Major League Baseball has an overwhelming supply of tickets over the course of its 162-game season, and it is seeing a rise in empty seats.
Excluding the 2020 and 2021 seasons that were heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the league saw its lowest overall attendance of the 21st century in 2022. The 64,556,636 figure for last season was a noticeable dropoff from the 68,494,752 figure in 2019.
Teams and secondary markets set the ticket prices for the 2,430 MLB regular season games each year. But what if fans had more control in the ticket-purchasing process?
That’s the overarching goal for Jason Shatsky, the CEO of TicketRev. His company takes bids from potential buyers looking for certain tickets at a certain price, brings them to brokers and secondary markets with hopes of finding a match and completes the purchase if a match is found.
Get Philly local news, weather forecasts, sports and entertainment stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC Philadelphia newsletters.
“Teams need a way to be able to sell tickets more discreetly,” Shatsky told Evan Drellich of The Athletic “So what’s great about our product vs. any other marketplaces is that teams are not actually listing their inventory for sale at an advertised price. They’re able to put our white label product with them out either via email, via social media, direct channels, where they can then collect this information on how much people are willing to spend. They have the ability to accept those offers and sell in a much more discrete manner.”
Along with over 5,000 users, TicketRev has garnered the support of an MLB team.
The Minnesota Twins were among the investors in TicketRev’s $1.1 million funding round that it just completed. Chris Iles, the Twins’ senior director of brand experience and innovation, said the team is “in the process of exploring” some kind of implementation as soon as 2024 but also noted that “the ticketing game moves at a very, very slow pace.”
TicketRev doesn’t promise that a ticket will be available at the buyer’s desired price and it doesn’t control its own inventory. On top of that, it has to compete with one major factor that MLB teams are steadfast in protecting.
“We are never going to sell a ticket for below what we would sell to a season-ticket holder,” Chris Iles, the Twins’ senior director of brand experience and innovation, said. “Our season ticket holders will always get the best price. So you know, a name-your-price tool is probably more of a secondary market type of thing. Which, you know, we find intriguing. … But, I’ll just be clear that we would never undercut our bread and butter, which is our season-ticket holders.”
While accommodating fans who buy tickets in bulk comes first, Iles believes TicketRev’s model is something that can enhance the overall process.
“I don’t know why we haven’t thought of [a name-your-price option],” Iles said. “But we’re really interested to see where it can go from there. … Anything that we can do to make the ticket buying process more fan-friendly is a step in the right direction. The ticketing game has been notoriously tough on fans over the years.”
