Social ticketing company Ticketfly is announcing a $12 million Series B round of financing from Root Music investor Mohr Davidow Ventures. This Series B will bring the startup’s total funding to $15 million and other investors include High Peaks Venture Partners, Contour Venture Partners and angels Roger Ehrenberg and Howard Lindzon.
Ticketfly has an interesting origin story, the company’s co-founders sold their first startup, TicketWeb to industry leader Ticketmaster for $35 million in 2000 and then left that company in 2008 to form Ticketfly.
Seeing that Ticketmaster was missing out on a tremendous opportunity in social marketing and realizing that there was a market in catering to the small venues that didn’t feel right with having a competitor sell tickets (after Tickmaster merged with Live Nation), Ticketfly co-founders Andrew Dreskin and Dan Teree sought to provide people with a Ticketmaster alternative. “We sort of got the band back together for round two here,” Dreskin tells me.
The company, which makes money off service fees, is now the number two online concert ticketing platform, next to Ticketmaster and is on track to sell 2.5 million tickets this year. Ticketmaster by comparison sold 141 million tickets in 2008, the last time I could find any concrete sales numbers.
What sets Ticketfly apart from its main competitor is its emphasis on the social marketing and analytics that currently drive ticket sales. It offers promoters a free website toolkit where they can create a Ticketfly Events page, integrated Concert site and Facebook Event in one fell swoop. Concert go-ers can buy tickets and share information about concerts directly from the Events page and a sites Ticketfly integration. Promoters can also set up the event to post concert updates to Twitter and Facebook automatically, without having to manually update.
Ticketfly currently has over a 150 partnerships with venues including Austin City Limits and The Troubadour. In addition announcing funding, the company is releasing an artist database today with records for over 70,000 artists, which means that venues can have access to up to date artist content like photos and videos in order to spruce up their Events pages. In addition it now offers email newsletter integration, allowing venues to automatically populate their email newsletters with events data.
Dreskin will be using the financing to expand the Ticketfly platform and further integrate all elements of the ticketing experience. “The ticketing experience historically has been abysmal, just not that fun for consumers, so we seek to remedy that as well,” Dreskin adds.