Hey, it’s Tom, cofounder of TicketStumbler.

It’s with a lot of confusion and mixed emotions that I write this.  Dan Haubert, my cofounder and friend since 3rd grade, passed away last week.  He died in a very tragic way, leaving those who knew him grasping for answers and finding absolutely none.  My heart goes out to his family and his girlfriend. I have plenty of complex shit to work through myself.

I know Dan’s absence is going to be felt on Hacker News (username “fallentimes”) and in the many ticket blogs and sport forums where he was considered a maven, maybe THE ticket maven.  His Facebook wall right now is a vestige of an indelible personality. If you knew him, you know that this simple comment is maybe the most accurate: “Dan, thanks for being Dan.”

I don’t yet feel like addressing the future of TicketStumbler in the absence of the gregarious and irreverent person that helped build it. Honestly, I just need some time to think, but I wanted to tell you before you hear it somewhere else. TicketStumbler is not going anywhere for now.

I want to thank Paul and Jessica of Y Combinator for being the most supportive advisors a company could ever have.  Thank you to everyone who’s offered to help in some way.

You’ll be missed, old friend.

You’d be forgiven for not noticing the subtle changes around here recently, but believe it or not, things are a bit different! For starters, the entire site has been re-designed! From the homepage to the ticket listings and everything in between, we’ve given TicketStumbler a fresh coat of paint and covered up a few blemishes in the process; a snappier, more reliable, more usable experience awaits you! I’ve highlighted a few of the more user-centric changes below, but won’t be getting into the nitty-gritty technical details here today.

New Navigation

We’ve redone the navigation with an eye towards reducing the number of clicks between where you are and what you’re looking for. To that end, we’ve replaced the simple links with more useful drop-down boxes. The search box is the default and on most pages will already be open for you. The search box is special in that it offers more options than before (such as searching around your current location) and will add options as appropriate (like a checkbox to only search within a category you’re browsing).

No Account Necessary

We’ve gotten rid of the necessity to register an account to save your location. This allows you to search for local events more easily and receive location-relevant content without having to go through the hassle of creating Yet Another Account. If you had an account already, it still exists, but we are no longer doing the whole “Dashboard” thing — at least until such a time that we can offer a seriously compelling feature set which would require accounts to work properly.

Better Ticket Listings

All the code used to update, display, and filter ticket listings was thrown out and rewritten from scratch. In the previous version, if tickets were taking too long to load from our partner sites you simply wouldn’t receive any listings at all. This was not an ideal solution, but at the time it was the only one available to us. This time around, I wrote everything myself without relying on a giant framework, donning the Javascript hat I keep in my closet for emergencies. The result is pages which (a) load faster, (b) give you results even when some sites are down, and (c) provide a concise message if no tickets are available (instead of a blank canvas).

News Pages

If you’re looking for current events surrounding a team or artist during your ticket search, we’ve got you covered there, too. News pages are available for every category and give you the latest news, blog posts, tweets and more. Here’s the news page for the Red Sox.

Fin.

Those are a few of the highlights, but there are many big changes (hey, it took a couple months to complete, after all!) so I encourage you to look around. Let us know what you like, what’s worse, and what you still wish we’d do better. And look both ways before you cross the street. Unless you live in Boston, where all the roads are one-way. Here you need only rotate the once.

Interesting break out of Ticketmaster fees:

A few comments:

-In this example, of the $20.50 in total service charges,  $8.25 (40%) goes to Ticketmaster and the remaining $12.25 (60%) goes to the venue. The distribution of face value ticket proceeds amongst the artist, label, Ticketmaster and venue would be even more interesting.

-Major artists are often able to negotiate cuts of the service fees and/or tickets for their own use or sale. The Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor has eloquently discussed this and the secondary ticket market.

-Although complaints about Ticketmaster fees are ubiquitous, Ticketmaster isn’t making as much money as the average user would think. However, this is probably a moot point as no one likes to be hit with extras at the end; it makes people feel ripped off or cheated. It’s one thing to pay more money for shipping. It’s another to pay numerous extra fees that are often esoteric and glibly named (convenience fees?!). If you ever want to be infuriated look at your cell phone bill. Not surprisingly, customer sentiment towards phone companies and Ticketmaster is very similar.

-But, this isn’t all Ticketmaster’s fault. Ticketmaster has tried switching to a pricing model where all or most of the convenience fees are built in to the face value ticket price. The end price would be the exact same, but the ticket buying experience would be significantly more transparent and mostly spared of backloaded fees. Unfortunately, this sort of pricing structure has been met with opposition from the artists and venues who don’t want to raise prices, or rather don’t want the appearance of raising prices. When the face value cost is lower, it’s much easier for the artists and venues to shift blame towards Ticketmaster for “excessive fees” even if the artists and venues are getting a cut.

-Since Ticketmaster tacks the fees at the end, its competitors and the secondary ticket providers follow suit. People are used to having to pay extras even if they complain about it.

(thanks Garry Tan for the image)

Below are a few updates for the TicketStumbler API.

• New “query” parameter to /event/search allows you to specify a search the same way you would using the search on the site. Example: “New York”
• New “radius” parameter supported on all methods which use the geo-location parameter set.
• New “id” parameter added to /venue/search
• Multiple category search implemented. Separate IDs with commas.

Further details are available at http://ticketstumbler.com/api/docs/

I spent a few days putting together a couple small services which highlight some of the capabilities provided by the TicketStumbler API. These were services we wanted to offer anyway, so we figured it’d be cool to show off the API by releasing them both under the MIT License rather than rolling them directly into TS.

Seats Tweets

The first app is Seats Tweets. This app is quite simple, in fact it doesn’t have a “backend” whatsoever, just some HTML, CSS, and a small Python script. Simply put, it sends out tweets about upcoming sports games (MLB, NBA, and NHL currently) and ticket pricing, it then links back to TS (imagine that!) where you can get tickets. It’s a really simple and non-intrusive way to keep up to date with who’s playing around you, and how cheaply you can see ‘em.

Inboxtix

The second app is Inboxtix. This fills a gap left by Seats Tweets in that it allows you to subscribe (via e-mail) to any team, artist, performer, sport [...] that you want. Again, it is rather simple: sign up and it’ll send you e-mails with ticket data for upcoming games, performances, etc.

Freedom!

As I said, we’ve made both these apps completely free to alter and reuse to your heart’s content. Both are available via my github page which, in time, I hope to add even more useful software to. I’ve been lax in my Open Source duties this past year and I hope to eventually have time to rectify that. For now, this will have to suffice. Even if you don’t have a use for the source, it’s still a good opportunity to insult my code

All feedback regarding these can be sent to api [at] ticketstumbler [dot] com. Let us know what else you want from these apps!