

Revisiting PG's New Reality, 7 Months Later: Ticketstumbler vs. Fansnap - Mystalic
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ticketstumbler.com+fansnap.com/
Based off this post 7 months ago, where PG compared TicketStumbler ($15k in funding) to FanSnap ($10.5 mil): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458925<p>This is not a criticism of PG's submission OR of TicketStumbler, just an interesting observation that I hope will generate some debate.
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Mystalic
Based off this post 7 months ago, where PG compared TicketStumbler ($15k in
funding) to FanSnap ($10 mil): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458925>

This is not a criticism of PG's submission OR of TicketStumbler, just an
interesting observation that I hope will generate some debate.

~~~
pg
If you spend enough on ads, you can make your traffic whatever you want. But
that kind of traffic doesn't prove anything (except the initial premise:
Fansnap has a lot of money). A more meaningful comparison would be organic
traffic, which Compete doesn't break out.

~~~
mattmaroon
The traffic might not prove anything, even if it were reliable, but the bottom
line might. It may prove that sometimes its better to raise a bunch of money
and spend it on ads.

At the end of the day it's all about profits. If they're spending $1m on ads
that bring in $5m in revenue, and TicketStumbler is getting only a fraction of
that organically, then Fansnap will come out way ahead in the end. And users
you buy from ads frequently have a higher RPU than organic ones, and the
difference is often more than enough to offset the increased acquisition
costs.

Not saying that's the case in this particular instance, but I think it's a
mistake to say organic traffic is necessarily a more meaningful metric than
overall traffic when the end metric is money.

~~~
pg
Organic traffic is not necessarily the best predictor of a mature company's
revenues, but it is a more meaningful way to compare two newly launched
companies.

The impression you get from the traffic graph is that Fansnap is leaving
Ticketstumbler behind, while in fact it is entirely possible (indeed likely,
under the circumstances) that it reflects mainly a gradual ramping up of ad
spending. I.e. that what you're seeing is a graph of increasing losses rather
than increasing profits.

~~~
Mystalic
I personally believe it's too early too tell, either 7 months ago or even now.
Consumers will decide in the end who they prefer, even if it's not one of
these two companies.

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fallentimes
Well duh, Fansnap has a 1 million dollar per year ad budget :). And now it's
15k vs 15 million!

In seriousness though, Fansnap has done a kick ass job on many many fronts.
Luckily the market is a $4 billion industry so I think there's room for a few
companies to play. I believe PG's point was that a bootstrapped company can
now compete with a venture-backed company. That wasn't always the case.

Compete isn't very accurate anyway.

-Dan, Co-founder, TicketStumbler

~~~
omouse
Wait a second! Are you saying that marketing and advertisement actually work
and that you need more than just a good product?!

~~~
fallentimes
Indeed.

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gojomo
TicketStumbler might still be the better business; that's a lot of funding to
earn back.

But really, I wonder what happened in February-March that gave FanSnap such a
traffic boost.

Looking on the two companies' blogs for that period, the only thing that
sticks out as a possible major traffic driver is a FanSnap partnership to list
eBay tickets.

Or was it some promotion associated with the NCAA tournament that drove
awareness and continuing use to a new level?

Or maybe FanSnap is just buying the traffic with advertising dollars -- ROI
and longevity TBD?

~~~
zach
That appears to be the time when they had a major launch, a meta-search for
ticket comparison shopping:

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/13/fansnap-is-the-new-
kaya...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/13/fansnap-is-the-new-kayak-for-
event-ticket-searches/)

------
suhail
I wondered when somebody was going to bring this up.

For the record however, Fansnap has spent a significant amount of money
purchasing traffic. There were ads on finance.yahoo.com at one point. The fact
that they only amassed 94k uniques is almost laughable, poor retention/use of
money--imo the whole ticketing business is a tough sell if you're just
aggregating--

Tom and Dan have definitely put in a heart full effort--I think they probably
understand the business just as well as fansnap (if not better) and spent much
less money learning about it at the end of the day. Kudos to those guys
bootstrapping an idea.

~~~
idlewords
If Fansnap is pouring money and resources into business development (getting
long-term partnerships and contracts in place), then this might not be
reflected in their numbers for some time. It still makes them a very dangerous
competitor.

A three-orders-of-magnitude difference in development resources might not be
scary to people who believe smaller is better when it comes to programming,
but it's hard to make up that kind of ground in other areas.

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wensing
Startups are a lot of work. I'm guessing it's fairly indisputable that $15.7m
funding can really help your growth. Case in point, employee count: FanSnap
21, TicketStumbler 2.

Given that tidbit, I'd say TicketStumbler is still doing a very respectable
job by comparison.

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AndrewWarner
If we're going to revisit what PG linked to, should we revisit what Dan said
about having a long way to go?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458946>

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trapper
There is such a huge variation in sites estimating visitor numbers.

<http://www.cubestat.com/www.ticketstumbler.com>

<http://www.cubestat.com/www.fansnap.com>

I think it's pretty obvious that given the variation and low absolute numbers
we are talking about that it's impossible to tell the two means apart given
the data.

~~~
wensing
For our site, Cubestat's "Estimated data" is completely and horribly wrong
compared to compete.com and alexa (which are only mostly wrong).

~~~
trapper
As I said, there is a huge variation. Quantcast often has dramatically
different results as well.

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symptic
We don't know the conversion rates of each site, so the traffic metrics are
useless. One could convert at 15% and the other only at 2% and be comparable
in terms of revenue.

Metrics are good, but they can be blinding.

