VentureBeat

London’s TickEx wants to help you find the best deal on tickets to live events. The company has just launched stateside.

When most people want to buy tickets to concerts and sports games, the first place they turn is Ticketmaster. If Ticketmaster has sold out, avid fans turn to the secondary market , where they pay substantial markups to see the events they want.

The problem with the secondary ticket market is that it is not transparent. Ticket service StubHub, which has legitimized the practice of ticket scalping, has made the market less opaque, but it’s hard to know if you’re getting the best possible price.

This is where vertical search engines like TickEx comes in. TickEx searches for tickets across primary vendors like Ticketmaster, big secondary sources like StubHub and Ebay, and a growing number of smaller brokers, who provide TickEx with a feed of their available tickets, and pay about $16 per lead TickEx sends their way. TickEx says that smaller brokers will pay this fee because the alternative — paying up to a $10 CPC on the major search engines – is not feasible.

The company does have competitors, in Oyaka and Ticketwood. TickEx says it hopes to have an edge on these other players by offering a better user interface. However, looking at the site, we don’t see this a significant distinguishing factor. Also, because it is so new to the states, TickEx’s index is relatively small, and a search for tickets to the hip-hop festival, Rock The Bells, turned up better results on TickEx’s competitors, for example.

It has raised a $1.5 million angel round.