Analysts now say the Internet is helping to move the secondary market out of the back alleys and into the boardroom. Internet companies such as TicketsNow.com and StubHub are trying to clean up the industry's image by weeding out con artists, offering up no-nonsense pricing and guaranteeing on-time delivery.

Of course, reselling tickets online isn't new. Some teams and opportunistic ticket holders have been doing it for years. The difference now is that the majority of professional sports teams, primary ticket companies and music venues that once shunned the secondary market are either jumping into the business or partnering with one of the top secondary companies.

On Tuesday, TicketsNow announced that it had become the official seller of secondary tickets for the National Football League's Baltimore Ravens. San Francisco-based StubHub has similar agreements with seven NFL teams as well as with various National Hockey League teams and college franchises.

"The sports clubs are acknowledging that there is a free market for tickets," said Carrie Johnson, an e-commerce analyst for Forrester Research. "They'd rather the sales happened safely than in a willy-nilly way."

The size of the overall secondary market is hard to pin down, said Johnson. Estimates vary dramatically, from $2 billion to $25 billion a year. The overall industry is mostly driven by season ticket holders who can't use all their tickets. In the past, these people would sell the extras to individual brokers, who in turn would sell them, sometimes for far more than a ticket's face value. Before the Internet, zealous fans who'd do anything to see Led Zeppelin or U2 could end up paying far more than the market value, as there was no easy way to compare prices. More>>>

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