VentureBeat

FanSnap, a search engine that helps users find event tickets at the last minute, has landed $5.5 million in second-round financing to finish building out its service (currently in beta), and to add new ticket vendors. The round was led by General Catalyst Partners.

Before you think “Geez, as if we need another ticket site,” take a closer look. FanSnap isn’t the same as Ticketmaster and its ilk. It actually sits on a higher level, integrating seamlessly with feeds from other ticket providers to offer users the best possible tickets at low prices (roughly like Travel Zoo and airline tickets, or Zillow and real estate listings). Not only that, it’s live, which means search results are more likely to be accurate — cutting down on the chance that you’ll get all the way through the reservation process only to be told the tickets aren’t actually available after all. FanSnap even double-checks with the provider of the tickets to ensure the prices have not changed before referring its users.

The Palo Alto, Calif. web site partners with big name online ticket providers like StubHub, RazorGator, TicketNetwork and AllShows.com (more than 50 altogether), to give users more options to compare — even at the very last minute. In fact, the company’s chief executive, Mike Janes, left a post at Stubhub to co-found FanSnap, a fact that has given it some sway in the online ticketing space.

In addition to aggregating search results from different sites, FanSnap has a couple other leading-edge features. For example, users can view the price distribution of available tickets for an event at a glance (could come in handy if you want to see if there are cheaper seats in the same section of a venue). They can check availability for a series of events at once, like a baseball homestand. They can even view where available tickets are (very precisely) on zoomable maps of various arenas, stadiums and theaters.

There are a few sites doing similar things. TicketStumbler, Ticketwood and Tickex, to name a few, claim to list search results across hundreds of ticket brokers and exchanges, also allowing users to easily compare price points. But most just refer you to the site the tickets were found on, and the mapping component is not nearly as fine-tuned as FanSnap. Beyond that, most of the results they deliver are from the same few sites anyway.

“”We think a search engine should show tickets as results, not URLs,” says FanSnap’s Janes.

On the other end of the spectrum, SeatQuest focuses on showing you exactly where you would be sitting on a clearly-rendered map. But the rest of the interface isn’t as clean, and a search for “San Francisco Giants” also yielded the results “Bob Dylan Tribute Contest” (which granted, might be cool), and “Candice Bergen.” They might want to work on that.

FanSnap, founded just last year, launched its beta test in October. It received a previous round of $5 million from General Catalyst and other undisclosed investors last year.

Updated

Thanks to the internet, selling tickets on the secondary ticket market — the act formerly known as scalping — has gone legit. EBay bought the market pioneer, StubHub, for $310 million. TicketMaster dropped $265 million to get its hands on TicketsNow, and top-tier VC firm Kleiner Perkins led a $26 million investment in RazorGator back in 2005. All of these companies make money charging sellers a 15 percent commission on the tickets they sell.

However, LiveStub, a just-launched start-up out of Toronto and Chicago, hopes to take a blowtorch to all of them. The company has decided to do away with commissions entirely and make the exchange of tickets free. Morten Lund, an early investor in Skype, has invested an undisclosed amount of angel funding to get the company off the ground.

LiveStub’s site has a few advantages other than its price. Unlike its counterparts, it does not require users to register, making a one-time transaction significantly faster. Second, despite the occasional flaw, LiveStub’s interface is generally simpler and cleaner. It’s just a search bar and a list of tickets, which you can filter based on popularity, the date the tickets were added and how soon the event is coming up. Its process is also somewhat more transparent. When you search for tickets, LiveStub produces a graph that lets you see the event’s average ticket price or popularity over time. Another nice feature lets you quickly find out how much your ticket is worth.

[Update: LiveStub may not be as transparent as it claims. As some readers pointed out in the comments below, the company has pre-populated its entire site with ticket data taken directly from TicketsNow and, in fact, the entire sales transaction goes through TicketsNow's system. As one commenter says, this means that LiveStub is currently not much different than any of the many ticket search engines, and in fact has fewer sources than they do. However, when you search LiveStub, the interface suggests that LiveStub itself is the source (see screenshot below). CEO Michael Hershfield has told me that seeding LiveStub with TicketNow's data was necessary to make the site useful early on and that it was not his intention to mislead anyone.]

But all of these features are easily imitable. The zero-commission is the only differentiator that truly threatens the competition, but it certainly seems like a big threat. Despite the fact that the site launched today, I was able to find tickets to Ice Cube’s show tomorrow on LiveStub but not on StubHub, and they were available on TicketsNow for the same price. After an unscientific few searches across all of the sites, it seems that ticket prices were lower on LiveStub, but not always and not by much.

Assuming LiveStub gets significant traction — and if the market likes cheaper services, it should — consistently lower prices and possibly even greater availability should become the norm. That being said, StubHub and TicketsNow have existing relationships with brokers and sports teams, plus they have the power of huge companies behind them. Craigslist also has a strong position, too, but I don’t expect most of these advantages to last.

The lingering question, of course, is whether or not LiveStub’s model will sustain itself. The company says at some point in the future, it will add premium services for power sellers and targeted advertising to buyers, but only after it has achieved critical mass, but this plan seemed a bit vague.

As it happens, Morten Lund seems to have a penchant for companies offering zero-commission transactions in industries dominated by commissions. He previously invested in Zecco, which charges nothing for stock trades and has gone on to raise $35 million over two rounds.

StubHub, an online site for reselling tickets to events, has been acquied by eBay for $310 million, minting the latest Silicon Valley millionaires in co-founders Jeff Fluhr and Eric Baker.

The controversial company has grown steadily, badgering eBay’s business for years. About 30 professional and college sports teams encourage fans to StubHub as a sort of safe haven in the reselling market, even as the New England Patriots have sued the company, saying it is encouraging fans to break anti-scalping laws (StubHub sued back).

Fluhr, 32 (pictured right), and Baker, 33 (pictured left), met as classmates at Stanford’s business school in 2000 and founded the company thereafter. According to Dow Jones (sub required), Fluhr owns 16 to 18 percent of StubHub, while Baker owns 10 percent.

Investors Allen & Co, Blue Water Capital, Pequot Ventures and Staenberg Venture Partners backed the company with a mere $15 million over the years, suggesting a profitable return for everyone.

The company had revenue last year of close to $100 million, and earnings of about $10 million before interest taxes, depreciation and amortization, according to the Dow Jones.

Competing start-up, Razorgator, backed by Kleiner Perkins, is still fighting away. It raised $26 million in 2005.

StubHub’s Baker, meanwhile, recently raised more than $20 million from Index Ventures and others to launch a similar company, Viagogo, to go after the European market.

(Photo credit: Chris Hardy, SF Chron)