Excited to have Vivid Seats CEO Stan and CFO Larry back to present. I see my compliance officer here, so I have to tell you to view our website for all disclosures. How to do? Good? All right, perfect. Vivid Seats, at a high level, is an online marketplace for secondary tickets, primarily outside of their vegas.com platform, which I'm sure Stan and Larry will talk about. We're going to do a little bit of hybrid format here. We're going to do an overview of some slides. I think maybe Stan and Larry may tag team on that, and then we'll turn it over to a fireside chat format. We're going to do everything in here. There will not be a breakout afterwards. That is Stan again started, or?
Yeah.
OK, great.
All right, good morning. Happy to walk you guys through a quick overview of Vivid Seats, and then we'll get to the fireside chat. Vivid Seats, we are a data-driven online marketplace for live events, primarily, as Ralph said, in the secondary space, primarily in North America. We started our international expansion both organically and inorganically, which I'll talk through. We participate, you know, I think, in the live events sector, which we continue to be really, really excited about.
I think this is an industry that continues to demonstrate long-term secular trends that we think are favorable and sustainable for the long term, with both consumers continuing to prioritize their spend on live events and experiential components, as well as, you know, I think when you look at the supply side of it, whether it's teams, whether it's artists, most notably artists really receiving the majority of their income from touring. I think lots of supply and demand dynamics that we believe drive long-term secular trends. In particular, I think continued outpaced growth, we believe, in the long term in the secondary space. I think for ourselves, as you look at us domestically, you know, we've begun our expansion of the TAM that we can hit. We started inorganically by buying the largest marketplace in Japan, in Wavedash.
We've started our organic expansion with tech investments and build in Europe with our launch in the U.K. We remain really excited about that, as well as Ralph talked about with Vegas, with a unique model that we believe drives a lot of synergy into what we do today. Just a really broad portfolio. When you think about the live events in the secondary space and Vivid Seats, you know, we are a marketplace. The beauty of the secondary is it never sells out. We have every category that you can imagine in inventory and supply across concerts, sports, theater, over 375,000 unique events that we've sold, 175 million cumulative tickets. Lots and lots of depth, lots and lots of data that powers what we do today.
When you look at our tech platform, you know, I think we look at ourselves as a technology marketplace, and thus we have products that serve each and every constituent. When you think about that journey from supply all the way to demand, if you start with the sellers, we have the number one ERP for professional sellers in the space in Skybox. We've got close to 60% of all professional sellers on the platform. When you think about professional sellers representing about 80% of the secondary industry in North America, you know, that would tell you about 40%-50% of the industry flows through our infrastructure. When that then moves through and you say, how do we get supply out to demand, you know, we've got multiple vehicles there. Within the Vivid Seats branded platforms, we have a Vivid Seats Rewards program that continues to engage.
It's the only loyalty program in the industry with a buy 10, get 1 free program. We've also got gamification components in our Game Center product that allow people to come in between transactions to play games, potential to win free tickets. Whenever they play, we learn how to personalize our offerings to you. As when you play games, we learn your interests as well. Certainly our own MarTech platform participates in a lot of the performance marketing world. As that flows through to our branded front-end marketplaces, we have vegas.com. Vegas.com is the destination for all things Vegas, unique and differentiated from Vivid Seats from an inventory perspective, given that all of Vivid Seats inventory is generally secondary and from professional sellers. Vegas, on the other hand, is primarily primary inventory coming directly from relationships and integrations into the box office.
Very synergistic in terms of coverage. When you go through how else we leverage that, we also have a distribution business, which takes all of our technology and our inventory and offers that to brands that want to have live event ticketing to their customers. For example, we power Capital One, Capital One Entertainment, fully captive demand powered by our technology. It's all our inventory, our technology, and customer service. We've also announced we'll be launching United this quarter. Lots of opportunity for us to continue leveraging our technology and inventory through multiple distribution channels.
Skybox, as I mentioned, the leading ERP, you know, I think that's a slightly dated thing, but closer to 60% now as we continue to provide a platform for sellers to holistically manage their inventory.
We've continued to build out offerings to that with our fulfillment services, where we've offered sellers at pass-through cost, given our economies of scale, the ability to manage fulfillment for them, which is still a labor-intensive exercise for most sellers. We've also launched Skybox Drive, which is an auto-pricing technology that is turnkey and integrated into Skybox. We continue to be excited to invest in the capabilities there to drive growth, retention, and adoption of Skybox.
