What are Ticket Proxies – Simple Economics
If you’ve ever looked online at different ways to make money then it’s possible you’ve stumbled across one of the most lucrative but controversial methods called ticket scalping. It’s often covered extensively in the media but usually from the side of trying to stop it ! Now despite the morality of the whole business, it’s definitely thriving despite the best efforts of some fairly major players and some of the artists too.
First lets summarise what’s exactly happening without some of the emotion that it causes. Buying and selling tickets that have been previously bought is simply operating within a secondary market. With regards to tickets this is simply a market where tickets are resold normally at a higher price.
Much of this happens through the promoters who are obviously encouraged to sell as many tickets as possible. This is not just so they can profit directly through the ticket sales, but from other side goods too. A concert will make lots of money from additional sales too like food, drinks and those hugely expensive concession stands.
The costs as any concert goer knows can be significant, and often even higher than the initial ticket price. When I took my son to see World Wrestling show a few years ago, I spent way more on stupid t shirts and junk on the stands than I did on tickets themselves.
The bottom line is to an economist the very existence of a secondary market means that tickets have either been under supplied or under priced. Usually it will be a combination of the two, after all concert venues have a limited capacity and ticket prices will be capped to avoid the accusation of exploitation. The reality is that if either of these factors where modified then the secondary market would disappear and so would ticket scalpers.
The Ticket Proxies Investment
The market conditions that promote this secondary market are unlikely to change significantly in the future. The truth is that making money from tickets in this market is actually getting easier if you can get hold of them in the first place. There are lots of online reselling platforms where you can easily sell on your unwanted tickets at a huge profit.
If you pick any popular concert or event, the chances are that it will be oversubscribed and thus tickets will be in demand. It’s relatively simple to double or treble the face value of each ticket which can obviously reap huge profits especially if you’ve managed to secure a lot of tickets.
This is of course the key to making money in the resale market – obtaining the tickets in the first place. It is where most of the promoters focus their efforts in eliminating ticket scalpers which is why to succeed you need the tools to thwart these efforts.
Enter the ticket proxies, one of the most essential tools in making money reselling tickets and in fact anything else which is available online.
This is one of the leading companies who provide the proxies that ticket scalpers need. they even supply highly specified servers – you can buy proxies for ticketmaster for example.
Why proxies are needed to buy lots of tickets !
In the physical world, where there is a scarce supply it’s slightly easier to control who buys them. We’ve possibly all seen those shops which have sales and purchases are limited to a specific amount. The only way to circumvent is to leave the store and rejoin the queue possibly slightly disguised depending on how serious they are. Your purchases can be limited by your physical presence, which is not as easy to do online.
When tickets for a major concert are sold there’s usually a disclaimer that sales are limited to a certain number per person. However online we don’t physically go anywhere so companies need to use the digital alternative to restrict the number of purchases. The base of your digital identity is your network address (IP address) and so e-commerce sites will limit purchases based on this. So you’ll be prevented from buying more tickets from the same connection.
Which is where proxies come in and why professional scalpers spend a lot of money on them. The proxy is a server that sits between you and the e-commerce gateway which sells the ticket and is crucially the IP address that the company sees. Sophisticated services like the RotatingProxies guys can provide proxies which actually switch IP address automatically allowing anyone using them to adopt a number of different digital personas. Each IP address can potentially be used to buy up to the limit of proxies and so you can buy many tickets without leaving your computer.
It’s tempting, an almost surefire way to double or treble your investment without changing from your pajamas.
The critical factors are that the proxies are quick, anonymous and simple to use. Without the speed you’ll certainly lose out especially in the really huge events where they can sell out the tickets in minutes. However spending ages configuring your computer to use a different proxy won’t help in this regards either. Other factors are location and classification – it’s much more effective to use something called residential proxies too, which look like legitimate home users.
There’s no doubt that with the potential to make huge amounts of money simply by sitting at a home computer buying and selling something is hugely tempting. Also trying to make it appear morally wrong or insinuate that this practice is illegal (incorrectly) isn’t going to put many people off either.
The economic solutions to stopping this practice is of course simple – let the market set the price of tickets. If you charge much more for each ticket then the resell market simply disappears, the price settles at a cost the market will sustain. Of course there are huge downsides to this tactic in that the performer and promoters now look like they’re exploiting the fans. Yet worse is the issue that everyone will know end up paying ‘ticket scalpers’ prices automatically.
The other method involves making it very difficult, which is why specialist tools are now needed. People invest in private proxies for ticketmaster simply because without them they couldn’t buy multiple tickets. The anti-scalping techniques started to make the costs rise, yet soon technology hit back and implemented changes like rotating proxies which brought them back down. The best companies are reliant on facilitating this market by actively creating servers which are effective like storm proxies ticketmaster servers too.
While online platforms increase the efficiency of reselling tickets it’s likely that the secondary market and it’s opportunities will increase. The costs and risks of reselling tickets are relatively low and the potential gains are huge. The technical side isn’t difficult to learn and if you invest in software to help the purchase – also known as bots then it becomes even easier to make a profit.
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