StubHub Scrapers
Link: Hannah Montana Tickets on Sale! Oops, They’re Gone
"[Hannah] Montana tickets, whose face value is $21 to $66, have been resold on StubHub, on average, for $258, the company says, and that is without taking into account StubHub’s 25 percent commission (10 percent paid by the buyer, 15 percent by the seller). None of the proceeds from the resale of tickets at inflated prices make their way back to Ms. Cyrus.
Some ticket brokers are so certain of their ability to get hold of desirable tickets that they confidently advertise tickets on these exchanges even before tickets go on sale to the public.
How do they do it? An intriguing explanation is that brokers use specialized software to make multiple online purchases of tickets, circumventing the four-ticket-per-customer limit that the rest of us must abide by."
This in many ways sounds like a replay of eBay’s early days as a platform five years ago, when the company was compelled to create a web service API with its own terms and conditions as a way to regulate rogue developers who were writing eBay applications by scraping HTML from the site. Now, StubHub (an eBay company) is running into the same thing; it can’t be a coincidence that StubHub doesn’t have its own web service API.
