NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Don't call them scalpers - call them resellers instead. They are brokers that peddle hard-to-find tickets for live events such as concerts or sporting events, and they have gone legit thanks largely to the Internet.Web-based ticket exchanges and services have proliferated - Forrester estimates U.S. online secondary ticket sales reached almost $3 billion last year, up from about $2.6 billion in 2007 - and in the last couple years a few prominent players have been snapped up some of the biggest names on the Net. Auction site eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) bought online ticket dealer StubHub in 2007 for about $310 million and last year Ticketmaster (TKTM) acquired reseller TicketsNow for $265 million.
Even sports teams, never fans of scalpers, have inked formal deals with high-tech resellers. StubHub has a five-year contract to serve as Major League Baseball's official source of secondary tickets, and last year the Boston Red Sox signed local agency Ace Tickets to handle ticket reselling.A Google for ticketsThe latest players to enter this bustling business are online ticket aggregators, who want to do for event seats what sites such as Travelocity and Kayak do for airline tickets or hotel rooms.
SeatQuest, a Chicago-based company, launched in late 2007, and TicketStumbler debuted last year. Ticketwood.com of Northridge, Calif., bills itself as a comparison shopping service for event tickets. FanSnap, the newest entrant in the field, likens itself to a search engine. "We're Google for tickets," says FanSnap CEO Mike Janes, a former StubHub executive.
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