At Ticketmaster we are committed to making the ticket-buying experience as effortless and efficient as possible for fans, while continuing to battle bots.
Bots are automatic web robots that are often used in an attempt to unfairly purchase tickets that should always be available for fans. They do this by accessing systems to sweep up tickets and have become illegal in many places.
Ticketmaster invests millions in technology and human moderation to identify and block bot acitivity. In fact, in 2016 Ticketmaster blocked nearly six million attempts by bots to access our sites.
As part of our continued commitment to battling bots in Australia and New Zealand, we have implemented a series of major new technical steps to protect ticket inventory from bots and improve the customer purchase experience.
The three-step strategy takes the following form:
1. Bot Manager (Third party solution)
2. DeCaptcha
3. Real time ticket limits
Bot Manager is the first in this series of major new technical steps across Ticketmaster AU and NZ, adding significant back-end security to both sites.
With Bot Manager, we have the capabilities to identify and block bot traffic, and in turn, this will allow us to mitigate the impact bots are able to have on our business and infrastructure.
The next step is DeCaptcha, which changes the way Google ReCaptcha operates on our website.
With DeCaptcha enabled, Ticketmaster customers will only see Google Recaptcha during the presale period and during the first 30 minutes of an onsale.
Previously, Google Recaptcha was active for all customers who made a purchase via Ticketmaster’s desktop, mobile web and mobile apps, regardless of whether the event was in presale, general sale or right before the event itself.
The release of Decaptcha will significantly improve the ticket-buying experience for Ticketmaster customers, ensuring they can buy tickets quickly and with the knowledge that bots are still being blocked.
From there, we will implement real time ticket limits to allow every fan a fair shot at accessing tickets when they go on sale. The benefit of real time software means we can prevent ticket limit violations as they occur and can make more inventory available for real fans to purchase.
How does it work? Every transaction on every event will be automatically inspected for ticket limit violations before it they are allowed to be completed. Tickets found to be over the limit are released back for sale to other fans.
When’s it all happening? Bot Manager has now been rolled out across Ticketmaster Australia and New Zealand, and we are now working to implement the next two steps.
