Excite (ATHM) AtHome is adding ticket sales to its offerings, thanks to a hefty $55 million investment in Tickets.com. Joining the party is Cox Interactive Media, which will sink another $30 million into the online-ticketing firm.
The deals give cobranded ticketing services and a searchable database of events and venues to the Excite portal and to CIMedia's 26 local guide sites for U.S. cities. CIMedia parent Cox Enterprises owns 8 percent of Excite AtHome. Tickets.com filed for an IPO in June and is in its quiet period.
Like rival Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch, Tickets.com provides its services to a big roster of stadiums, concert halls and performing arts centers. In return, it gets a cut of the service fee added to the price of the tickets. The company serves as the exclusive ticket seller for most of its 3,800 venue clients.
Tickets.com's willingness to cobrand its services made it a more attractive partner than other ticketing companies, says Mark Stevens, Excite AtHome's executive VP of strategic corporate and business development. He adds that the companies plan to add other integrated features. "If you're searching on Bob Dylan on the entertainment channel, a suggestion will pop up that says, 'Hey, Bob Dylan also happens to be on tour, and here's how you can buy tickets,'" explains Stevens.
The integration with CIMedia's network of sites gives Tickets.com exposure in the local events marketplace. CIMedia President Peter Winter says ticketing adds bells and whistles to the company's offerings, which he prefers to compare not with other city-guide sites but with portals like Yahoo (YHOO).
"Local city sites generally rank lower than portals, because they don't offer the mix of functionality that the portals offer," says Winter. "We needed to find a differentiating edge in areas the marketplace says is important. The marketplace said it wanted ticketing; now it will have ticketing."
Tickets.com is the latest in a string of Web investments made by CIMedia - the division of Cox Enterprises (dossier) that heads up the media company's Net ventures. Past investments have included chat site Talk City, women's network iVillage (IVIL), search engine LookSmart (LOOK), gaming network Mpath and, most recently, music site MP3.com, which Winters says will eventually help Cox spruce up its radio-station sites.
"Right now there is no irresistable reason to visit [the radio sites]," notes Winters. "In the future we plan to embed MP3 technology." That way, he explains, local bands who distribute MP3 files through the individual radio sites can draw Web surfers looking to check out their local-music scene.
Cutthroat competition between Ticketmaster and Tickets.com has led to litigation in which the former accused the latter of making false advertising claims. Neither company would comment about the lawsuit.
