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Comment by nanidin | Hacker News Reader

Stubhub gets a cut every time the tickets change hands. It's in their interest to buy the tickets off people and then resell them themselves, since they will get two cuts in that case. Couple that with the fact that they're in a unique position to measure demand and model future pricing, they can effectively double dip with little risk.

Further, the shell companies could be something Stubhub is doing to derisk the arbitrage portion of the transaction to isolate losses associated with inability to sell the tickets for a profit to the shell company rather than to Stubhub.

Stubhub was supposed to IPO in 2022, but it doesn't look like they did. This kind of 'gaming the numbers to pump valuation' doesn't seem implausible for a company that is trying to IPO.

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That double dipping doesnt make sense unless they are doing something more complex - like limit supply or time swings in the market.

Let's say there cut is 2%.

If I sell a ticket for $50 list price to StubHub and then they sell it for $50 list price then they got 1 dollar from me and one dollar from the eventual buyer. That's $2 total.

If I sell a ticket to someone else on Stubhub for $50 then they also get $1 from me and $1 from the seller. The "double dipping" doesnt work out even before you factor in the overhead.

This is not to say they aren't manipulating market. Maybe they think they can make more money because humans are risk adverse and sell tickets for less than they should to optimize EV, or somethikng.

I considered that, but consider that shell companies are buying and reselling the tickets - then the main Stubhub entity collects all of the fees from each transaction. Now they get to show higher revenue for the Stubhub entity. Stubhub is trying to IPO and this feels like a way to boost numbers in order to boost valuation.

The SEC would catch you for that. There are all kinds of tricks like that for inflating revenue they have outlawed.

Thats why for example, if you work for Walmart you aren't allowed to buy walmart food for the team party and expense it. Expensing it is fine, but inflating the revenue figures by buying your own product is not.

In your first case, there were two sales at $50, meaning a $2 cut for the company.

In your second case, there was one sale at $50, meaning a $1 cut for the company.

1 dollar from buyer and 1 dollar from seller. It's 2 dollars regardless.

But consider that there is Stubhub and there is the shell company intermediary. Now Stubhub recognizes $1 from the buyer and $1 from the seller for the first transaction, and again $1 from the buyer and $1 from the seller for the second transaction.

This smells like an accounting trick to boost published revenue numbers, and seems plausible given that Stubhub announced they were on IPO track last year.

Yeah the other commenter got it, but just to be explicit:

Case A:

Sale 1. Ticket holder sells to [shell company]: +$1 for Stubhub

Sale 2. [shell company] sells to ticket purchaser: +$1 for Stubhub

Case B:

Sale 1. Ticket holder sells to ticket purchaser: +$1 for Stubhub

It doesn't matter who the buyer or seller is, Stubhub says "This is a ticket sale so I will take a cut". Case A makes twice as much money for the parent company, and that's what's under suspicion in this thread, although there are other realistic reasons for the domain name behaviour seen by OP. And Case A makes assumptions about ticket pricing, e.g. if the shell company bought too many tickets and couldn't re-sell them all then whoops

It could make sense if someone lists the tickets for less than their market value - perhaps they're trying to be nice and are reselling at face value, or just need the tickets to sell quickly.

In this case, StubHub could buy them and re-sell them to arbitrage the seller's price and the true market value.

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