If you’re looking to buy concert tickets online, Yelp will no longer refer you to a ticket reseller, after a letter from the National Independent Venue Association called on Yelp to stop “empowering the sale of fake and price-gouged tickets.”
In a letter to Yelp’s CEO, NIVA executive director Stephen Parker wrote:
Your site redirects users from purchasing legitimate tickets at face value from small businesses and nonprofits, instead sending them to a Yelp-branded TicketNetwork website that is price gouging and selling fake tickets. These deceptive practices are to consumers’, artists’ and concert venues’ detriment, but we know you can stop these practices. While our outreach has gone unanswered, we stand ready to dialogue to fix it.
In the letter to Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Parker wrote that promoters, venues and festivals discovered Yelp placed a button on their profile pages that redirects a user to TicketNetwork.
“They are selling resale ‘tickets’ on Yelp that, in many cases, do not actually exist
or are marked up two to four times the price of face value tickets that are often still available from the venue,” said NIVA, according to the trade publication.
Parker “implored” Yelp to take quick action “to protect consumers, uphold the integrity of independent stages and maintain the trust of the millions of users who rely on Yelp for accurate and honest information.”
Within two hours of the letter being made public, Yelp informed NIVA in an email that it would no longer integrate the third-party site, saying it appreciated the venues bringing their concerns about TicketNetwork to its attention.
“For 20 years, Yelp’s mission has been to connect people with great local businesses, including independent venues. We thank NIVA for bringing their concerns about TicketNetwork to our attention, and have taken immediate steps to turn off that integration,” Yelp said in a statement.
TicketNetwork criticized NIVA’s letter as “extremely biased,” describing it as “talking points generated by a company currently being sued as an illegal monopoly by the Department of Justice and Attorney Generals representing more than 296 million Americans.”
TicketNetwork said that marketplaces like itself “guarantee that consumers will receive the tickets purchased, a suitable replacement (subject to buyer approval), or a full refund.”
NIVA spokeswoman Audrey Fix Schaefer said the organization stands as a “counterweight to anti-competitive practices of publicly-traded, multinational conglomerate promoters.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include the statements from Yelp and TicketNetwork.
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