Make Money Selling Concert Tickets

A few weeks ago Hannah Montana went up for sale on TicketMaster for a few of her concerts this month in New Jersey. This tickets were nearly impossible to get and sold out within the first 5 minutes of going up for sale. This was even more crazy, because it was a pre-sale which was even more limited to Hannah Montana club members only. I ended up getting two tickets to two of her concerts, one pair with nearly front row seats and the second pair were several rows back. I gave my sister the great seats and had to sell the other pair this week.

If you search eBay, you’ll find a ton of tickets going for sale in the $200-$500 range. I also did some other research and came across StubHub.com, which is another high profile site for buying and selling event tickets. I ended up listing the tickets on both sites to see which sold. This morning I was notified by StubHub that the tickets sold. Using StubHub was extremely easy to list, process and ship out the tickets to the winning bidder, which is mainly what enticed me to write up this post. This leads me to "Make Money Selling Concert Tickets", and there are two different ways.

The first and most obvious method to "Make Money Selling Concert Tickets" is to buy tickets once they go for sale on TicketMaster, then flip or resell them on eBay or StubHub. The advantages to this are you can flip them for a couple hundred bucks and it’s simple enough. Hard part is actually getting any (or at least good) tickets to an event that sells out within a couple mins.

The second method to "Make Money Selling Concert Tickets", is what I’m more interested in… which is the StubHub.com affiliate program. They are currently offering 8% through their Affiliate Program. The StubHub affiliate program is inhouse and I just applied to the program today, so I haven’t been able to check out the admin area yet or tracking/linking setup. If someone had sent a visitor to StubHub through an affiliate link and they ended up purchasing my Hannah Montana tickets for $500, the affiliate would have earned $45 off that one referral, which is pretty good for an affiliate program. Affiliate payments are sent out every month, at $20 minimums and are sent through Paypal.

If you have a celebrity or event related web site or blog, you could do really well with this program. As mentioned, I just joined the program today, so I am still waiting to hear back from them on my acceptance. I will push the offer on a few of my sites and keep you updated on it’s earnings and performance.

  • Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Make Money
26 pieces of wisdom given by ye faithful
  1. Michael Kwan said on December 26th, 2007 at 9:21 pm

    If the affiliate gets 8%, I’ve got to wonder how much are the fees at StubHub for the seller (I’m too lazy to check).

    Reply
  2. Zac Johnson said on December 26th, 2007 at 9:37 pm

    It is a decent amount they take. You can look up the info fully at https://www.StubHub.com/help-top-questions-buyer#commission . But, the tickets sold and they made the process super easy… which is why I recommended them. This should help increase affiliate earnings as well.

    Reply
  3. Paul said on December 26th, 2007 at 11:02 pm

    Pretty sure that scalping tickets (or reselling them at higher than face value) is illegal in my country, so this wouldn’t work (at least for local gigs). Interesting that it is legal in the USA?

    Reply
  4. Zac Johnson said on December 26th, 2007 at 11:16 pm

    I know that it varies per state and there are specifics on how much you can sell them for over the percentage you paid. If you are pushing the StubHub affiliate program, this wouldn’t be an issue.

    Reply
  5. $1000 Affiliate Experiment said on December 27th, 2007 at 12:54 am

    Interesting. I saw on the news not to long ago that people were paying thousands of dollars for Hanna Montana tickets. It’s unbelievable what people are spending money on..

    Anyway, I wonder how a PPC campaign would work for something like this…

    Reply
  6. DotDriven said on December 27th, 2007 at 2:53 am

    Great idea, thanks Zac. I’m definitely planning to jump on this tip and see what I can do with it.

    I don’t have a busy celeb site yet but adding it to the few I have could work out well. After all, it’s pretty targeted and who better to promote to lol.

    Reply
  7. Jeff said on December 27th, 2007 at 10:45 am

    I’m all for making money, but I have to say that it’s douche bag tactics like this that piss me off when I want to go to an event, be it a concert or pro game, where all the tickets are sold out to people that never wanted to go and are charging 5-10x what they paid for the tickets. Pushing the affiliate program is cool, but as a fan that likes to get out and do shit once and a while, I have to give ticket scalpers a big hearty “fuck you.”

    Happy holidays.

