Good morning. I'm Ralph Schackart, analyst at William Blair. Thanks for attending our annual Growth Stock Conference. Really great to see everybody. Today we're really excited to have Stan, CEO of Vivid Seats, and Larry, CFO. We're going to do a slide format for this presentation, and then we'll do Q&A at the end, and then the breakout room will be in Jenner A. But I would say just from the outset, we've been covering it since the IPO a couple of years ago. They've done a really great job in terms of execution on top line. I think sort of fair to say over-delivered on the top line, on the bottom line, have done a really good job as well. They've done some reinvestments this year into international expansion, which they'll they'll get into.
But in terms of the cohorts or vintage of that year, definitely better execution than some of the other IPOs that we recently picked up. So with that, I think, Stan, you're gonna kick it off and then turn it over to Larry.
Sounds great. Yep. Thanks, Ralph. Oh, all right. Good morning, everyone. Good to see you. Happy to, A, tell you about Vivid Seats today, and also tell you if you're going to the Chicago Cubs and White Sox game tonight, we've got a place for you to buy your tickets. So quickly, Vivid Seats, you know, live events, marketplace, we cover everything across the gamut. We've been public since 2021. If you look at the history of that, really scaled, highly profitable business, double-digit growth, 21 million customers on the platform now, and when you look through last year's performance, $3.9 billion in top line, $713 million in revenue, $142 million in Adjusted EBITDA. Significant cash flow conversion on that, as Larry will tell you when we get to the financials.
And then when you look at that on the backs of what was already a strong year, you know, that was a year where we delivered, you know, 20% growth on the top and bottom line. When you look at who we are again, you know, think about this business, there's really fantastic tech-enabled marketplace business, where scale network effects really matter, and our goal is to really get everyone to experience it live. We've got a two-sided marketplace. I will give you the high level right after this about how we have invested and continue to believe we have best-in-class and differentiated technology amongst all the constituents that participate in our ecosystem. You'll also see the TAM. We talk about live events. I'm sure as you see, there's a lot of shift to spend in experiences.
I think we are well poised to take advantage of that, and our investments, both organic and inorganic, have us, you know, continuing to increase our TAM. As Ralph alluded to, we've primarily been a North American-focused company. We are now making our foray into international, continuing to expand that TAM. And then beyond our constituent-based technology that we believe is quite differentiated and best in class, we also have great infrastructure and ancillary products that also support that marketplace in our MarTech stack that also drives great customer acquisition, retention, and engagement. We said, you know, typical network effect business, we've got a great flywheel. So, when you look at the sellers, for sellers, we have Skybox, which is our proprietary ERP system for professional sellers. As they come on, inventory, cost, benefit, everything flows through. That then surfaces through the flywheel.
When you look at the buyers, we certainly have our marketplace that exists to drive transactions. Beyond that, we also have a rewards program. Beyond that, we also have engagement engines in our real money daily fantasy product, Vivid Picks, as well as Game Center, which is a derivative of that that is free to play using the same technology that we have on Vivid Picks. So we start walking through the technology ecosystem that we have, maybe starting from how it gets from sellers to fans. You think about sellers in this space, professional sellers make up the vast majority of what is in the secondary industry, and our estimates are they are about 80% of the entire industry. And just like anybody operating a small business, you need a platform with which to run that business. We provide Skybox.
Think of that as an ERP, think of that as a point of sale. As you procure inventory, you need a place to store that, cost that, account for that, distribute that, price that. Skybox does all of that, and as I get into, we have over 55% of the entire professional seller base on our Skybox platform and growing. And if you put those numbers together, that means 40% of the entire industry flows through our infrastructure, both historically and in real time. When you focus on that center part there, as that inventory starts to flow through, how do we engage users?
Well, we've got really three components that we highlight here, and we'll get into a little bit more detail, but certainly Vivid Seats Rewards, the only rewards program in the industry, both experiential and economic, centered on a buy 10, get one free program. You can think about that as, as you are looking for a new platform to shop, that helps you convert with a unique proposition. Once you do acquire, you've now got currency that's entrenched with us, which you will then redeem, and so why go elsewhere when you have that currency? And as we've talked about, I think in past, past platforms, when you look at metrics, that we believe show success in this area, you know, before we kicked this program off in 2018, 47% of our orders were repeat orders.
