Ticketmaster and Eventbrite to start selling tickets through Facebook
Adam Lashinsky is on assignment. Erin Griffith is a writer at Fortune. Shane McGlaun / SlashGear : Ticketmaster and Eventbrite to sell tickets via Facebook PYMNTS.com : Ticketmaster To Hawk Tickets On Facebook Saqib Shah / Digital Trends : Facebook-Ticketmaster partnership lets you buy tickets right from your news feed Tyler Lee / Ubergizmo : Ticketmaster Will Now Sell Tickets Directly On Facebook Christina Warren / Mashable : Soon you'll be able to buy concert tickets on Facebook Charlotte Hassan / Digital Music News : Ticketmaster Partners With Facebook To Sell Concert Tickets Oscar Raymundo / CIO.com : You'll be able to get tickets from Ticketmaster directly on Facebook later this month Natt Garun / The Next Web : Ticketmaster selling directly on Facebook is another way to fail at snagging Beyoncé tickets Kia Kokalitcheva / Fortune : Ticketmaster and Eventbrite Will Soon Sell Tickets Via Facebook Billy Steele / Engadget : Ticketmaster will start selling tickets on Facebook this month Christopher Heine / Adweek : Ticketmaster Is About to Start Selling Tickets on Facebook Melissa Chan / TIME : Ticketmaster Will Soon Sell Tickets Directly on Facebook Micah Singleton / The Verge : You'll soon be able to buy sports and concert tickets through Ticketmaster on Facebook
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook has been building toward native ticketing for months: in December it rolled out a Buy Tickets button for a small group of venues, artists, and promoters, keeping purchases inside the app rather than linking out. Bringing Ticketmaster and Eventbrite aboard is the step up from that experiment — the two biggest names in event and concert ticketing now selling where discovery happens.
The pattern is already spreading across platforms and categories: Fandango began selling movie tickets through Facebook after iMessage, and SeatGeek built its own direct-to-consumer tooling before partnering with Facebook to open its events pages to third-party sellers. Ticketing is becoming a distribution fight over where the buyer already is.
First-order effects
- Ticketmaster and Eventbrite gain a discovery channel at the point of intent — fans who see an artist or event post can buy without leaving Facebook, shortening the funnel from post to purchase.
- Facebook moves further into commerce infrastructure, taking transaction flow off its own platform's outbound links and deepening data on what users attend as well as what they like.
Second-order effects
- Rivals must match the surface area: SeatGeek had launched its Open platform so artists, teams, and venues could sell directly, then signed its own Facebook deal, while Fandango extended the same playbook from movie tickets into Facebook sales.
- Ticketmaster's presence inside Facebook pressures YouTube-style video partners too — Ticketmaster went on to partner with YouTube to sell tickets on artists' video pages, showing ticket inventory being placed wherever fans watch.
Third-order effects
- The structural shift is toward social platforms as commerce rails: if discovery, decision, and checkout all happen inside Facebook, ticketing companies compete increasingly on inventory and fees while the platform owns the customer relationship.
- For venues and artists, distribution consolidates around a handful of embedded channels — Facebook, YouTube, messaging apps — raising the stakes of which platform controls the events graph of who is going where.
The trend: Event ticketing is moving from destination sites into social feeds, with platforms like Facebook embedding checkout and turning ticketing firms into interchangeable inventory suppliers.