Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, SECUTIX, Etix – these are all platforms that handle high-demand venue drops, and yet are not blighted by the disruptions that come with that.
Scrapers and scalper bots have been an issue for the events industry for years now, using automated tools to flood sales with traffic and ultimately snatch up inventory before real fans can get their hands on it.
The struggle for many providers, then, is working to ensure botnet prevention without sacrificing the customer experience and inadvertently punishing them.
The Struggle
Looking a little bit closer at this, the issue isn’t that high demand is inherently problematic, but that a significant portion of that demand can’t necessarily be trusted.
Indeed, AI-driven bad bots now take up 51% of internet traffic, and scrapers and scalpers can repeatedly ping a site every 20 seconds, checking whether tickets have become available and attempting to secure them the moment they do.
On a major onsale, that seemingly small amount of activity can multiply rapidly as thousands of automated sessions operate simultaneously, resulting in a flood of requests that the platform has to process.
This then creates an infrastructure problem that can be surprisingly expensive, because suddenly, servers and APIs have to accommodate traffic that has little legitimate value, yet takes up a huge amount of computing capacity.
During particularly intense drops, the sheer volume of requests can easily contribute to crashes and performance issues, simply because a company’s computing resources are being stretched beyond their intended capacity, and this then leads these companies to scale up their infrastructure, paying higher server and infrastructure costs to handle the additional traffic and the demand it creates.
Indeed, the damage doesn’t stop at the technology layer, because fans aren’t distinguishing between legitimate demand and automated traffic.
When a site becomes slow, they simply see a platform that is failing to give them a good experience, and that frustration can quickly become negative PR, spilling over onto social media and into the press.
For companies, then, there’s a hugely difficult balancing act. Blocking too little means allowing automated traffic to consume resources, but blocking too aggressively risks catching legitimate customers and eroding their trust.
The challenge is to remove malicious traffic early enough to protect their infrastructure, while allowing genuine customers to move through the buying journey with as little friction as possible.
The Solution
As we mentioned above, platforms like Pittsburgh Cultural Trust have achieved this, and they’ve done so by implementing a dedicated botnet prevention solution that actually works.
In this case, the process has been streamlined by DataDome’s Virtual Waiting Room, a dynamic queuing system that works to control traffic before it reaches the underlying infrastructure.
To understand how it solves the problem, it’s important to put it into context. Many of the affected platforms don’t ignore bot traffic, of course, they just have a standard waiting room that isn’t equipped to deal with it.
While a traditional waiting room will check all visitors once at entry – if at all – with pre-queue filtering and continuous mid-session validation, combined with behavioral analysis to identify suspicious activity before and after admission.
Likewise, a traditional waiting room will not differentiate between bots and humans, while DataDome’s solution is reserved strictly for genuine humans and trusted AI agents – such as shopping assistants or automated accessibility tools.
Not only this, but a standard waiting room will add CAPTCHAs and a range of other challenges to identify human visitors, ultimately adding friction and potentially frustrating customers along the way, while DataDome evaluates intent in under 2ms at the edge, blocking bot traffic before it consumes bandwidth and strains resources.
The Key Benefits
Perhaps the key benefits to highlight, however, involve both efficiency and accuracy.
For instance, DataDome’s Virtual Waiting Room ensures 0% unnecessary server over-provisioning during 2-hour launch spikes, which helps to reduce those infrastructure costs we mentioned while maintaining a reliable experience during periods of high demand.
When it comes to distinguishing scalper bots from genuine human buyers, too, there’s 99.99% accuracy – which, again, is important when it comes to protecting legitimate customers without introducing friction or false positives.
Trust is important to maintain, of course – especially if you want to avoid the negative PR we mentioned earlier and if a customer has a good, smooth experience where they’re not blocked for being something they’re not, they’re going to remember it.
Altogether, it’s these capabilities that have made the difference for a number of established ticketing platforms, and as time moves on and bots become more sophisticated, they’re only going to become more of a necessity.
To survive as an event platform in 2026, there needs to be a keen focus on strong bot detection, otherwise the infrastructure will crumble and customers will look elsewhere.
The solutions are out there to take advantage of, so it’s up to the providers to recognize that and recognize how essential they’ll be moving forward.