As of the end of last year, almost 60% of our orders were repeat orders, so 1,300 basis point shift into highly profitable repeat orders, at the same time, almost doubling the size of the business. When you then move down, you know, I think about rewards as a transactional driver. Once it's time to buy, you come back, but this is a lower frequency category. You don't generally go to live events, you know, every week, let alone every month. And so our challenge was always: how do you keep them engaged in the platform between events? Game Center is our free-to-play product, derivative of daily fantasy. You come in, you play trivia games, with the opportunity to win free tickets. And as we've launched that, we've put almost no marketing dollars towards that.
You know, as of our last earnings, we've got over 200,000 people playing that game. As they play, they buy 33% faster than people who don't play the game, and everyone who plays browses tickets, too. So keeping ourselves top of mind with a unique engagement vehicle. And then the other way, as they are looking, you know, as we know, the search engines continue to be a source of demand for many. We are no exception. We have, however, our own proprietary marketing technology that integrates with all of the publishers through APIs, utilizing algorithms that we keep in-house, as well as data that we derive from Skybox, as well as 10 years of consumer marketplace history that allows us to be very pinpointed and efficient in our acquisition.
When you think about the distribution infrastructure, on the bottom of this page, not only do we have our own marketplace, but we also have a distribution business where we allow other brands who wish to offer ticketing to their constituents a solution. For example, Capital One Entertainment is fully built and powered by us. Capital One said: "We'd love to bring this offering to our cardholders, for everybody to procure and also redeem Capital One points." We've built that solution. It's fully captive demand. All of that inventory is us, the tech is us, and the service is us. So another great way to expand that, as you can see down there, you know, Caesars, Groupon, other brands that participate in that, and another, you know, way that we take advantage of the technology that we have.
And then when you look at the marketplaces on the right, you know, certainly the Vivid Seats marketplace is what we started with. We've certainly been on an expansion spree. Last year, we acquired Vegas.com, which I'll talk about a little later, as the leading authority and domain for all things Las Vegas. We are quite excited about the tailwinds there. And certainly on the international front, we also have our Wavedash brand and product, which we acquired as the leading marketplace in Japan.
So when you look at that, a pretty holistic ecosystem that gets, you know, the inventory from sellers onto the platform in a unique and advantaged way to us, engaging products for users, distribution across the ecosystem, whether through our owned and operated brands or through partners like Capital One, reaching fans in a multitude of forums and vehicles of their choosing. Skybox, as we talked about, the leading ERP, we've got 55% of professional sellers on our platform. Somewhat of a history, but when Vivid Seats was founded, the founders were originally professional sellers and so had really unique insight into what sellers required.
We've continued to build and innovate on this platform, and I would say are the only ones out there who are continuing to grow share on the ERP side, where our closest competitor has 7% and shrinking, and everybody below that, low single digits. We've talked about this at all already, but a really nice flywheel of we can attract through all of the channels, our proprietary engine, and as they come in, unique vehicles to engage them. Vivid Picks, which you see there, Real Money daily fantasy. So, you know, think about that as entries and where you are picking players from at least two different teams with real money opportunities to win. As you play that, our active users are playing over 15 times a month.
So if you're playing with at least two players, that's 30 incremental data points that we have to personalize recommendations to you. So we also have unique insight into your preferences as you play that, and perhaps more importantly, as we talk about, that is 15x a month that you are pulling up our product, engaging with our brand, and 15x where we have an opportunity to surface you, you know, tickets that you highly likely will have interest to as you are playing games related to those events. When you look about at, you know, I think the funnel, if you will, from a buying perspective, really personalized discovery.
We talked about the unique data elements that we have, whether it's through Vivid Picks, whether it's through Game Center, whether that's through your engagement through the product, and that starts as you open up your app with us. It's personalized to you. What are your favorites? What have you been looking at? What have you been playing? You will see all of that as you, as you come up. Where are you located? Putting up local event discovery for you, so very personalized to what you have. When you look at the diversity of the platform, as we'll talk about, really everything across sports, concerts, and theaters, there are, you know, tens, hundreds, and thousands of productions and events for you to choose from. Great value out of the gate.
When you think about having an ERP that represents 40% of the entire industry, we have great insight and then ability to also drive great cost advantage, right? We are the backbone that sellers run their business on, therefore, we understand their cost in a unique manner and are able to drive that into pricing advantages from us on the outside. We then transfer that over to compelling value to users, which we return both in terms of the initial price, but also in subsequent rewards. And then finally, a very simple, easy purchase process that allows users to transact once they've found the event that they'd like to go to. Rewards, we've talked about. Really, I'd say it's a buy 10, get one free ticket program when you think about the economic benefit of that, and tickets is not orders.
