Ticketmaster has purchased secondary market ticket seller TicketsNow.com (WSJ cites price of $265 million) in an effort to capture (and share with partner venues, artists, etc.) more revenue from ticket reselling. This move will help Ticketmaster compete more directly with StubHub, which eBay purchased in January 2007. Each of the two combinations are compelling – the market leader for ticket sales moving more aggressively into ticket reselling (Ticketmaster also operates Ticketexchange, a smaller service in terms of market share, to resell tickets), going against the online market leader for reselling almost anything.

Until last week, StubHub has led TicketsNow in market share of visits since the week ending Aug. 11, 2007.

Interestingly, TicketsNow is already receiving traffic from the search term ‘ticketmaster’, which provided more traffic tthan ‘ticketsnow’, its own brand, for the 4 weeks ending Jan. 12, 2008. The one benefit however, is that the traffic from ‘ticketsnow’ is partially driven by organic results (78%), while the traffic from ‘ticketmaster’ all originates from paid search. One immediate benefit – the acquisition will help keep all of the traffic under one owner.

Search Terms Driving Traffic to TicketsNow.com, 4 weeks ending Jan. 12, 2008

Currently, the high demand for tickets to the Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Tour are driving searches to many of the ticket reseller websites. The event is driving the top search phrases for a specific event – ‘hannah montana’ and ‘hannah montana tickets’ for both StubHub and TicketsNow. For the 4 weeks ending Jan. 12, 2008, TicketsNow benefited more than StubHub from the search phrase ‘hannah montana tickets’.

Search Terms - Websites that received traffic from – ‘hannah montana tickets’, 4 weeks ending Jan. 12, 2008

Heather Dougherty

Heather Dougherty is Director, Research at Hitwise. This piece originally appeared on Hitwise's analyst blog here.

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