Auction giant eBay is rolling out a new system to prevent charity event tickets from being used for unfair profiteering.
The company says it will begin a scheme allowing any charity organisation in Britain to recoup a slice of profit from resold tickets – handing a percentage of the money back to the charity concerned, rather than seeing it fill the pockets of touts.
The idea is to prevent those who get hold of tickets to charity events from selling them for vastly inflated prices on the web without giving back to charity. That practice, widely criticised by event organisers, has become commonplace as increasing numbers seek to profit from selling access to exclusive, star-studded charity events.
In the past eBay has come in for criticism for allowing such deals to take place, most notably in the run-up to events such as 2005's Live 8 concert, where free tickets to the London gig featuring Madonna and Pink Floyd were trading hands online for as much as £500 each. Those sales were eventually banned after Sir Bob Geldof labelled them "sick profiteering".
The new scheme lets people resell similar tickets, but forces them to return at least 20% of the auction price back to the original organisation - and deletes listings by sellers who do not donate. In recent weeks the company has started manually removing all such listings from its website, but has promised that its system will begin automatically deleting offending adverts "within a few weeks".
The new scheme will also mean any event where more than 50% of profits go to charity can be registered in order to ensure that cash from ticket reselling goes to the appropriate parties.
"We will also introduce a ban on the sale of tickets for events where all the tickets are free," said Mark Lewis, the managing director for eBay in the UK.
The system was trialled last year for the Live Earth concerts, promoted by Al Gore and aimed at increasing environmental awareness. Figures from eBay suggest around £30,000 in extra revenue was raised through official ticket re-selling. More recently the system has been used for an event put together by the Teenage Cancer Trust.
Charities will have to notify eBay in advance in order to make use of the system, but not every group is likely to be convinced by the idea, however. At the time of the Live 8 debacle, concert promoter Harvey Goldsmith accused the site of "black marketeering".
The effort is eBay's latest attempt to try and improve its public standing, after recent unrest from some users over its feedback policies.
In January the company's chief executive Meg Whitman announced that she was standing down after 10 years in the job, following a period of stagnation at California-based web giant and gloomy predictions from market analysts.
But despite potential backlash from the powerful community of touts, the company said it did not fear any reprisals over its plans.
"We defend the right for people to sell what is theirs, but we accept that there is strong feeling out there in relation to charity concerts," said eBay spokeswoman Vanessa Canzini.
"I don't think we're going to have any reaction from our community. If we lose a few users who don't agree with it, we're quite relaxed… at the end of the day, it's the right thing to do."
