A few years back Anderson Bell, then a promoter for local nightclubs like Reserve and Crescendo, tried to buy a Pearl Jam ticket through Ticketmaster. “I was on a limited budget,” he says, “and the service fees were kind of a deal breaker for me. It was something like 30 percent of the face value of the ticket. . . . It just woke me up to the fact that something is really wrong with the system.”
The process of purchasing a ticket through FanFueled is pretty much identical to that on most ticketing websites, except at the end of the transaction buyers are offered buttons to create posts on Twitter and/or Facebook that include a link back to the event’s FanFueled page. When someone purchases a ticket through that link, the original buyer gets paid a portion of that ticket’s service fee, ranging from 7.5 to 20 percent. If a third person buys a ticket through the second buyer’s link, both of the first two buyers get payouts—and so on. The amount FanFueled kicks back is bigger for direct referrals and for smaller shows; for the biggest concerts the payouts continue to the sixth degree of separation, so Bell has prudently set the rate of return low in such cases. The sums involved are modest, but they can snowball fast. The money is deposited into the referrer’s account, and once the total reaches $10 it can be cashed out in the form of a check or PayPal transaction. Soon it will be possible to put the money toward another FanFueled ticket or donate it to charity.
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FanFueled is still a small operation—at press time it had only paid out a little more than $600 to fans, and it had 19 events listed before the end of the year, mostly in Illinois but also in New York, Ohio, Tennessee, and California. (It’s hard to get a feel for how many concerts Ticketmaster is handling in Chicago through December because its website will only display 500 results at a time.)
