Forbes: Here's How The Yankees And Angels Are Disrupting Baseball's Secondary Ticket Market

Here a new article we published over on Forbes discussing how the Yankees and Angels have disrupted the secondary ticket market. Here's a little piece of the article:

When pitchers and catchers report for Yankees spring training later this week, the roster on George Steinbrenner field will be about $400 million more expensive than last season.  If all goes as planned, the result of that investment will be a much-improved team that makes a run at the World Series. Many are calling the 2013 offseason-spending spree a return the Yankees ways of old when they would try to spend their way out of mediocrity.  Others are hailing it as an immediate return to contention.

Regardless of what one thinks about their on-field development approach, the Yankees are unquestioned leaders in terms of innovation and creating value on the business side of sports.  Along those lines, the Yankees launched their own branded Ticket Exchange last season. With all their new talent, Yankees tickets may heat up in 2014, and it could be the year that the exchange generates a real return for the team as well as their fans.  It may also be the year that the secondary market starts to look more like the trusted, single source destination that the box office has provided for generations.

Over the last 20 years, as baseball goes so goes the secondary ticket market.  While only the Yankees and Angels have adopted branded exchanges so far, with an average of over three million primary market tickets to sell in a season, others are likely to follow soon.   While branded exchanges have been around at a league level for several years–through the NFL, NHL and NBA Ticket Exchanges and FlashSeats–the Yankees and Angels ticket exchanges have taken the model one step further by putting the team brand, and all the credibility that comes along with it, in front of the secondary market. Based on data from year one, the exchanges are off to a good start. Last season, the average number of per-game listings for Yankees tickets on Stub Hub dropped 40%, from 7,000 to 3,000 across the entire Yankees Stadium seating chart.  For those that used the Yankee Ticket Exchange, they not only paid less in fees, but they also got tickets from real season ticket holders who weren’t in the business of making money on ticket sales, but were just looking to unload games they couldn’t use, and recoup some of their investment.

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