Just The Ticket For eBay

eBay to boost its portfolio with ticket resalers, StubHub.com.

by Helen Leggatt

Ebay have officially released the news that they will purchase StubHub.com, the ticket scalping website, for around $310 million. This will be Ebay’s third major purchase in the last few years, following on from PayPal and Shopping.com.

StubHub is the largest tickets-only reseller of concert, sports, and event tickets, selling more than $400 million worth of inventory during 2006. During its six years in business StubHub has brokered the sale of over 5 million tickets.

"StubHub's business model is an excellent fit with eBay, a company we've admired for a long time," said StubHub’s co-founder and chairman, Jeff Fluhr. "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."

eBay moves a lot of event tickets through its site, but as they don’t actually own the tickets they keep themselves above any ticket scalping laws.

StubHub saw 2.1 million unique visitors and generated 22.3 million page views in August, according to Nielsen/NetRatings (via MarketWatch). eBay's ticket section saw 309,000 unique visitors and 875,000 page views.