How the Scammers Beat the Olympics at Internet Ticketing

8/19/2008

If ethics had been an Olympic event, then the people behind the internet scams that promised Olympics tickets to unsuspecting buyers, but never delivered those tickets, would have come in dead last. However, change that event to producing websites that cater to a ticket buyer’s every need — other than getting the actual ticket, of course — and the scammers would have likely won the gold, while those responsible for the official Olympics ticket site would have been lucky to even place.

As more than a few ticket buyers have reported, when they went online in search of Olympics tickets, their Google searches returned lists with the scam sites ranked significantly higher than the official Olympics tickets website. Even when they refined their search to find “official Olympics tickets,” the scam sites were still perched at the top of the list. Some who did make it to the official site had so much trouble buying tickets there that they gave up and looked for alternatives — which frequently ended up being a scam site.

How this happened — and how in particular beijingticketing.com, a scam website less than a year old, managed to climb past the nine-year-old CoSport.com, the Olympics’ official website, to take the top position on both Google and Yahoo — is something Christian Vuong wanted to figure out. Vuong, an internet-marketing expert for WPromote, which in 2007 was ranked the number one search engine marketing firm by Inc. 500, pulled up the official Olympics site and the leading scam site and began to examine what each was doing right, and what each was doing wrong. He didn’t find much right with the official site, though he’s reluctant to say that directly. What he will say is that the official site could have learned a lot from how the scam site was put together.

In early August he posted his analysis of the two sites to his blog. In it, Vuong determined that the scam site was more user-friendly and made it easier for people to buy tickets (even if they were never going to see them); paid more attention to, and gave more information about, the Olympics themselves; understood better what they needed to do to raise themselves in Google rankings so that when people searched for tickets, they were the first website, or among the first, found; and made better use of the growing community orientation of the world wide web. Actually, making better use of the web community wasn’t very difficult for beijingticketing.com, given that CoSport.com, the official site, ignored that aspect of the internet completely.

The user-friendliness advantage is clear from looking at the two sites’ home pages. At the very top the scam site invites people to “Buy Now.” Then it lists a number of different events to buy tickets for. It provides large graphics to click on for special tickets. It, in essence, warmly welcomes you. The official site, in contrast, looks almost cold. It welcomes you not to the Olympics, but to the website itself. The home page offers no tickets at all, but instead directs you to “click here” to go to another site that might have tickets, though what those specific tickets might be isn’t said. There are no pictures of athletes or athletic events, but only of Chinese tourist attractions, including an almost unrecognizable Olympic stadium. The look is static, the information limited.

Even worse is what information is provided. The scam site talks about the Olympics, talks about particular sporting events, talks about the things that someone interested in attending the Olympics would be eager to know. The official site talks primarily about CoSport, the company selling the tickets, rather than the Olympics themselves. There is one video on the home page, and it’s about, as the title explains, the “CoSport Experience.” It features multiple CoSport employees, but not a single Olympic athlete. At first, and even second, glance the website appears to be a promotional site for CoSport the company, not the official ticketing site of the Olympics. It’s easy to see how someone seeking Olympics tickets could come to the site and think they’d reached the wrong place.

The lack of Olympics information is one thing that helped sink CoSport in the Google rankings, just as the wealth of Olympics information provided by the scam site helped it to rise. “Because they [the scam site] were talking about the individual sports, be it archery, basketball, tennis, or anything else, there were more possible ways that people could find out about the website,” Vuong says. “For example, if there was a page specifically on U.S. Men’s Basketball — and there was on beijingticketing.com, but not on the CoSport site — when people are searching for Men’s Basketball tickets, the chances are that the beijingticketing.com page will appear in Google’s results. By targeting every single sport, they were trying to build up their ranking in Google, and they did.”

Another thing that helped beijingticketing.com move past CoSport.com in the Google rankings was the depth of the site. CoSport.com contained only seven pages, five of which contained duplicate information. Beijingticketing.com, on the other hand, had almost 2,000 pages. In Google’s eyes, that depth made them better, because it suggested they had more to offer. This difference in offerings was even apparent in how the sites described themselves in their Google listings. CoSport said only that it was the “Official Website for Olympic Tickets and Accommodation Sales.” As a description, it added the less than clear, “Olympic Hospitality Provider.” Beijingticketing.com, in contrast, used its title tag, the place where a description goes, to promote itself by saying “Beijing Olympic Tickets. Buy 2008 Olympic Tickets.” Then in its description it added, “Buy Beijing 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony Tickets and other Olympics games tickets on BeijingTicketing.com! The Worldwide dealer in Olympics Tickets.” It’s a bit of a hard sell, no doubt, but unlike with CoSport, there would be no question in the mind of the person using Google just what beijingticketing.com was all about.

There were other areas in which the scam site surpassed the official one, in particular its use of what is known as Web 2.0. That term has come to reflect the newer websites that are more community oriented, that try to build on what used to be known as word of mouth. In its links, beijingticketing.com asked visitors to tell their friends about the website, to mention it on social sites such as Facebook or StumbleUpon or Reddit. Such requests helped spread the word of the site, and helped create more visitors, who in turn would be solicited to promote the site even more. CoSport, in contrast, made no use of this type of internet interaction.

When asked if CoSport’s clumsiness in promoting itself on the web meant it was behind the times, Vuong was ambivalent. “I don’t want to say they’re behind the times,” he notes, “but I will say they could definitely have done a lot more work than they did on it if they really wanted to dominate the Google results for all their offerings and all their tickets. I think they have a lot of room to improve if they want to prevent another incident in the next Olympics.”

Whether CoSport and Olympics officials will learn from their internet failures remains an open question. The Vancouver Olympic Committee, which is in charge of the 2010 Winter Olympics, has promised to avoid the problems that beset the Beijing games, among them internet ticket scams. But while it has promised more diligent warnings about scams, one thing it hasn’t mentioned is simply producing a better official Olympics website, one that can actually compete in the internet marketplace with the scam sites that are sure to emerge. If that basic change isn’t made, then all the warnings in the world may not be enough.