongs at the FGBA, taking home the Angel or VC-backed Business and Online Business of the Year awards. We hear how the company is legitimising the market for secondary ticketing.

“Secondary ticketing is as old as the hills,” says Seatwave’s sales director, Chris Willis. “In the Life of Brian, they were touting tickets to stonings.” The questionable historical value of the Monty Python film means this might not be the best example to cite, but Willis’ point still stands.

Both Willis and chief executive Joe Cohen (pictured below) emphasise that the company, established in early 2007, aims to legitimise the market by providing a reliable, secure and repeatable online marketplace for buying and selling tickets, while bringing prices down.

It offers customer protection through refunds for tickets not supplied and cancelled events. “Prices have been artificially inflated on the secondary market because there was no aggregated marketplace to create competition,” says Cohen. “Since we’ve been in business, we’ve brought down prices by over 30%.”

Inevitably, the firm, which is already Europe’s leading independent ticketing site with tickets for events in 38 countries, has had to work hard to distance itself from negative associations with touts.

“We’ve faced resistance from the very first day we started and every day since from different sectors of the market,” Cohen concedes. “Whenever anyone criticises what we’re trying to do, we focus on the fact that we’re solving two big problems [protection and price] for consumers, and they’re who we answer to.”

Usefully, the former COO of dating site Match.com has experience of overcoming negative consumer associations when building a business. “When we started Match.com, dating was restricted to the back pages of the newspaper. By the time I left, people almost felt they’d be missing an opportunity if they didn’t try it online,” Cohen says.

While he believes it will take three years to comprehensively “send out the same message” about secondary ticketing, Seatwave, which is backed by Atlas Venture, has made a flying start. The London-based firm has a strong acquisitive pedigree, an impressive management team and saw gross European ticket sales increase by 325% in quantity last year compared with 2007.