So as you can imagine, orders often have multiple tickets, and so you think about the allure of a rewards program for us, you're either increasing your order size because as you're trying to hit the hurdle, you'll maybe buy more tickets than you would have, or you'll come back more frequently, both of which are great outcomes for us. And as we've talked about, you know, publicly, 12 quarters, our repeat rates every quarter have been higher than the prior quarter. So compounding kind of frequency increases that we see, and as I mentioned earlier, strong mix into repeat orders as well. Beyond that, we also have experiential components, whether that is allowing our rewards users to throw out first pitches at baseball games, guaranteed jumbotron time, like, things that we think are really unique where, you know, I think, users will value that.
And then frankly, we can take advantage of their social as they continue to post, you know, "Hey, wow, I got the access to first pitch, you know, at a baseball game. I got to be on the jumbotron at a Kings game. I got access to a really cool speakeasy at the Dodgers," posting and tweeting and putting that all up, and we get the benefit through the social networks again, as users go with the unique experiences, all as derivatives from our rewards program. Gamification, we've spent time there. Download, play, wager, please. Get it, give us feedback. But great vehicles, again, where people can engage with us on a daily basis, which give us, again, personalized data and a, and a vehicle where, users can engage with us between transactions.
When you look at the TAM, I mentioned, you know, through the entirety of our history, we'd primarily been a North American business. And when you look at that, already a sizable TAM with lots of tailwinds as you think about artists in general needing to tour more than they ever have before. Sports teams also, you know, the advent or kind of the takeoff of women's sports, new categories, UFC, you know, all of these things really taking off, so great time to be in the sector. We're starting to see that, or we've seen that opportunity internationally as well, as, you know, this sector goes online internationally, as the rest of the world starts to take advantage and see the same things that we're seeing in North America.
So, as I mentioned, you know, expanding strategically first into Japan, but, as we've disclosed to everybody, plugging in significant investment to internationalize our organic platform this year to be able to launch into other polls as we see opportunity. So as you look at that kind of total opportunity that we're looking to address, you know, over $60 billion of global TAM in live events, in ticketing, and beyond that, our Vegas acquisition also expanding us into a standalone $6 billion market, where we now have both Vivid Seats and Vegas.com, great leading properties with great inventory and leading authority in that market. You know, we talked about the broad portfolio of events, but it is everything. When you think about the beauty of the secondary, is it never sells out, right? We've got everything. There is instant liquidity.
There is instant pricing as the perfect intersection and barometer of demand and supply, and therefore, you see all of this surface in the portfolio of events across concerts, sports, theaters, everything across every geography. You see that breadth of offerings, and, you know, when you look at the history of the company, almost 300,000 unique events sold, 155 million tickets, and continued growth and, you know, strong excitement on our part. You know, as we mentioned, the business has the benefit of being capital efficient, and so we generate a lot of cash as well, and so how do we think about deploying that cash?
Certainly last year was a year where we saw lots of opportunity to really be aggressive on the inorganic front, both to drive accretion from a financial perspective, as well as enable strategic capabilities and beachheads into areas that we're excited about. If you look at the two that we did and maybe a framework for how we look at them, you know, are they strategically and financially accretive to us? Both of the businesses that we acquired are scaled, profitable, and cash generating, and we were pretty excited about the multiple that we paid, you know, at the time when we purchased them, so I think accretion across all elements financially. When you look at the strategic components of it, Vegas.com, leading authority in Las Vegas, our premise or just base case thesis for that is most people who go to Vegas are not from Vegas.
As you go to Vegas and you see a live event, and you go home, that asset can't do anything about it. As part of Vivid Seats, when you go back to your home market, we can now introduce you to Vivid Seats, and you are already a live event shopper. So on its base case, a profitable customer acquisition engine for us, where as users return, we can immediately take benefit of that. Beyond that, it's very incremental in terms of inventory as well. So you've heard me talk about Vivid Seats is primarily, you know, resale and primarily professional seller inventory. Vegas.com is the exact opposite of that. Marketplace business, 0% resale, 0% from professional sellers. All of it is with integration into the box office, pipes, venues, everything that is there. That is what is showing on Vegas.com.
So a great overlap, a great capability add. They also have flights and hotels, although ticketing and live events is the vast majority of that business. We've already closed on that deal in November, and this quarter, in our earnings, we've talked about doing a deal with AEG Fox Sports in their new college basketball tournament in Vegas, the Crown Basketball Challenge, that we will be the official ticketing partner for that. And the way we are doing that across primary and secondary is literally by integrating the Vivid Seats technology, the Vegas.com technology, which allows us to participate as a total ticketing solution to a tournament without having to invest ourselves in a primary ticketing platform. So excited about the capabilities, excited about the tailwinds that were there, already coming to light in commercial deals that we're structuring with lots of scalability, if that works.
Wavedash, number one marketplace, in Japan, scale, 20 year history, really excited about that. We've already taken lessons that we've learned. You know, there's, you know, we're in a fortuitous spot, if you will, with Shohei Ohtani fever and us being the Dodgers' official secondary ticketing partner as well. And so a lot of stuff, if you look at the platform there, cross-pollination with standing up of baseball pages, to drive a lot of that cross, cross-border traffic, as well as relationships in Japan. So excited to take that asset, learn from it, and use those lessons as we organically build out our international platform as well. And so with that, I will punt it over to Larry, who can give you how that translates into all of our financials. Larry?
So we are trying to subscribe to, I think, pretty tried and true value creation pillars, as outlined here. I don't think anything that you see here will be particularly controversial. Market forces and market spirits will come, they will go, but if we can continually deliver against our three pillars, we're pretty confident we'll deliver a strong value creation. Does anyone else hear an echo? Yeah, maybe yes. Can you hear me all right? Do this. All right. I'll stand. By delivering across these three pillars, very comfortable that we'll continue to drive shareholder value in the intermediate and long term. So we'll go into a little bit of these pillars in depth, but at the core, start out by driving sustained double-digit growth at scale.
Turning that revenue growth into profitability, which we have nice margins today, but the focus moving forward is to deliver operating leverage, which our business has a history of doing. Continue to do that, such that EBITDA growth outpaces our top-line targets. And for those of you that aren't a fan of adjusted EBITDA as a metric, we always think it's really important for the purists to see that we turn this adjusted EBITDA into real cash on the balance sheet, which we do at a very healthy rate. With that cash, we then have to deliver continued accretive deployment. The three use cases we think about are strategic M&A, ideally strategically accretive and financially accretive. Stan touched on the targets that we acquired last year.
Share repurchases, we think are a tax-effective form of capital return, so long as the price is right. And then if for whatever reason, there aren't compelling M&A opportunities, we don't believe it's an attractive entry point to buy our shares, we have a bit of debt on our books that we would retire as sort of a fallback option. But at the core, if we can deliver double-digit top line, operating leverage, turn that into true balance sheet cash, where you take EBITDA, multiply it by two-thirds, and that's how much cash shows up at in the balance sheet at the end of the year, we think that's a winning model over time. So how are we doing against those objectives?
Yeah, I think it's been a really nice run since we've been public, where you've seen our GOV, our gross order value, proxy for the total volume flowing through the platform, growing at healthy double-digit rates. So 2022, we saw GOV grow north of 30%. 2023, GOV grew north of 20%. Almost all of those numbers are organic. A little bit of the 2023 number was a few months' worth of the acquisitions layering in, but really robust 20%+ GOV growth the last couple of years as we've emerged from the pandemic. That's flowed through to, you know, pretty similar growth rates on the revenue side. And then EBITDA, you know, probably worth spending a minute here. Business has long been profitable, long generated attractive margins.
In 2023, we delivered 20% EBITDA margins, which on an absolute basis, I think is healthy. But I think it's worth noting, if you were to go back to pre-COVID, 2019, we were actually at 25% EBITDA margins, and in the midst of COVID, made some strategic decisions to make meaningful long-term investments. Stan touched on loyalty as a core pillar. We think that is a wonderful way to align our interests with those of our buyers. And we do that because if folks know they have stored value with Vivid Seats, if they come direct to Vivid Seats, we don't need to pay to market to reacquire those customers. And if you look at our PNL, the most significant expense item is our marketing expense.
So the ultimate win-win for us, folks do their research, they get comfortable with the Vivid Seats value proposition. They understand that our value proposition, when you layer in the benefits of loyalty, is meaningfully differentiated from the alternatives out there. So they decide to make all of their live event purchases from Vivid Seats. We are happy to share back a very meaningful portion of our fees, so they have a fundamentally different, lifetime cost in return for essentially getting marketing savings. So if consumer behavior can evolve where they have done their research and have a platform of choice, we are very happy to reward that behavior and have a fundamentally different fee paradigm than what you have if folks are repeatedly going back to Google or repeatedly clicking on, other paid sources like Facebook or Instagram links.
So as we've come out, you know, we had 25% EBITDA margins. We put approximately $40 million-$50 million of investment into the ground across our loyalty program and the brand marketing to make sure folks were aware of that program. And the expectation is, you know, day one, you take the P&L hit, and then over the next four, five, six years, you'll see the benefit as customer behavior evolves, as awareness grows. And as Stan had touched on with some of our repeat rates, that's our ultimate monitor of are we seeing the intended effects flow through? The other monitor is, are we seeing a flow through in the form of growing EBITDA margins? So 2022, we had approximately 19% EBITDA margins. 2023, we were up to 20.
Our 2024 midpoint of our guidance would apply steady at 20%, but we also announced approximately $10 million investment to build out our platform to expand internationally. And if you net out that investment, which has no revenue assumed with it, you would see 2024 EBITDA margins improving from 20%-21%. So we think we are back on the path of methodical EBITDA margin expansion, which has been a steady pillar of this business's historical financial perspective. And we don't have it on this page, but turning that EBITDA into cash is something that we've been quite proud of. Our model, we have pretty limited amount of CapEx. We have negative working capital. We get paid by the consumer before we remit that payment to the seller. Most years, those amounts offset.
The bridge from our EBITDA to our cash on the balance sheet is a little bit of interest expense. Currently, it's $12 million-$15 million a year against the EBITDA base of $165 million, and then taxes. So we think it's pretty simple, clean model. We've generated very meaningful cash flow. I'm not sure exactly what we have here. Yeah, in 2023, you can see on an EBITDA base of about $140 million, we turned that into $116 million of cash, which we turned around, deployed into a couple meaningful acquisitions. Those get us really excited. Stan touched on the strategic elements of them. From my side, it's beautiful to have that type of strategic alignment and have them be financially accretive.
The businesses are quite similar to what we do. Obviously, doing it in Japan is different than doing it in North America. Vegas has some unique elements with how they get inventory direct from venues, versus professional sellers, but the business models are strikingly similar. The cash flow conversion, strikingly similar. So we feel like we've got a really nice flywheel working, not only on the operational side, but on the financial side, where we're able to take this profitability and cash that we're generating and turn ourselves into a bigger, better, better version, by continuing to expand our TAM and, and building out our strategic capabilities.
So to pull it all together, I think you've heard a lot of talk around, you know, flywheels and, you know, kind of getting the snowball rolling down the mountain, both on the operational side, as we think about getting more buyers to attract more sellers, getting more sellers to get better data to help us market to buyers and get that flywheel going. We think of it the same way on the financial side. As we're able to grow the business, it gives us more capability and resources to reinvest, so we have more arrows in the quiver to further accelerate our operational flywheel.
We've had a wonderful run operationally coming out of COVID, and I know we have a Q&A session coming up after this, so happy to dig in additional depth on how we're thinking about the future opportunity. But we sit here pretty excited about what lies ahead.
A couple minutes if there's any questions before we break out.
Can you just talk about how the cycle of secondary ticketing prices impacts your model? It seems like during COVID, secondary, post-COVID, secondary ticketing prices went up quite a bit. You know, they've obviously stayed rather resilient. If that starts to come down, how does it start to impact the financial sides that flow through? What's your ability to grow sort of agnostic to secondary pricing?
Yeah, I can take that. I think there's a perception that prices have gone up explosively post-pandemic. A lot of times you'll see this, like, selection bias, where the stories that hit the media are the most sensationalized result, right? We all lived through the Taylor Swift experience. We know what those tickets were going for. That was something else. You hear the, you know, courtside seats that set record-setting pricing, the Super Bowl that sets record-setting pricing. But our events are a much more diversified representation across litany of sports, litany of venues from the largest to the smallest, and when you blend across all of that, what you saw in our growth post-COVID was a continuation of 3%-4% average order size growth, which we've seen for the last 15%. So 3%-4% year.
Some years will be a little bit less, some years will be a little bit more, but lo and behold, post-COVID, we're right on that 3%-4% trend line as we sit here, today. The vast majority of our growth, that supported that 20-30%+ volume, was order growth, i.e., more events. So what you're seeing is artists, in particular, driven by concerts, comedy, et cetera. So you're seeing artists who no longer make money from selling CDs make 90%+ of their income from touring, by most accounts. They need to put on more supply. They want to put on more supply, and they want to put on better shows because this is now their bread and butter. At the same time, you have strong demand, where you have folks craving live events.
I think, you know, not necessarily just narrow to our industry, but you've seen this evolution from the goods to experiences economy, right? A lot of people have a lot of stuff, and now they wanna invest in experiences, and so you've had this beautiful supply-demand alignment, where a lot of that growth has been driven by volume rather than price.
Great. Unfortunately, we're out of time. Thank you for your interest in StubHub seats. Stan Chia, thank you for your time, and the breakout is in Jenner A. Thanks again.
Thank you.