About Ticket Club, and why our pricing works

The short version

At Ticket Club we limit our paid advertising, and have a special relationship with our ticket exchange to cut certain costs. This allows us to offer tickets at a much lower profit margin than other websites do.

The long version

The secondary ticket industry is complicated. There are multiple parties involved, and they all get some cut of a given ticket sale.

The venues, along with the artists / teams, are mainly concerned with selling out tickets and avoiding bad PR from looking "greedy". As a result, they tend to underprice the face value of tickets.

The resellers capitalize on this. Items are being sold for less than their true market value, and such things are always going to get flipped for profit these days. The internet allows this to happen at a scale that used to be impossible.

So ticket exchanges were created to bring sanity and safety to this internet scene. They provide places for all the sellers out there to list their tickets on a collective marketplace, and sell software to help them manage their listings.

Exchanges also have the critical role of guaranteeing the sale on both sides - protecting buyers from fake tickets, and sellers from fraudulent or dishonest buyers. They charge a percentage rate fee to the resellers to bring in revenue, and reward good selling practices and reliability with lower rates.

Lastly, there's the websites, which make a ticket exchange's listings available to the public, and shoulder the burden of advertising and marketing. They often have to pay the ticket exchange a cut, and usually get their revenue from a service fee snuck in at checkout.

That brings us to Ticket Club.

Ticket Club is a website, so normally we'd need to charge service fees both to pay the exchange, and to get some revenue ourselves. However, that's not the case for us, because we're a direct subsidiary of a ticket exchange (specifically, TicketNetwork).

That means that we don't have to pay exchange fees. And instead of needing a service fee to make money, the seller's fees can be considered our revenue. We also get to use a lot of TicketNetwork shared resources to avoid more costs.

Of course, there are other sites in the same boat - TicketNetwork.com, Stubhub.com and more. However, instead of passing the above savings on to customers, they just charge rates similar to other sites, and burn the extra money on things like advertising and sponsorships. Or they just pocket it.

Ticket Club doesn't. We dabble in some paid advertising - you have to, in this industry - but we try to keep it meager. Instead we use our lower costs to offer lower prices, and look to be competitive in that way.

Having a Ticket Club membership makes it very hard for buying tickets elsewhere to make any legitimate sense. The loyal customers that result from that membership model, are the last and most important piece of the picture. And if they let some friends know about the best place to get tickets, all the better.