When you look at our buyer experience, I think most notably demonstrated in the app, you can see all of the components that drive what we believe are unique and sticky users. Everything from personalized discovery, compelling value, both in terms of upfront pricing as well as rewards. I think rewards offers an ability to drive increased frequency and retention. All of these are also available only in the app.
When I talk about rewards redemptions, when I talk about Game Center adoption, all of those are available in the app and are all mechanisms to drive them into the app, especially as we see pressure on the marketing front, especially as we see other components of, I would say, email, for example, more historical CRM becoming less effective. You know, our strategy has always been how do we get people into the app, and loyalty and Game Center are two mechanisms which we believe.
With that, let me hand it off to Larry who can walk you through our financial profile.
I'll be pretty quick. This slide was a lot more fun to present through the end of 2023 when we could show everything that had been up to the right for the entire history of Vivid Seats. If you go back to when the marketplace was founded back in 2011, you had this intersection of wonderful secular growth across the live events industry and Vivid Seats' position as a disruptor that was systematically outperforming the incumbents with particular advantage over StubHub while they were owned by eBay. In 2024, we saw a pretty meaningful increase in competitive intensity, particularly out of StubHub.
The story the last several quarters has been, I think, continued health, robust belief in the secular long-term opportunity in live events, and in particular in secondary with the convenience that it offers to consumers, offset by this heightened competitive intensity, particularly in performance marketing channels. You can see that, you know, growth, GOV revenue all the way down to EBITDA has rolled over in the last several quarters. That has also pressured cash generation. We have a wonderful cash conversion model when we're growing, where you have limited CapEx, low net interest expense, and working capital as a source of cash. Unfortunately, when you shift to organic declines, that cash float dynamic reverses. The cash conversion has been a little bit less than anticipated or less than we've seen historically when you look at the last three or four quarters.
As we look at our overall share of performance, a lot of that is reflecting this heightened competitive intensity. You know, as we look forward, you know, fundamental questions on the sustainability of that posture, right? There are rumors around the strategic objectives of that competitor. They want to get, they need to have a different story since we're out here trading at mid-single digit EBITDA multiple. Regardless of what their intentions are, our strategy has been and remains to try to bring customers into an ecosystem where they can repeatedly interact with us because they've done their research, they've understood that we offer the best value proposition, and continual shopping, continual touching paid marketing channels is in no one's interest. You know, I always say that the number one frustration you hear consumers have in our space is, oh, the fees are too high. Understandable, right?
I certainly have felt it. What people generally don't appreciate is that at least half of those fees are going to marketing folks and in particular paid search channels such as Google. I think we see significant opportunity where there's a collective win where if we can get customers coming directly to us, we can charge less and remove some of the economic rents that the Google folks extract. That is the essence of our loyalty program. You can only redeem it in the app. Generally, once you have the app on the phone, you aren't touching performance marketing channels. We use this repeat metric as a proxy for our progress in getting folks to come back to Vivid Seats. You can see there's still work to do, right? Almost 40% of our GOV is from new customers.
As we continue to push that number up, we'll be increasingly insulated from the competitive pressures I mentioned, and I think can continue driving a better value proposition to consumers that should keep being a flywheel effect.
Great. Thanks, Stan. Thanks, Larry. Maybe just kind of kick it off, and then we'll start with the macro. Maybe talk about some of the signals you're seeing on the demand side if that's sort of changed, I guess we're halfway through the year. Then maybe give us some perspective of just sort of the health of the industry on the supply side for concerts and events for the year and how you're viewing that.
Josh, Larry, you want to take that?
Yeah. There's been a little bit of a tale of two cities, both last year and this year on the industry growth. Coming off of 2023, we had a record-setting concert environment, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé and people paying $10,000 to see the Eras tour. In 2024, you saw industry growth in aggregate go from 20%-30% in 2023 to flat in 2024, with concerts actually going negative, ballasted by sports having a really exceptional growth year. Caitlin Clark effect, Super Bowl in Las Vegas, Yankees-Dodgers World Series. Coming into 2025, you've seen concerts bounce off of what was a particularly soft supply side in 2024, and sports are now facing some tougher comps from some of those event mix dynamics. Against those supply trends, we've seen broadly steady, stable demand. That's been a comment we've made repeatedly in our space.
We're seeing particularly stable performance in the concert side. You know, there are some questions on the lower-end consumer, which we see manifest in our Vegas business. On our core marketplace, you know, we talked about recession resiliency. This is a discretionary item, but it feels like folks substitute into this category or don't substitute out, right? There are home remodels, new cars, multi-week vacations that seem to get trimmed before going to the baseball game.
