Ticketmaster has long been pulling a quick one on its customers with convenience fees. So when some Facebook users saw a way to return the favor, they jumped on it.
As recently as last week, more than 150,000 people on Facebook said they were a fan of Ticketmaster. That’s more than Hillary Clinton, John McCain or even Starbucks. Ticketmaster’s profile was Facebook’s fifth-most popular page.
It seems that that’s because the majority of these people weren’t real, and were only in it for the music.
If you looked at Ticketmaster’s fans list you would have noticed that a surprisingly large number of them don’t have a profile picture. Many also don’t have any friends or belong to any networks.
But the real tip-off was the names of many of Ticketmaster’s faceless fans, which were generic, ridiculous or seemingly just created by someone mashing their keyboard.
This anomaly was first reported by East Village Idiot, and then the whole Internet caught on. Ticketmaster has since lost 90,000 fans, more than South Park currently has, and has dropped to 52nd place.
It looks like for once, Ticketmaster was taken advantage of by normal people, instead of the other way around. Though Ticketmaster and Facebook have made no official comment, the Internet consensus is that a marketing campaign encouraged Facebook users to wantonly break the social network’s terms of service.
Through November, anyone who became a Facebook fan of Ticketmaster received a code for five free songs from iTunes. This promotion had no restrictions, and it didn’t matter if your profile was obviously fake. So people went crazy, creating thousands of fake profiles to get tons of free songs. And, really, who wouldn’t?
Except that it is clearly against Facebook’s terms of service, which requires users to “agree not to use the Service or the Site to register for more than one User account, register for a User account on behalf of an individual other than yourself, or register for a User account on behalf of any group or entity.”
While the promotion might have temporarily improved the image of a company known for its “convenience fees,” the Internet buzzed with stories about Ticketmaster either faking its Facebook rise, or of Ticketmaster being royally duped. Friendship cancellations sent the Ticketmaster page to below-Nutella popularity on Facebook.
It probably hasn’t been fun for Ticketmaster, who has long been desperate for positive PR. On CafePress you can buy everything from thongs to teddy bears emblazoned with “Ticketbastard”.
The angry and organized can visit ticketmastersucks.org or ticketmastersucks.info. In addition to “convenience fees,” these sites take issue with Ticketmaster’s privacy policy. Most online companies promise not to give your information to any third parties. Ticketmaster says no to third parties, but yes to a whole different list, including all of its sister companies, Match.com, Collegehumor.com, Ask.com, Citysearch.com, Ticketweb.com, Evite.com, Vimeo.com, BustedTees.com and dozens of other sites — pretty much the whole Internet.
Still, at the end of the day, Facebook users got more than their fair share of free songs, and others got to laugh at silly names. Ticketmaster certainly got what it asked for: a bunch of free publicity.