eBay has announced that viagogo has agreed to purchase StubHub for $4.05 billion in cash.
eBay purchased StubHub for $310 million in 2007. StubHub claims to be “the world’s most trusted ticket marketplace spanning 44 countries.” It’s business partners include “the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, MLS, WWE, NCAA, Matchroom Boxing, plus Paciolan, Tessitura and Roundabout Theatre Company. StubHub provides the total end-to-end event going experience throughout the world.”
Rival viagogo was founded by Eric Baker, the same individual who co-founded StubHub. Baker left the company before eBay purchased it in 2007. Nevertheless, he was upbeat about bringing together his two creations and combining their resources.
“It has long been my wish to unite the two companies. I am so proud of how StubHub has grown over the years and excited about the possibilities for our shared future,” Baker said. “Buyers will have a wider choice of tickets, and sellers will have a wider network of buyers. Bringing these two companies together creates a win-win for fans – more choice and better pricing.”
Together, the two companies “will sell hundreds of thousands of tickets daily across more than 70 countries.” Despite StubHub’s success, eBay ultimately is divesting itself of the company to streamline its focus.
“We believe this transaction is a great outcome and maximizes long-term value for eBay shareholders,” said Scott Schenkel, interim chief executive officer of eBay Inc. “Over the past several months, eBay’s leadership team and Board of Directors have been engaged in a thorough review of our current strategies and portfolio, and we concluded that this was the best path forward for both eBay and StubHub. We firmly believe in the StubHub business and we are excited about its future growth potential with viagogo as its owner.”
Provided the deal receives regulatory approval, eBay expects it to close by the end of Q1 2020.
eBay-owned ticket marketplace, StubHub, has launched a new weekly scorecard aimed at gauging the “true popularity” of college football teams among fans, based on its own internal data.
StubHub’s system uses the AP Top 25 as a starting point, then uses the weekly pageviews for the teams, and ranks them by which are the most popular. Each Tuesday, StubHub releases the rankings. At the end of the year, they’ll unveil which were the most popular of the season.
Here’s what StubHub’s top 25 looks like right now:
After looking at the early figures from comedian Louis C.K., it was hard to call his most recent direct-to-fans venture anything but a massive success. After announcing that he planned to forgo Ticketmaster or any other similar service and sell tickets for his upcoming standup tour straight to fans on his website, Louis C.K. gave us some encouraging news:
Less than 48 hours after ticket sales opened up on his site, the tour had sold 100,000 tickets. With a flat cost of $45 per ticket, you can probably do the math. But for the lazy, that’s a gross of $4.5 million.
It was clear the Louis C.K. is very serious about this new model for ticket sales.
“Making my shows affordable has always been my goal but two things have always worked against that. High ticket charges and ticket re-sellers marking up the prices,” he said in an email to fans. “Some ticketing services charge more than 40% over the ticket price and, ironically, the lower I’ve made my ticket prices, the more scalpers have bought them up, so the more fans have paid for a lot of my tickets.”
So Good Guy Louis C.K. sincerely wants his shows to be more accesible to his growing throngs of fans. That’s absolutely believable considering last year he released his latest comedy special online, DRM-free for $5. Louis C.K. started a trend with that “Live at Beacon” release – one that was shortly followed by the likes of Aziz Ansari and Jim Gaffigan.
Despite his warnings and good intentions, it’s unavoidable that people have seen the low $45 price money and vision of scalping danced through their heads. A quick trip to StubHub shows four tickets available for his October 27th show at the New York City Center – and they’re going for around $245 a piece.
Here’s where we are with the scalpers as of now…
I’m doing 67 shows on this tour and we’ve sold 135,600 tickets to those shows after one week on sale.
In addition to the tour, I’m doing two shows in one city that are on sale through traditional ticketing.*
So as a comparison…There are 1100 tickets available on stubhub alone for those two traditionally ticketed shows out of 4,400 available ( Almost exactly 25%). and these shows aren’t sold out yet.
There are less than 500 tickets available on all scalper sites (including stubhub) out of the entire 135,600 tickets that have already been sold, from the tour sold exclusively on my site, louisck.com (substantially less than 1%)
So it’s working. So far.
He’s right about the breakdown of tickets. The two shows (Trump Taj Mahal, Atlantic City) not being sold for $45 on his site currently have over 1100 tickets available on StubHub alone. Plenty of his other shows are available on StubHub, but each of them only offer a couple of ticket as available. Two-four mostly, and occasionally as many as 16-20.
