I have purchased secondary tickets outside of TicketMaster many times and the fee has always been lower. But, that's anecdotal of course... there's no reason why they couldn't be higher. But, let's leave the actual fee amount aside for a moment...

I'm slightly less concerned with the actual amount of the fee and more concerned with the fact that ticket scalping has apparently become legal and that the original ticket seller is not only in on it, but getting even higher fees on the scalped tickets than the original tickets.

It's disturbing that it's illegal to scalp a single ticket in person outside an event, but if someone does it online with hundreds of tickets then they're a "ticket broker" and that's legal (in California at least).