Over the past two and a half years, we’ve poured countless time into building a canonical database of live events in the US. Not only have we cataloged when and where each event is happening, but we also built a system that attaches copious metadata to each event–e.g., the latitude/longitude of the venue, the number of tickets currently listed, etc. Thus far, that database has been used exclusively to power the pages on SeatGeek.com. But we musn’t be selfish! Thus, we recently announced The SeatGeek Platform. Developers can use the Platform to add live event info to existing apps or as a foundation for entirely new apps that deal with live events.
The SeatGeek Platform is composed of our event, performer, and venue data, a REST API, our Partner Program, and a developer support community. The API exposes a mother lode of live event info—nearly all of the data you see available on SeatGeek.com, plus a lot more. Full documentation is here. The Partner Program gives Platform users an easy way to monetize. Anyone who signs up earns a 50/50 rev share whenever a user buys tickets using one of their links. For current partners, that has worked out to about $11 every time one of your users buys a ticket. A few of us on the SeatGeek dev team are closely tracking posts on the support forum, so if you have any questions about the API, just post there and you will get a prompt, thorough response.
How might someone use this thing? A quick example: Let’s say that Sarah runs a site for her indie record label, SBeats, which gets a lot of traffic from fans. Since the record business isn’t massively lucrative these days (shocking, I know!) Sarah is looking for new ways to monetize. She’d also like to add a bit more content to her label’s site. She uses the SeatGeek API to pull in data about which of her artists are touring. She displays that info in a module on each artist’s page. To give users a bit of context, she pulls the “low price” field from the API to show the cost of the cheapest ticket for each show. Whenever a user clicks on a link for a show and buys a ticket, Sarah earns $11, on average.
We’re pumped about this launch. For the first time, we’re exposing our data to developers everywhere. I can’t wait to see what people build.