Mr. Gimple: Tickets.com is the result of about 11 acquisitions that were made between early 1997 and last year. In 1996, a group of investors in Southern California were looking at the opportunity of consolidating the fragmented ticketing industry that existed outside of Ticketmaster. Their acquisition strategy looked at solutions to address the market that Ticketmaster wasn't serving. The primary focus of the acquisitions was technology companies that concentrated on infrastructure to do ticketing transactions. That included any company that was producing software-related products that either enabled live entertainment organizations to do their own ticketing or allowed ticketing companies to provide outsourcing services for those venues. The one thing that tied all of the acquisitions together was technology that offered the opportunity to use data and relational databases. Ticketing companies, historically, were just order takers, selling tickets for cash and taking orders. The founders of Tickets.com were looking to change that, and their focus was the relationship between the customer and the entertainment organization. They saw tremendous potential in the ability to start leveraging data, not just to sell the ticket, but to understand who was buying it and how a single ticket buyer could be turned into a multi-ticket buyer, a repeat customer and, for the arts organizations, a subscription buyer.
TWST: Who are you competing with?
Mr. Gimple: We compete in different ways, but our primary competitor is
Ticketmaster. Since the early 1980s, Ticketmaster has been the only real
choice for large-scale arenas, stadiums and sports organizations because
of its large-scale distribution and retail outlet network. There really
wasn't anybody to come in and challenge Ticketmaster on those larger
venues and on a national basis. With the critical mass that we developed
through the acquisition strategy, we now have laid out a national
footprint and have technology that allows us to sell tickets for large-
scale venues very, very quickly. Ticketmaster and Tickets.com really are
the only two competitors in the market.
Tickers included in this excerpt: TIXX
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