Somewhere right now, a museum is cutting its opening hours to balance a budget — while a reseller takes a cut of every ticket to that same museum, for the service of standing in the doorway.
A reseller bids on the museum's own name in search ads. "Louvre tickets." "Vatican Museums entry." They outrank the institution on its own identity, catch you on the way in, and add their commission or markup. The museum gets a rigged choice: pay the toll to distribute its own tickets, or lose the visitor to a marked-up copy of itself.
The institution restores the frescoes, pays the guards, keeps the roof standing. The middleman contributes a checkout button and a tracking pixel — and skims the culture budget for it.
Ad spend buys impressions. Impressions buy reviews. Reviews buy authority. Authority buys cheaper impressions. The wheel turns and at no point does it measure the only thing that matters: whether you paid the real price at the real window.
At the far end of that spectrum sit outright fakes — cloned official sites with a logo and a checkout. The legal end and the criminal end are doing the same move: standing between people and culture, charging rent on the doorway.
We verify the official source for every venue — by machine, by open data, by hand — and we hand you to it. The official domain, printed where you can read it. The official price, stated so you know when you're being marked up. Then we get out of the way.
Resellers count impressions. We count something else: