eBay’s ticket business StubHub was one of the high points of an otherwise largely unimpressive set of Q415 and year end 2015 results for eBay Inc..
StubHub’s made revenue of $232 million in Q415, and that showed 33% year on year growth. In terms of total sales, GMV (gross merchandise value) StubHub grew 30% YoY. In the last quarter of 2015, StubHub’s revenue represented 10% of eBay’s reported revenue against 7% in Q414.
So it seems that StubHub and tickets could well become much more important to eBay’s fortunes than in the past. They will want to capitalise on a piece of their business that is a) growing b) has great potential and c) isn’t hampered by the core platform’s problems.
Clearly incoming CEO Scott Cutler (who took the reins in May 2015) can take some credit for these results. But the change of tack whereby StubHub didn’t just charge a fixed price for tickets with no hidden extras too (which did often make it look uncompetetive) was also clearly critical.
2 Responses
Stub Hub is a cancer, but there is no chemo. I went to buy a ticket for a music concert but was 1 hour later than the time tickets went on sale and the tickets were sold out. There was plenty for sale on Stub Hub for twice the price though. It’s one thing to resell a ticket you no longer have a need for, but quite another to make a business out of it.
It won’t be long before sites like this are obsolete. They’re parasites – or as Inspector Gadget put it much better – a cancer.
There’s a Parliamentary Review into this issue of Secondary Ticketing ongoing right now with the conclusions to be published by 26 May 2016.
More info on the scope of the Review here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/467466/1510010_Call_for_Evidence.pdf