This week’s Sunday Times spotlighted the dynamic-pricing industry’s tightening grip on the professional sports world, especially Major League Baseball. Qcue, Inc., a 2010 Austin Technology Incubator graduate, is leading the way.
Dynamic pricing enables ticket sellers to change ticket prices to meet demand as often as day-to-day up to the date of the event. Qcue is the world’s sole proprietor of a dynamic pricing engine for live entertainment events.
According to the article, the San Francisco Giants, a Qcue client, made a quick decision to hike Memorial-Day ticket prices as fans rushed to grab seats for the just-revealed ace-v.-ace pitching matchup. As a result the game, which pitted Giants’ all-star Tim Lincecum against the Colorado Rockies’ Ubaldo Jiménez, the Major-League leader in wins and earned run average (ERA), earned an additional $80,000 in ticket sales.
In one weekend, Qcue’s Dynamic Pricing Engine enabled the team management to sell the remaining 10,000 available seats to fill the stadium at an average of $8 more per ticket.
As seen in the article, numbers like that can’t help but give Qcue CEO Barry Kahn confidence in his emerging industry. “It’s really hard to have better info on what your games are worth, what your sections are worth, and sit on that,” Kahn told The Times.
The predictive data Qcue’s algorithms deliver – game-to-game and section-to-section – will only grow in their appeal to sports teams.
Read the full story here.
About Qcue
Qcue is reinventing the primary ticket marketplace with the world’s only dynamic pricing engine for live entertainment events. Sports teams, concert promoters and venues use Qcue’s patent-pending technology to set the right price at the right time and provide the best value for fans, from the date of on-sale to the date of the event. Customers and partners include the San Francisco Giants, Major League Baseball and Tickets.com. Founded in 2007, Qcue is based in Austin, Texas. Qcue grew out of economics research at the University of Texas and has received funding from the State’s Emerging Technology Fund. For more information, visit www.qcue.net.
