As expected, it didn't take long for the Eurovision Song Contest tickets to find their way onto the black market! esctoday.com decided to monitor the auction sites to see how long it would take, and sure enough, within a matter of hours, official tickets for the Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki could be found on Huuto.net, the Finnish version of eBay. The first ones appeared early afternoon on Sunday 10th December.

The black market is always a problem and this year YLE and EBU tried to fight it with a five tickets per person limit, but the measure, as predicted by many,may not have worked so well. Around 6pm for example the first offer for tickets appeared on Huuto.net. The starting price was 1560 but only for the final tickets and two rehearsals for four persons (12 tickets instead of the 16 included originally in the package), and the minimum raise was 50 euros. At least three others followed with various combinations for tickets. Characteristically, we mention an offer for two Semi Final tickets Category B for 590 euros, where the regular price for them was €180.

It is fair to expect to see a flood of this kind of offers in the coming days and weeks. This year's selling method in packages of four is certain to haveforced many a true fan to buy tickets for events they never intended to go to. It takes an extremely dedicated fan to sit through 3 rehearsals before the final. Besides unwanted tickets being sold by fans, it is expected that there will be a fair amount of tickets sold by scalpers, and additional tickets bought by fans in order to sell them on to recover the high cost of the tickets that they actually want to use themselve. The price of these tickets are also likely to rise steadily as the Eurovision Song Contest approaches, and many of the tickets are unlikely to appear on these sites until the last few weeks before the event.