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