How Event Platforms Saved Infrastructure Costs & Restored Fan Trust During On-Sales

For ticketing operators, not to mention fans, high-demand on-sales events can create the perfect storm, with scalping bots and scrapers pinging sites every 20 to 30 seconds, overwhelming servers, causing infrastructure meltdowns, and frustrating real fans. Here’s the problem: legacy bot protection tools often can’t identify scalpers and other nasty automated agents. This means operators must manually check IP ranges and accounts, which is both a time-consuming and imprecise process.

The damage caused by scrapers and scalpers can be profound. As well as the strain on infrastructure and loss of fan trust, consequences include unnecessary chargebacks and financial losses, and the sort of negative PR that hits brand reputation hard. This scenario was exactly the one experienced by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, whose on-sales were repeatedly targeted and disrupted by automated resellers.

The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust - Regaining Control

The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust case is one of real operators, real fans, real chaos, and real transformation, and is a clear example of how event platforms can take back control from the bots and restore fairness for fans. For years, the trust was under relentless siege from automated agents every time tickets went on sale. Even outside major ticket drops, this created constant background noise, putting pressure on the infrastructure, inflating traffic, and causing site-wide problems.

During big releases, the trust’s site suffered a barrage of automated requests, with millions hitting endpoints at the same time. To survive the onslaught and keep the site up and running, the trust was forced to increase bandwidth, spin up extra server instances, and add temporary caching layers, as well as manually monitor, in real time, suspicious traffic. As well as increasing costs, this scenario was demoralizing for trust staff and fans alike, with the latter facing slow queues, site crashes, and unfair access to events. And to add insult to injury, tickets were subsequently appearing on secondary markets within minutes, at inflated prices.

The Fight Back

For the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, replacing their legacy waiting room with the DataDome solution was the turning point, marking the start of the fight back against malicious automated bots. For the trust, the change was both immediate and dramatic:

● Bots were filtered out before they could even enter the queuing system, meaning only authentic visitors populated the waiting room.

● The virtual waiting room was able to cope with traffic surges without adding load, so the trust no longer needed to over-provision servers.

● Real fans enjoyed faster entry to the queue, predictable waiting times, no sudden site crashes, and no latency at checkout.

A major on-sale launched by the trust shortly after deployment shows how effectively DataDome stops ticket scalper bots. During this time, DataDome blocked 3.2 million unique malicious IPs, nearly 19 million automated slider attempts, and 99.99% of scalper traffic, without disrupting or annoying genuine fans. Despite the massive scale of this attack, the trust experienced no site downtime, unnecessary server over-provisioning, or latency, and had zero complaints from fans about queue fairness. This was a reset of the highest magnitude.

A Fair, Controlled, and Predictable On-Sale Experience

Rather than allowing all traffic (including bots) to enter the virtual waiting room and keeping fingers crossed that the queue could absorb the load, the trust now had a system that ensured the waiting room reflected real human demand and applied real-time decisioning (in less than two minutes) to every request. This meant no latency was added for genuine fans (in the form of CAPTCHA challenges and the like), even during launch spikes.

The bots that had previously been battering the trust’s site were now consistently and reliably filtered out, with the system continuously checking for automated agents throughout the entire queuing process.

Restoring Fan Trust

For fans, the impact of the new system was revolutionary. As well as fewer complaints, this was evidenced by more successful checkouts, less backlash appearing on social media, and a general sense that the process was finally fairer. This was great for the trust’s bottom line and staff morale, with fewer angry fans to deal with, reduced chargebacks, and a better relationship with the wider community.

Fans had faced years of bot-driven disruption, with this menace gradually eating away at trust and the trust’s connection with the fan community. For example, fans regularly queued for long periods only to experience site crashes at checkout or discover that all the tickets were sold out. While the scalpers were thriving, genuine fans felt cheated, shut out, and increasingly frustrated. The fallout was felt by the trust’s customer service team, in the form of accusations of unfairness, rage-filled emails, and requests for refunds.

DataDome’s virtual waiting room solution eliminated the chaos and protected ticket inventory from bots. Tickets remained available for longer, rather than disappearing into secondary resale markets; checkouts were a smoother process, and the whole experience felt human again, rather than a battle against a bot army.

Operational Calm Seas

By stabilizing on-sales and eliminating scraper and scalping bots, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust achieved smoother operations and reduced infrastructure spend, effectively regaining control of their platform. This was reflected in lower cloud costs, reduced engineering stress, the need for fewer emergency interventions, and repeatable, predictable, on-sales performance. In short, everyone was happy - apart from the scalpers.

Whereas before using DataDome, the trust was constantly firefighting, now ticketing events were calm and controlled. Instead of feeling like a crisis waiting to happen, on-sales were smooth affairs that didn’t generate operational issues or bad vibes from fans. This prompted an important psychological shift, too, with the trust’s team no longer feeling under constant attack and major ticket drops run without the background fear of disaster. For the trust leaders, this meant restored confidence in the platform’s stability, and staff experienced higher levels of morale once it became clear that successful drops were now the norm, not the exception.

Another Case Study: DataDome to the Rescue

A performing arts center, of a similar size to the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, was fed up with every major ticket drop resulting in scalper bots laying siege to its site, and sudden traffic surges overwhelming system infrastructure. As in the trust case study, these things were resulting in negative customer sentiment and expensive over-provisioning of servers.

The center deployed the DataDome virtual waiting room solution along with the platform’s robust real-time bot protection and saw amazing results. During a high-demand ticket drop for a Broadway show, DataDome blocked literally millions of malicious requests made by bots trying to skip the queue, meaning infrastructure load stayed in the green and fan sentiment markedly improved. Social media comments even praised the fairness and stability of the platform and ticket-buying process.

Fairness and Stability as Essential Infrastructure

DataDome’s innovative approach puts fairness and stability at the heart of on-sales, blending a queue system that ensures integrity and real-time, consistently strong bot protection to defend against a range of automated threats. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and others reveal the same pattern: when scalpers lose ground, costs fall, customer trust returns, and on-sales become smoother in general. DataDome delivers every time on this score, with a solution that gives real fans the opportunities and experiences they deserve.