eBay buying Stubhub?
The financial community is abuzz with rumors of eBay acquiring Stubhub.com. The rumors put the all-cash deal in the "low $300m" range. Stubhub's GMV is around $400m and i believe they have a take rate in the 15-20% range so their revenues must be in the $60-80m range so this equates to a 3-5X multiple which is pretty decent. It's no Skype though!
I think this makes sense. Stubhub has really taken the ticket category away form eBay, but its success has drawn in the likes of Ticketmaster who now have their own rapidly growing auction site.
It's good to see eBay buying things that directly relate to their core business. My biggest concern is Stubhub takes some risks that eBay does not typically take in tickets so hopefully eBay won't de-stubhub-ify Stubhub.
Another interesting angle - how quickly can ebay get that $400m going through Paypal? A nice little bump in TPV possible there...
StubHub Stole my idea for the secondary ticket market and never even sent me a thank you for my idea. Back in 1999 i'm the broker that sold Eric Baker the Lion King tickets and told him about my idea of a secondary ticket market at the time i was handing out flyers to season ticket holders at all New York events and i told him how there is a market for people looking for seats. He said he knew someone that could build a site and he would call me back well i never got that call and Stubhub went on to make MILLIONS but i am now working on building my new site priceyourseats.com that should be available by April 10th. Too bad Stubhub got so greedy because i have great ideas and could have made them worth billions.
Posted by: Robert Finnimore | January 16, 2007 at 02:03 PM
This was talked about in November and ebay didn't do anything, let's see if it is for real this time. Stubhub has been shopping its offering around for the past few months.
Posted by: Jason | January 10, 2007 at 04:28 PM