He continued:
Our goal is to get even these 500 or less tickets back into the hands of fans at their original price. How we are doing that is our business that I won’t share right now. But so far our plan is working and we have learned a lot. The main message I’d like to convey to ticket-buyers out there is that buying a scalper ticket to one of my shows is a tremendous risk (well, a risk equal to how much you paid for it).
Contact with these scalpers has been enlightening. They tend to respond with indignance and a defensive posture “Hey man! Scalping is NOT a crime!” We’re not treating it as a crime or even a wrong-doing. We are just competing with them, on behalf of my fans, to enforce the terms and conditions of our ticket sales and to keep the prices down. It’s worth the effort, it’s working and it’s even been kind of fun.
Jesus christ, these shows better be fucking good.
Has Louis C.K. figured it all out? I’m sure he’d tell you no, but he continues to have success doing it his way. And you, the guy sitting on your couch laughing your ass off, should be happy about that.
eBay launched StubHub, its secondary ticketing service, in the United Kingdom today. This marks the first international expansion for StubHub. The company is positioning it as an attept to “shake up the UK ticketing market”.
The company will sell tickets to various music, sporting and entertainment events, just as it does in the US.
“The UK has an incredibly rich and vibrant event landscape with an amazing sporting, music and theatre scene and we are looking forward to bringing UK fans our customer centric approach that has made us not only the largest ticket marketplace in the US but also the best at serving fans,” said StubHub CEO Chris Tsakalakis.
Physical ticket buying and pick-up locations are opening in London’s West End, and across the UK.
eBay acquired StubHub in 2007, and StubHub itself has been making acquisitions of late as well. In fact, just last week, eBay announced StubHub’s acquisition of Peekspy, makers of FanVenues 3D mapping technology, which lets users look at seating results.
In late December, StubHub acquired Zvents, giving the service access to 100 times the events it already had. That was a big one.
eBay’s StubHub has acquired Peekspy, makers of the Fanvenues 3D mapping service. On its site, FanVenues calls itself “The Google of seat views for sports and concert fans.”
OK. I guess that means the place where people go to search for seat views?
“We create 3-dimensional real-life spaces for the web with your own customised and interactive features,” Peekspy explains on its site. “Our range of products enables your customers to visit your space (indoor or outdoor) by simply browsing the web. Combining fun, interaction and sense of real-life experience, users can locate information within buildings, get directions to desired destinations or choose to freely navigate within the 3D environment. Our technology also allows you to easily organize, update and display live information instantly in 3D.”
Something I could have done with a couple of days ago on StubHub when I pulled the trigger on 2 tickets for my eldest daughter and I to see The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, perform in San Jose later next month. I’ve got a pretty good idea that we’ve got excellent seats because I’ve been to this particular venue a few times, but because she’s young, I wanted to make sure we had a great view from our seats for her first ever indoor arena concert.
As an avid Miami Dolphins’ fan I’m looking forward to playing with the new functionality when I start tracking down tickets next season when Peyton Manning takes the field in orange and teal.
StubHub itself was acquired by eBay back in 2007. StubHub recently acquired Zvents, which claims over 3 million events generated by 140,000 local marketers.
Terms of the Peekspy acquisition were not disclosed. For that matter, neither were terms for the Zvents deal.
Zvents has over 3 million events, generated from 140,000 local marketers in its catalog. It gets 14 million monthly unique visitors.
eBay’s Richard Brewer-Hay writes on the eBay Ink blog, “StubHub currently offers around 30,000 events for discovery whereas Zvents users have access to 600,000 events on any given day and over 3 million during the course of a calendar year. Essentially, with this new acquisition (and after integration), StubHub users will eventually have access to 100x more events than the present.”
Joining StubHub is an exciting next phase in our evolution to be the world’s premier provider of event and entertainment content. Since launching Zvents in 2005, our team has worked tirelessly to build a strong product line for our users, advertisers and partner network. Zvents boasts over 14 million users via its various channels – Zvents.com and its media partner network of over 300 major sites, including Microsoft, AT&T and over 280 major newspapers.
StubHub’s industry-leading service and platforms provide the ideal launching pad for us to accelerate our growth and expand our mission. We are dedicated to enabling our users to find fun and interesting things to do in their lives by providing the best events and entertainment information across our products and network. StubHub shares our passion and we will work together to drive a new vision for live entertainment.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
If you’ll notice the images in this article, StubHub is displaying results for Louisville. That’s because it doesn’t have Lexington as a market. Zvents does. Presumably, this means StubHub will feature a significant amount of new markets.
