Stubhub

[OmahaCard79]

I can't prove it but there is no way that stubhub type resellers aren't a boon for ticker resellers and artificially raise prices across the board. Maybe for an event that isn't high demand it's a different story, but for high demand events it just jacks the prices up across the board. Even the event itself goes up for face value because they know that ticket resellers will gobble them up in mass which causes a supply problem which drives the prices up ...

But it's all you can do sometimes

I disagree.

The World Series was in high demand. This is the article I mentioned earlier where ticket scalpers were lamenting the fact that ticket scalping is now legal and that there are sites like ebay and Stubhub helping every mom and pop sell their tickets...

http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/ ... c16b8.html

The Legislature's reluctance to restrict an ungovernable trade has not been kind to those in Green's line of business. Neither has the rise of online ticket exchanges.

Once the domain of a small group of brokers, secondary ticket sales on craigslist, StubHub, eBay and other sites have cut into the pocketbooks of those who once earned a living in storefronts or on the street.

If anything, it drives prices down. When you go on Stubhub and want to buy tickets for a game, even a high demand game like the World Series, you can immediately see that there are literally thousands of tickets available. Advantage: Consumer. When there are a number of tickets to be sold even in the same section and you only have a week to offload them, you start seeing prices come down. It really is supply and demand at work.

It reminds me of what happened to baseball card shops once Ebay took over. When I was a kid in the early 90's, and you were looking to buy a Mark McGwire or Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card, you were at the mercy of the handful of shop owners in the city who had the only inventory for possibly hundreds of miles. If a shop owner knew he was the only one who had what you were looking for, he could increase the price beyond even what the price guide said the going rate was. If you wanted it, "bleep you pay me. I've got the only one."

The same holds true for ticket scalpers. In the days where scalping was a clandestine operation, you were at the mercy of just a few "brokers" and shady characters outside the stadium. They would flash their handful of tickets and could spin you a story about how "the market" was just going crazy on this game and your only way to get in was to pay their price. Now that you can see all the inventory in real time, they are admittedly hurting.

[jim]

No way does it drive prices down. It encourages resellers to buy up everything they can, which makes supplies *seem* limited, and thus artificially driving up the price. And the teams actually feed into it buy making single game tickets ridiculously high over ST prices. For example, the 100-level seating for Bulls games is listed $150 for a season ticket holder, but up to $250 per game for single tickets (which aren't available by the way).

But wait .... go to the Bulls/Ticketmaster site and you see this:

Please note that all individual game ticket prices, depending on the game date and the amount of ticket availability, are subject to change without notice. The ticket prices shown here may be different from the actual prices available through Bulls.com, 1-800-4NBA-TIX, Ticketmaster or the United Center box office.

Turns out those $250 seats for that Monday night game? $350 now. So yeah, I go to a re-seller and see $225 and jump on it. Oh thank you stubhub, you saved me ... well you saved me jack [expletive] squat is what you saved me. You set my ass up.

Ticket re-sellers RAISE the price of a ticket, not lower it. It creates a false supply demand issue by having the re-sellers gobble up everything. I get the privilege of buying tix for the Bulls the day before they go on sale to the general public, and a week after the ST holders get to buy as many damn tickets as they want. Guess what is available when it gets to me? Not much.

If there was an organized effort to refuse to buy tix through re-sellers and the general public stuck to it, ticket prices would fall like a rock - including at the team's site. They wouldn't have the gluttonous feeding frenzy of buying for people that have no intention of going to the game.

[OmahaCard79]

In a perfect world, what you're saying makes sense. If you could eliminate all ticket resellers and enforce the anti scalping laws to the fullest extent (although that would drive up police manpower to insane levels that you might be looking at tax increases), you'd see prices go down.

Unfortunately, that's just not how it works at this point. The laws aren't enforced and there will always be scalpers and brokers. When operating within those parameters, Stubhub is as good as it gets because it creates a true market, brings buyers and sellers together, is secure, and eliminated the ability of a single person to set their own price because they and only a few others have a corner on the supply.

I don't know what else to say about it. The street vermin and brokers have as much as admitted in that article I linked that their business is down and online sellers like Stubhub have been pointed to for the crash in prices. I've read that "dynamic pricing" was created, in part, because certain teams couldn't compete against themselves on Stubhub, and needed the ability to lower (and raise I suppose) prices because without that ability, people were choosing Stubhub for lower prices over the teams own website.