In Vegas, you talked about some of the, I guess, maybe a little bit more of the softness that you've seen there. Had that started earlier? Maybe kind of give us a sense of what more of the trend line has been from maybe the beginning of the year to where we're sitting today.
Yeah, so the Vegas, one of the interesting aspects of having vegas.com in the portfolio, you have disproportionate exposure to what's happening in a city, right? Normally, things spread out over the country. Now we talk about things like they knocked down the Mirage and the Tropicana Hotel in September. They did that to make room for the Oakland A's Stadium. When Oakland moves to Las Vegas, that will be a wonderful tailwind in 2028. In 2025, it is an idiosyncratic headwind. Beyond that, really starting in winter, right, December, January, we also started to see some consumer softness. You're seeing that manifest in the LBCA total travel data. There are fewer people flying into Las Vegas. Occupancy in the hotels is down.
Not dramatically, but, you know, mid to high single-digit type levels, which I think is reflective in our belief of a more economically sensitive customer feeling some pinch, which we have just not seen crossover into other markets.
We've kind of shifted into international. Can you outline maybe your international growth story, sort of the strategy there, what markets are you in, and, you know, does the Vivid Seats brand move across the pond, so to speak, and how does that integrate with Wavedash, etc ?
Yeah. I think when we looked at international, part of the appeal was the international market, while certainly smaller than North America, still sizable, and the dynamic is very different. Essentially, there is no competition internationally versus what I would say is intense competition in North America. I think as we started to look, you know, I think our journey began with, are there inorganic assets that will allow us to accelerate our push internationally? We did not really pick Japan as the first country we wanted to launch, given language differences, everything, but we found a great asset that happened to be the market leader. That has proved to be an anomaly as we looked out across the rest of the landscape.
Thus, we spent a lot of 2024 investing organically in our technology platform to prepare it for internationalization, whether that's everything from compliance, currency, language, all of that. We began our push first in the U.K., late fourth quarter, moving into first quarter, and then now I think we're starting to expand more into other adjacent European countries.
I think what we've seen has continued to validate our thesis that with the lack of competition, even though we would admittedly say that our inventory is not yet up to where we'd like it to be from a selection perspective, the offering that we present, the pricing that we have, our rewards program, we've already seen, you know, I think contribution margin, positive international volume, still small, but I think a really strong signal for us that I think those economics and the dynamics and the thesis for what pushed us to go there in the first place, I think remain sound and remain excited about growing that part of our business.
Tricky, as you know, growing a marketplace. Can you walk us through, you know, how do you build both the supply and the demand side, and do you get scale across, let's just say, Europe or international markets, or is it sort of unique to each market as you're going through?
Yeah, it's a great question, Ralph. You know, I think as you've expanded, you know, I think as with everything, always having that balance of how do we build up enough supply to drive eyeballs that will then convert at an economic, you know, kind of rate that we like. That was certainly the first part and continues to be our push. How do we get incremental supply? What we've continued to see, I think, is that when you look at that landscape, what offerings that are available here, whether it's Skybox or ERPs or other components that allow professional selling in the secondary to be more efficient, don't exist internationally as well. I think when we have gone international, we've offered some of these offerings, which have been received, I think, very favorably from the sell-side community.
Bringing that up, offering an automated way to manage their inventory and automatically move into multiple countries, right? I think as we've built up supply, our supply strategy has been not only finding supply that is local, and generally supply in international countries is not one-to-one market. You know, the U.S. market will have sellers in the U.S., but again, I would think about states as the right comparison for countries there. A seller based in the U.K. might have supply across multiple relationships, across multiple teams in multiple countries. I think we've seen that ability to start scaling, and I think right now we're really focused on building out the supply side of that, of the international businesses. We've continued to see, I think, the consumer offerings take hold and really just building up competitive selection is really our next stage.
Do you lean in with Vivid Seats there? Maybe just maybe broadly speaking, you know, what's the marketing strategy or how would the marketing strategy compare overseas versus here?
Yeah, you know, I think what we've said is we believe that the, I would separate the brand positioning from the brand marketing investments because I think those are different. We've seen in this category, given the general low-frequency nature of it, that if you were to invest in traditional brand marketing, that payback period is very long and generally, you know, fairly uneconomic over the duration of that. As we've presented, I would say our acquisition strategies internationally, we remain centered on our propositions to consumers. We offer rewards, we offer industry-leading pricing, we offer, you know, best-in-class customer service. We've been recognized by Newsweek now, I think, five years in a row, best customer service in ticketing.
