The Stub Hub Issue: On the MLB Making Money Twice
The overall tone online was that many weren't surprised.
Full disclosure, I have used Stubhub in the past. Most recently, I bought both my Spring Training seats from there, both for less than face value. I don't typically buy tickets to the big, sellout games because I'm not a huge fan of being in massive crowds.
I'm not surprised this is happening, but the issue I have with it is this: for big games like Opening Day or a Wild Card Game, MLB teams won't care that these massive ticking buying operations can buy up huge blocks of tickets and markup the price because the teams make money twice off the same seat. They don't care about making tickets inaccessible to fans that don't have deep pockets.
StubHub's Glenn Lehrman, global head of communications for StubHub. wouldn't get into specifics.
"Our relationship with Major League Baseball is a revenue share so we share in the profits with the teams of any ticket that is sold. We don't disclose what the revenue-sharing agreement with Major League Baseball is."
I suspect if they aren't disclosing, it's probably a pretty nice number. It would have to be make it worth MLB's while to look the other way on online scalping.
"They're going to sell out their game regardless," Lehrman said, "and now they're benefiting from whatever sales that we do on top of that."
Yes, making money twice from the same tickets. They would be all over that.
This news coming after a sizeable increase in the cost of Blue Jays tickets from the box office over the last few years, is just a bad look.
And while it's not mentioned in this article. but StubHub tickets are sold in US funds while the ones bought through Ticketmaster (the official retailer) are in CAD. It's not a huge thing when the dollar is at par but if you bought a ticket on Stubhub for $150 USD today, that's $193.39 CAD. Plus fees. Stubhub picks up a %10 fee on every transaction, so the higher the cost, the higher the fee.
Teams do this to increase profits, which is understandable as they are a business. But they are doing it off the back of the average fan. And with other news stories circulating around about how teams don't want to pay free agents after the age of 30, that they are holding top prospects back to maximize the amount of control a team has over the player in his prime and that they don't want to pay minor league players minimum wage, it's all coming back to the same idea. Fans argue will argue in favour of all those things but often don't recognize that they, too, are being taken advantage of.