    Reply
  8. Affiliate Unleashed said on December 27th, 2007 at 2:43 pm

    Great idea. :) Thanks Man.

    Reply
  9. shane said on December 27th, 2007 at 4:45 pm

    Wickedy Wowz, now I rake it on my concert going fanatical friends and fiends. Gotta hand it to you for “admitting” *ahem* confessing you went to Hannah Montana. Signed for the aff pgm, be interesting to see what comes of it.
    Cheers and Beers
    Shane

    Reply
  10. Brandon Hopkins said on December 27th, 2007 at 4:54 pm

    There is a big difference between scalping tickets and reselling tickets.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_scalping

    Reply
  11. Mike Huang said on December 27th, 2007 at 9:33 pm

    Wow! I was listening to this on the radio last month and the famous “Ryan Seacrest” was telling everyone how the tickets sold for $1,000s for the Los Angeles area…

    -Mike

    Reply
  12. Zac Johnson said on December 27th, 2007 at 10:13 pm

    haha, I didn’t go… they were presents for my sister and her friend!

    Reply
  13. Cash Dominator - Instant Money Maker said on December 28th, 2007 at 11:46 am

    This a really interesting money making idea, although I heard about it before I’ve never found such a detailed guide about it. :)

    Reply
  14. Malin said on December 28th, 2007 at 6:01 pm

    Selling tickets for more cash than you bought them for is illegal here. And I thought this was illegal everywhere! :O

    Reply
  15. abasits said on December 29th, 2007 at 5:55 pm

    did you mean buy it from Ebay and sell on the other websites like you described ?
    because on ebay you can only sell cheaper, not expensive. but still its good idea, it did couple of times.

    thankx mate,
    -abs

    Reply
  16. Sucker said on December 30th, 2007 at 11:17 pm

    Any thoughts on the TicketMaster affiliate program? StubHub does seem like a better idea, but it wouldn’t hurt to try to cash in on both times the tickets change hands :D

    Reply
  17. Zac Johnson said on December 30th, 2007 at 11:37 pm

    The commission levels are pretty crappy, like 1%… but with the right audience, it could do well.

    Reply
  18. Freddy said on January 31st, 2008 at 12:06 pm

    Stub Hub gets %5

    Reply
  19. Dennis said on April 29th, 2008 at 10:09 am

    Here are the facts about StubHub. I have been affiliated with them for several years now. StubHub gets fees much greater than you may realize. When you buy tickets from stubhub, they get a 10% fee from you and they also get a 15% fee from the seller who posted their tickets for sale on stubhub. That’s why eBay was so anxious to purchase stubhub for 300 million dollars. So you see, the affiliate gets 8% commission from each transaction and stubhub retains 17% of each transaction…Looks to me like the REAL money is creating a site like stubhub’s and then getting affiliates to build your brand for you. Big money in the ticket business and most of it goes to StubHub!

    Reply
  20. Aloha Al said on June 4th, 2008 at 5:50 pm

    Ticketmaster gets roughly 10% and passes on 1%

    StubHub gets roughly 25% and passes along 8%

    Reply
  21. Not a Tout said on March 13th, 2009 at 12:05 pm

    DAMN TOUTS!!!!

    Reply
  22. Rey said on July 24th, 2009 at 2:54 pm

    @Paul:
    I wish it was illegal! I paid $151 for an $81 ticket and on top of that they charged me 26% service fee! I bought two of them and it ended up costing way too much >:(

    Reply
  23. Rey said on July 24th, 2009 at 2:57 pm

    @Rey:
    I mean 15% service fee…!!

    Reply
  24. Guide for Concerts said on August 20th, 2009 at 8:21 pm

    We actually just created a guide to help people increase their chances of landing concert tickets to popular shows.

    Reply
  25. What’s Up Thursdays, Part Deux || Beyond the Rhetoric || said on December 27th, 2007 at 3:31 pm

    [...] the dough. While the rest of us try to figure out Adsense and TTZ Media, Zac has figured out how to make money selling concert tickets. He recently sold a couple of Hannah Montana tickets through StubHub.com, a ticket-flipping site [...]

  26. wwe divas undressed pic said on January 13th, 2008 at 5:31 pm

    wwe divas undressed pic…

    Thanks for the nice read, keep up the interesting posts…..

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