Leaning into those three elements while driving efficient performance marketing has allowed us to, I think, target users while getting the message across to them in an economically viable way for us.
One thing I'd add, the journey we're going on internationally where Viagogo is somewhere between 80-90% of that market. And for those who don't know, Viagogo owns StubHub. It's eerily similar to the original journey that Vivid Seats went on disrupting StubHub in North America. Step one, right, it's this chicken and egg of a marketplace model. You have to convince sellers that you're worthy of their inventory. You get the inventory, what do you have to offer buyers, and circularity ensues. That's exactly the genesis of Vivid Seats as a business. While the timeline we can debate, I think there's a high degree of confidence that this is a cut and paste from what the company executed 10 years ago.
I guess broadly speaking, how is the transition or the migration to international markets performing versus, I guess, your expectations or what you would have seen? I know you came into Vivid Seats at a later stage versus the founders, but just kind of broadly speaking, how's it going versus your expectations?
I would say, you know, I don't think we expected to see the unit economics, you know, kind of turn contribution positive in that favor given where we are from a sort of share of the market as well as, I would say, share of the supply. I think certainly ahead of our expectations, but I think lots and lots of work still to do. I think we remain excited about that, and I think we're quite pleased with the traction so far.
Maybe sort of shifting to points of differentiation for your model. I'm not sure Skybox is sort of a household term with investors, but maybe spend a couple of minutes, Stan, if you can, you know, what the product provides. I know you did an upgrade as well, and then how that provides such a point of differentiation for Vivid Seats.
Yeah. I think, you know, maybe first helpful to ground, I think people don't really know what professional sellers, you know, what that means in the industry. And for the domestic market here in North America, it's a fairly mature market. Most professional sellers have long-term relationships with rights holders, is the term, whether that's teams, promoters, venues. So they manage a portfolio of inventory. As with anybody who has an inventory product, they need a platform with which to manage that. Skybox serves as that platform. Skybox does have competitors uniquely in this space versus other spaces. If you think about retail, if you think about that, the ERPs are not owned by the actual retailer. But in this space, the ERPs are owned by the marketplaces. So we have Skybox, StubHub has a product called Ticket Utils, Ticketmaster has a product called EIBO and Trade Desk.
We look at our share at about 60%. I think our closest competitor is StubHub's Ticket Utils at about 7%, and then everybody else is single-digit one. Sort of the landscape on that. What it provides is a way for sellers to load their inventory in, figure out how to price it, invoice it, literally run their business on it. How do I broadcast and distribute? Where do I want to sell it? Sellers, once they load their inventory, truly want broad distribution. Skybox offers a lot of native distribution capabilities as well as integration into other third-party components that serve those needs, as well as simple APIs for more sophisticated sellers to build on top of that. In addition to that, it's, you know, it sounds a crazy thing to say in 2025, but it's also cloud-based, which some of the older ERPs were not.
As you think about high-velocity ERP transactions with customized software builds, Skybox offers that uniquely in a way that others do not. What we have done since then is continue to build, I think, on the offerings in addition to the core ERP platform. As I mentioned, when you are a seller outside of just being able to obtain the inventory and then distribute it efficiently, you have two other components of your operations that are important. One, how do you manage fulfillment? Fulfillment of your inventory is in multiple tranches. You can think of the old way, which is now a very small part of the business, but still exists. There is still physical fulfillment. You can think about concerts, festivals where there are lanyards, there are bracelets that still go out. There is a physical component of that. There is a lot of account management.
When you think about electronic ticket transfer, for those of you who have done that, it's still not the easiest process to manage ticket transfer from email to email. We have used our economies of scale to offer that as a service only to our Skybox users. We have been met with pretty strong reception on that. Our ability to pass that through at our cost is at better cost than sellers can do it independently, given our ability to utilize those resources. I think that has proven to be another service that we continue to grow. We do not make money on it, but we do not lose either. It is at pass-through cost, and it makes the service stickier.
You can think about that as if a seller is on Skybox and using our seller services, now when they want to get off Skybox, they need to find a replacement fulfillment vehicle. None of the other marketplaces offer that today. More recently, as I mentioned, we also launched the other component that sellers will look for is how do you price your inventory. Auto pricing in the industry is really not so much about what is the nominal value that I should price my inventory at, but it is much more about relative pricing, right? Because your competition is really against other sellers who have inventory.
