stubhub.com

Does stubhub.com have a moat?

Yes.

72/100 · Real moat

“The resale site is a month's build. Matching $9.2B in yearly ticket sales, 84% US brand awareness and the MLB deal would take a decade.”

Code to copy

3 months

Moat to cross

years

Market

Crowded market

Share on X

Moat depth

MoatlessShallowReal

Revenue not verified. Founders can list on TrustMRR to show it here.

01/The verdict

Two-sided marketplace for reselling live event tickets (StubHub in North America, viagogo abroad). Buyers pay fees on top of the price, and sellers (mostly brokers) pay a commission. The take rate is around 20%.

The software is ordinary: listings, seat maps, checkout and a guarantee. The hard part is liquidity. StubHub moved $9.2B in gross merchandise sales in 2025, and a clone opens with no tickets and no buyers. It also has 84% US brand awareness, a multi-year deal as MLB's Official Direct Issuance Partner, and buyer trust built up over 25 years. It still falls short of 80 because sellers list on every site at once, buyers compare prices, and it spends about half its revenue on marketing ($943M in 2025, 54% of revenue) to keep its share. The stock trades around $5.60, against a 52-week high near $28, which shows how contested the category is.

02/4 moats

Marketplace liquidity

Deep

Time won't do it

Gross merchandise sales were $9.2B in 2025, up 6%. StubHub calls itself the leader in the $18B North American secondary ticket market, and viagogo adds supply in dozens of countries.

To cross it: Get brokers to cross-list through their point-of-sale tools and pay for buyer demand at a loss for years, the way SeatGeek and Vivid Seats did with hundreds of millions in funding.

Brand & trust

Real

Time won't do it

Its own 2024 study puts US brand awareness at 84%, built over roughly 25 years. Its FanProtect guarantee matters a lot when a fan is spending $500 on tickets that could turn out to be fake. Fee complaints and a $10M FTC settlement over hidden fees have hurt that trust.

To cross it: Offer a stronger guarantee and visibly lower all-in prices, and earn trust slowly with a niche of fans.

Funding

Real

~36 mo to cross

Public since September 2025 (NYSE: STUB). It spent $943M on sales and marketing in 2025 and bids heavily on Google search for every event name.

To cross it: Raise hundreds of millions and accept years of losses on search ads, or skip search and win a channel StubHub doesn't own.

Exclusive access

Real

~24 mo to cross

Multi-year deal (Sept 2025) as MLB's Official Direct Issuance Partner, which lets MLB distribute primary tickets through StubHub's technology. It has also partnered with AEG and has a long history as MLB's official fan-to-fan resale site.

To cross it: Win team and venue deals one at a time against Ticketmaster and SeatGeek, which needs a sales team and years of relationship work.

03/The gap

Easy to copy

The site and app: event pages, interactive seat maps, listing and checkout flows
Fee structure and buyer guarantee copy
Seller tools: brokers already use third-party software that pushes listings to every marketplace
Price comparison: aggregators show StubHub next to everyone else, so it can't hide its prices

How you'd go after it

Undercut on fees and show all-in prices from the start in one niche (college sports, a single city's venues, K-pop or concert fan groups) where StubHub's fees cause the most complaints
Partner with artists or teams on face-value or capped-price resale, which StubHub's broker-heavy supply can't match
Build fan-to-fan resale inside a primary ticketing platform for smaller venues and festivals, where Ticketmaster and StubHub pay little attention
Go after an underserved international market with local payments and language support

04/Build against it?

Stay away

Ticketmaster controls primary tickets and transfers, and three well-funded resellers already fight over the same brokers and Google ads. Only try it with a specific edge, such as an artist, league or venue partnership that gives you exclusive or face-value resale inventory.

Already selling this:Ticketmaster ResaleSeatGeekVivid SeatsTickPickGametimeViagogo (owned by StubHub)

05/Receipts

Checked 2h ago by Claude Opus 5.5 on high effort, with web search. Confidence: high.

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