The NY Times has a great article about some of the questions swirling around ticket scalping sites… er, I mean ticket exchange sites like StubHub.com (owned by eBay), which has had an extraordinarily successful year. On these sites people resell tickets, and the key question is how do they manage to get all those tickets to all those great events? To quote the article:

Ticket sales for big-name concerts now follow a distressingly consistent pattern: At 10 a.m. on a Saturday, tickets go on sale, and by 10:05 a.m., all tickets are sold. Yet by 10:05, StubHub and other ticket exchanges already have a plenitude of tickets listed for the sold-out event — only now, they cost much more.

Now one of the obvious answers is a few “intermediaries” using Bots- and the article notes Ticketmaster thinks that, somedays, 80% of their hits are from bots. Those bots, indeed, are the reason for those wierd visual puzzles that many sites use in an effort to thwart them. However, the obvious answer isn’t always the right one – it turns out the genius business model behind how all kinds of tickets are picked up is… paying people in India $2/hour to do it by hand.

Anyways, I won’t give away the rest of their article, but it is an interesting read that raises some interesting questions. To me, the most important question is why don’t the original ticket sellers just start an auction process from the get-go and knock those “intermediaries” out of there?