When you think about sellers and how they price, they will think to themselves, I would like to price my Section 102 tickets in row B, and that should always be 10% cheaper than row A because row A is probably a better seat, and I want to be 15% more expensive than row F as an example, and I want that to move in 15-cent increments timed at two-minute latency, one set of rules. That happens very rapidly across a lot of technologies. You imagine that's one rule. You're going to set multiple rules across your rule set. We launched Skybox Drive, which is an automated Pricer that allows you to take that rule set and, more importantly, turnkey into the ERP. All the other auto Pricers today require integration into your ERP.
One of the things we had heard from sellers all along was we would just love to be able to flip that on inside our ERP. Skybox Drive allows you to do that. Equally, if not more important, it is the only auto pricer that indexes off of the Vivid Seats marketplace data. While certainly a little bit more challenged on the volume side, it is the most representative sample of data. When you think about how you price relatively, having a very representative sample as an index is critically important. Another key tool that we've continued to invest in that we believe drives long-term stickiness and adoption to the platform.
Great. Looks like we have under five minutes now. Please pause to see if there's any questions.
Can you expand a little bit on the competitive nature of just main [audio distortion] marketing and where else do you see it? Like on the third competitor?
Yeah. Yeah, I think what we've seen generally, and I think validated by a lot of other publicly available material, you know, I think it's the performance channels that continue to be, I think, pressured, right? We see it in performance marketing. You know, I think even outside of our industry, I think performance marketing continues to go up. Like when we look at Alphabet, you know, I think their last quarter was, you know, clicks were up 3%, CPCs are up 15%. You take that and then you put that into a hyper-competitive environment, and you can imagine the same traffic just costs a lot more. I think that has certainly been where we've seen a lot of that pressure.
In other areas of, you know, I would say the industry, there's always going to be a little bit of take-rate pressure, I would say, from other competitors. I think our model being, you know, very asset-light and able to sustain, I would say, competitive prices with our base, I don't think we feel that as much. It's certainly been more on the performance marketing side. I mean, I think, look, maybe I'll give you the competitive landscape as we see it, right? You know, I think there's three scaled profitable models in the industry that have been Ticketmaster, and I would carve them out slightly differently, right? I mean, Ticketmaster and Ticketmaster Secondary really is a segment of a very different business model in Live Nation. You have StubHub, which is clearly our closest competitor.
Everybody else is what we would sort of say is the tail, ranging from, you know, SeatGeek probably being the largest of them. Then you have various other, you know, niche, I think, competitors, whether folks who are looking for last-minute game time, Ticket Network, one of the original marketplace models. The top three in the U.S., StubHub, and Ticketmaster probably represent about 80% of the industry and are, again, I think, scaled and profitable. I think when you look at the rest, I think most of them have generally been funded from an era, you know, zero-interest rate era, have not generated profits. I think it is a slightly different dynamic when you look there.
I think where you see us is, I think, sort of in the competitive nature of we have prioritized unit economics, making sure we have sustainable growth, whereas I think you can see in other spaces that growth is being bought, you know, I think, with eroding margins, and we have not participated in that.
Questions?
Bumping up on time, but maybe Stan or Larry, anything that we didn't cover today or anything that you'd like to highlight again or reemphasize for the investors sitting out here today?
We are continued believers in the long-term growth opportunity in the space, and it certainly is living through kind of a recalibration and reset period. But, you know, the DNA of this business has been disrupting, fighting, growing, and I think there's alignment on the horizon that gets us excited, right? If this was 10 years ago and, you know, Google position at the top of the funnel was firmly entrenched with no risk of moving at all, I think you'd have a bloody fight on your hands to go take StubHub on with where they set the economics. But I think we can all smell and see change on the horizon at the top of the funnel with exact form to be determined, right? Which AI platforms and what structure, what share do they get over what timeframe? But we're excited for what that could bring.
Yeah. I think, you know, there's always a lot of talk about competition, right? I would frame it more as, you know, when we look at ourselves in the space, we're light, we're very asset-light, we're very nimble, right? We don't have a lot of fixed, you know, expense. I think when you think about our ability to transform and sort of where we prioritized, which is very much on, you know, I think, differentiated products and the ability to transform, I think, quite nimbly. I think when you look at the landscape, we remain excited about, I think, again, our model, the base that we've built and the ability to adapt fairly quickly to an ever-changing environment. That's both competitively and as, you know, I think we talk about many, many times. I think consumer discovery is also, I think, on the precipice of change.
As you look at everything that's happening, you know, how often will search be the top of the funnel or the predominant top of the funnel? I think a lot of things are changing, and I think we're very well positioned to take advantage of those changes.
Great. Thank you for your interest in Vivid Seats. Stan, Larry, thank you for your time. We will not have a breakout session today. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Ralph.
Thank you.