eBay Will Finally Get Into Tickets Resale Market

Yesterday eBay officially confirmed its pending acquisition of one of the fastest growing online projects ??? San Francisco-based StubHub. StubHub is an online marketplace for buying and selling tickets to various events ??? sports, concerts and other entertainment events. The estimated amount of the transaction is US$ 310 million. But the acquisition is still subject to regulatory approval as well as approval of StubHub???s stockholders. It is expected that this new eBay purchase will be completed within the next few months ??? in the first quarter of the year.

Jeff Fluhr, founder and CEO of StubHub is clearly enthusiastic about the future of his company in view of joining the group of eBay-owned websites (and we all know the successful examples of PayPal and Skype):

StubHub’s business model is an excellent fit with eBay, a company we’ve admired for a long time. StubHub exists to serve passionate fans - and we feel great knowing our customers will benefit from the power of eBay and its community of users.

StubHub deals with online resale of tickets to major events ??? thus creating a prosperous alternative market that some teams are not particularly happy about because their fans sometimes simply have to pay much higher to get the tickets to events with their favorite teams participating.

The annual volume of this secondary tickets market is reported by various experts to vary in the range from 2 to 25 billion dollars. Quite a nice share of this volume exists due to sales of season tickets by people who are unable to attend all the events they purchased tickets for. It is definitely worth mentioning that in the last three years StubHub grew by 3,248%, while the company???s revenue almost reached US$ 200 million.

In the past eBay did try to get a share in online tickets resale market but eBay???s own features for search and buying tickets remained quite humble compared to StubHub???s functionality. So this deal seems to bring eBay to this market finally ??? this way or another.