IF anyone is to blame, it's the teams/venues themselves for allowing people to buy so many tickets, giving season ticket holders cracks at single game tickets before the general public because almost all of those tickets end up on the secondary market.

Venues have tried to combat scalping at concerts by stating the tickets can't be resold and that you need a photo id and the card you bought them with in addition to your ticket to gain entry, but the market, thus far, has rejected that idea as too cumbersome.

It's not a perfect world, but I'd take a post Stubhub, Craigslist, and Ebay world over the days in the past where some street urchin working for a "broker" could rake you over the coals becuase their close knit fraternity of scalpers had a corner on the market.

[OmahaCard79]

FYI, ran into this article from 2011. Gives you an idea of the effect Stubhub has had on the market. Hits on alot of the points I mentioned above...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/sports/15tickets.html

The online ticket market has bucked the trend. The number of tickets bought on StubHub, the largest online reseller, as well as at other exchanges, has risen steadily even as the economy faltered. At the same time, though, prices have fallen, making it possible for cost-conscious consumers to continue attending games.

After initially resisting resellers, many teams have allied with them in the last few years to make it easier for their season-ticket holders — who often want to recoup some money for games they cannot attend — to resell their tickets. That has led to a flood of tickets listed by individuals willing to sell at a loss rather than by for-profit brokers.

As a result, the average price of tickets sold on StubHub fell 2.5 percent last year even as sales grew 26 percent. Since 2006, the average price of tickets has declined almost 20 percent, to $84.21 per ticket from $104.42. The average price of tickets sold on TicketNetwork, another major reseller, fell 30 percent in the last five years.

See, the numbers just don't back up the notion that Stubhub has increased costs, and...

Maged said that just a few years ago, 60 percent of the tickets listed on StubHub were by brokers and 40 percent by individuals, but that the ratio had reversed. And with empty seats in arenas and stadiums for all but the most popular games and teams, Maged and other ticket industry executives say that more fans will shop first for bargains online before they pay face value for tickets at the box office.

“I don’t know if the economy has completely recovered, but the Web is a great place to find bargains,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, who tracks online spending at Forrester Research.

It's like I've said, Stubhub, Ebay, and Craigslist have taken the power out of the hands of the brokers.

[OmahaCard79]

Also, here's a great piece about how the secondary market has MLB (and other leagues) shaking in their boots in fear of lost revenue. Basically, it's like I mentioned, Stubhub is undercutting the teams themselves thereby setting a true market that is often even lower than what the teams have arbitrarily set in terms of pricing on their websites...

http://bizofbaseball.com/index.php?opti ... Itemid=155

But, within MLB there are plenty of critics of the BAM/StubHub alliance. These critics complain that the burgeoning secondary market has cannibalized their primary ticket sales, including season tickets. In fact, some question if fans any longer see a delineation between the primary and secondary markets. And guess who was widely quoted in the aforementioned SBJ piece? Derek Schiller of the Atlanta Braves said, “I don’t believe there is any bigger obstacle or issue, any bigger threat to the professional team sports marketplace and industry as a whole…This is the single biggest issue facing our industry….The amount of dollars at risk is growing near exponentially. And we absolutely as an industry — and not just baseball — need to manage it.”

and...

Angels executive Robert Alvarado was very outspoken about the BAM/StubHub alliance. “We did it to ourselves, StubHub was a small player. And we blew it up. They’re legitimate now. And it’s killing us. It’s killing us. Location. Price. Just about every advantage we had over the secondary market is gone. It’s the blurring of the lines. Because, in my opinion, we failed to do our due diligence before we jumped into bed with StubHub.”

[jim]

Stubhub IS a broker. They have taken the power away by just being more competitive. If everything were illegal and only the team could sell tickets, then the team would be forced to make that decision as to whether to sell a ticket at market value or not. Teams don't want to do that because it looks bad (squeezing out the little guy), but if the market can stand squeezing out the little guy then they should. So maybe teams prices are artificially low, and the brokers correct that.

Anyway, I use stubhub and plan on using them very soon. As soon as my son gets off of crutches, we are celebrating with some 100 level seats to a Bulls game. He's a huge fan, has never sat in the 100 level, and he's been through heck and deserves it. And the only way I can do this is through a broker, and the best one out there is stubhub.

[OmahaCard79]

but the fact of the matter, as stated in the multiple articles I've cited, is that even though they are a broker, their ability to bring the market into one cohesive online outlet, has caused prices to go down, not up, and has caused teams to adjust accordingly out of fear of being priced out of selling their own product.