It is damaging for artists, whose tickets can cost 500% more without receiving anything. It is damaging for the State, which sees the income of a sector with a turnover exceeding one billion euros and which employs around 350,000 people being withdrawn. It is damaging for the public, which sees the barriers to access the events being raised. Illegal, digital scalping is a plague that has been going on for years. The recent case of Coldplay is just the latest example.
But every time, for every major event, it’s the same story: tickets disappear in a few minutes, as soon as the platforms accredited for the sale open their virtual gates and dozens of sites where tickets can then be purchased with more than multiplied prices. In this chaos, even those who can no longer attend the show for which they had paid the ticket months before and need to resell it, pay the price.
Guarantors of the sale
There is a startup that has developed a platform that allows you to sell and buy tickets, on the secondary market, at the same original ticket price, it’s called Ticketoo.
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Their peculiarity? Act as guarantors of the buying and selling of tickets for musical and sporting events between private individuals, no longer just intermediaries, thanks to a platform that wants to ensure the ethics, legality and transparency of the exchange. The introduction? Secondary ticketing, i.e. the secondary ticket market, is not synonymous with digital scalping.
The second-hand ticket platform
Born in Rome in May 2022 thanks to Dock3 of the Roma Tre University, accelerated for six months by Digital magics and Lazio innova (which invested 100 thousand euros in the company in a pre-seed round at the beginning of 2023), Ticketoo is supported by the commitment of three boys: Andrea Giorgi, 23 years old, Simone Serani, 26 years old, and Paolo Biondo, 27 years old.
The team is based at the House of Emerging Technologies in Rome Tiburtina. “We want – Andrea immediately explained – to be a fan-to-fan platform. The others on the team and I are passionate about music, we know the dynamics of these events and also the communities that are created on social networks. Those same communities that we have turned to, offering them a safe alternative”. In this there is a bit of all the drive that animates the company. Yes, but how do they try to avoid speculation?
The three guarantees
Andrea reminds us that the 2016 regulation which regulates secondary ticketing (and which tries to stem digital touting in every way) is clear: tickets can be resold, yes, but at their price lower than or equal to their face value.
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“The technology we have developed allows you to map the prices of all tickets”. Thanks to this step, it ensures that there are only tickets with verified prices on the platform. “If you don’t offer it at a lower or equal price, you won’t sell the ticket on our platform”. As an intermediary, he explains, Ticketoo connects those who sell and those who buy.
“Here the node of the ticket name change is relevant. We also guide you in this regard. In short, the buyer will find himself in the possession of the ticket paid for the right price and with his name on it ”. Finally, only after verification by the Ticketoo system is the sale closed.
A fee with 3 brackets and not a percentage on the tickets
One of the crucial issues for the credibility of those who operate in secondary ticketing is linked to the company’s business model and revenue. “We don’t have percentage fees – Andrea says clearly – we have foreseen a fixed fee for those who buy in three brackets: 4 euros for tickets up to 60 euros, 6 euros up to 150 euros and 8 euros for tickets over 150 euros, always ”.
Ticketoo numbers
Despite only one year of activity, with the app released just 30 days ago, Andrea underlines: “We are heading towards 100,000 registered users, 250,000 users per month with interaction sessions on the site and 15,000 tickets sold”.