Monica Selby
Last week Rafat Ali posted on LinkedIn about “mediata” startups. Mediata startups combine data and media:
“What if data *is* media?” Ali asks.
New York-based TiqIQ has been operating along those lines since 2009. The company works as a ticket selling platform for live events around the country. TiqIQ aggregates the best prices across several secondary platforms like eBay, TicketsNow, Vivid Seats, ScorBig and primary sellers like Ticketmaster.
“Think Kayak.com for live events,” VP of Marketing Brett House told me over the phone. “We scour the web for the best tickets available so fans don’t have to. All they have to do is show up and have a good time!”
TiqIQ utilizes the ticket market pricing data to produce original content on events and fan-demand. They are able to see trends across the market, going back as far as 5 years. The articles are then published across their network of 1,500 fan blogs and websites, like this article on the crazy Iron Bowl that put Auburn in the SEC Championship game.
Their publishing partners are impressive, including Forbes.com, Bleacher Report, Grantland, Huffington Post, Village Voice Media (with 14 properties nationwide), and high affinity sites, like the largest SEC blog in the country: Saturday Down South.
TiqIQ has seen lots of growth since its inception and landed a $1.7 million Series A early last year. Now they’re looking to grow even more with the launch of a new mobile site.
Actually, the site launched quietly about 3 months ago. Since then, they’ve seen a 303% growth in the mobile conversion rate and double the overall traffic. In just 3 months.
I’d say that’s “high growth.”
The fully responsive mobile site is clean and simple. You can allow it to see your location and immediately pull up all the local events. Just like on the website, you can also personalize the mobile site so that you only see sports or events you’re actually interested in. (Yes to football games. No to basketball. Just for instance.)
Of course, it makes complete sense that mobile ticket sales would do well. Mobile shopping overall is having a year, and as consumers get more comfortable (and the experience gets better) TiqIQ can only expect that to grow.
Which is why in the next couple of months they’ll also add content to the mobile site. They are going for that extra “stickiness” that will keep fans on the site long enough to buy tickets after reading about how scarce they are to a particular event.
So now TiqIQ is not only a media/data company but also a content/commerce company. Two hot trends that find a pretty interesting home in live event ticket sales.
TiqIQ doesn’t have the name recognition of, say, StubHub, but the disdain in House’s voice as we talked about the competition indicates that they aren’t too worried about that.
And let’s face it, with growth like that and more features to roll out, the guys at TiqIQ probably aren’t worried about too much these days.
Except maybe which bowl game to go.