All right, thanks, Jason. Afternoon, everyone. Great to see folks here today, and happy to tell you the Vivid Seats story. If you go through it, at our heart, you know, who is Vivid Seats? Really data-driven, oriented, secondary ticketing marketplace, live events across all the categories, and I think what we believe is continued investment, you know, in a business that has differentiated product that continues to grow, scale, profitably. When you look at some of the stats that I think overarchingly describe the business, over our lifetime, sold 130 million tickets, 18 million+ customers. When you look at where we're guiding this year as well, you know, guiding towards $3.5 billion in GOV with $640 million of revenue and $130 million of adjusted EBITDA.
So you continue to see strong, profitable growth vs last year, and I think we continue to invest in those elements that we believe drive differentiated advantages into our ecosystem. When you look at our mission at the crux of it, we look to help empower and enable all fans to experience it live. You know, we're a two-sided marketplace. We've got really unique technology, platform, and data elements, and really differentiated and leading products across all the constituents that participate. We look at the large and growing TAM, you know, I think great secular growth in there. You know, I think an interesting industry where you've got the sell side and the buy side really motivated to drive growth, right?
Pick on the artists for a minute, you know, whether it's the sports teams, everybody needs fans in the stands, and artists more so than everybody else. They don't really sell as many records anymore. Streaming's not a really large source of income, and so the estimate is that artists need 90% or obtain 90% of their income from getting out there and touring. And so as you can imagine, not only does that mean that they are putting more shows on than they ever have before, but they are also drumming up their own marketing machines to excite their fans to go to these events.
And on the flip side, when you look at the fans, you've got all of the forces moving in that direction when you start about the generational, generational shifts towards spend prioritization, with the Gen Zs having already voted with their wallets, where experiences are prioritized over goods and services. And then almost myself, if you look at it, I call myself a geriatric millennial, so, you know, still go to concerts. I got a little bit more money than I did before. My knees just hurt more when I go in. So these two, you know, groups, really with the money and prioritizing that, so great secular trends, you know, I think driving the TAM in the sector.
And then specific to us, again, I think really proprietary customer acquisition strategies and technology and data that ultimately drive profitable acquisition and continued engagement of users as they continue to progress through the Vivid Seats ecosystem. When you look at the actual platform and, you know, I think all of the underlying elements that drive our sustainable growth and retention, you know, if you walk from left to right, inventory comes from sellers. You know, we look at the industry as 80% professional sellers. All of those sellers need a platform with which to run their business. We have the leading ERP in our SkyBox platform, with over 55% and growing of that seller base on the platform. So if you put those two numbers together, that means 40% of the entire industry flows through our infrastructure in SkyBox.
That then moves on through the infrastructure, and you see the engagement engine that we have for users, so that inventory now makes its way up to the marketplaces. We have a combination of rewards, which is experiential and economic, with a Buy 10, Get One Free program. Great experiential components, whether it's surprise and delight pieces with your seats, or as we've announced, weaving that into partnerships where with the Colorado Rockies now, if you are a Vivid Seats loyalty member, you have the opportunity to potentially throw out the first pitch at a baseball game. So weaved into that, Vivid Picks, our real money daily fantasy product, a perfectly countercyclical platform to our ticketing platform.
So consumers going to ticketing or, or going to live events on a lower frequency basis vs other events, but now with Vivid, Vivid Picks engaging with our platform on average, 15 entries a month. So really now the platforms that allow users to transact with us, but also engage with us between transactions and in a unique manner. And then our performance marketing technology, which utilizes all of those signals from consumers, all of those signals that come in from our sell- side, SkyBox Technology, and we drive very efficient and performant customer acquisition through our performance marketing technology. On the distribution side of it, we also leverage everything we have to go after almost what we like to term as captive demand, so leveraging our technological prowess, the scale, the customer service we have to power a lot of that captive demand.
And you look at the partner list there, our most notable large customer that we signed to that, Capital One. So when you go to Capital One Entertainment, that is fully built, powered by Vivid Seats. That is our technology, our inventory, our customer service behind that. If you're a Capital One cardholder wanting to redeem loyalty points to purchase tickets, that's the only place you can do that. When you look at SkyBox, we've talked about this as a platform, and we look at the ability to continue growing it and what drives that largely cloud-based solution that's scalable across, I think, this continued scaling industry with tons of reliability, and performance.
Beyond that, easy integration into industry-level tools, easy APIs, both on the front end and the back side, to build on top of the platform if you'd like, integration into all major marketplaces, so you have access into distribution. And then I think as we've announced this year, adding on a product in SkyBox Drive, which will allow auto pricing for sellers as well. That product currently in its beta phase, prototyped with sellers, at a conference in July with rave reviews, that beta pipeline continues to grow, and we remain on track and excited to launch that by the end of the year.... You look at our buying experience, you can see lots of great components from discovery, to diverse selection, to value with rewards, great offerings, and a very simple purchase process. So all throughout the funnel, reinforcing the differentiated components and taking those signals.
You know, when we look at personalized discovery again, all of those elements where you're playing our games, that feeds your profile on Vivid Seats. And again, we have unique elements that then allow us to surface, I think, high propensity recommendations that users continue to engage with at an accelerated clip. Our engagement engine, we talked about the loyalty program, Buy 10, Get One Free with stamps. Always an important distinction we make here, it's buy 10 tickets, get one free. Orders are not tickets, and generally, you go with friends, and so by about, call it two to three orders, you are almost ready to redeem. And you think about the impact for what we wanna drive there. Do you just bring one more friend to the event? Do you go to one more event?
Both work really well for us, and as we've talked about the metrics that we've seen, we're continuing to see accelerated repeat there with our users. On the engagement side, complementing the transactional cycle, we have both our real money daily fantasy product and Vivid Picks, very sports-oriented, 15 entries a month, simple, over-under propositions. Is Aaron Judge gonna hit one home run today? Pick an over-under. Is Mookie Betts gonna have an RBI? Pick an over-under. Really simple, and all of those allow us to, A, learn about the user while they continue to engage with our platform between events. We loved what we saw there.
That was real money, that was regulated, and so we said, "How do we take what we have and apply it to the rest of our ecosystem?" We took that engine, and we launched our Game Center product, which is a free-to-play product available within the core Vivid Seats app. Soft launch, I would say, first week of June, almost no marketing, and 60 days later, we had over 70,000 people playing that. So again, excited about the differentiated components here that keep users in our ecosystem engaged with the transaction, and more importantly, I think, engaged between transactions.
You look at the cycle here, I think we've hit a lot of that, but everything amongst attracting, engaging, and again, every aspect of how they engage with us fuels their profile and our ability to then surface recommendations in a way that others really don't have the ability to do. When you look at the TAM, as we've talked about it, you know, we last year did $3.2 billion, guiding to $3.5 billion at the midpoint this year, out of a $10 billion TAM, which we continue to post, I think, double-digit top-line growth. And so we remain excited about our ability to drive share and take advantage of the secular trends that are happening.
As we look at adjacencies, and certainly where we're happy and aggressive to invest, as we'll go through shortly with the balance sheet that we have, real money daily fantasy already made the first move there. Very synergistic customer base with sports fans. Our business, also slightly under indexed to sports fans, so I think a lot of benefit there. The industry is about 60% sports, 40% concert and theater. We've historically been the reverse of that, with 60% concert and theater, 40% sports. So I think, again, a great way to do that. International expansion, started that, or announced the start of that at the last quarter.
We purchased the leading secondary marketplace in Japan and Wavedash, and are excited to kick off, I think, our continued excitement, and expansion opportunities, into the international world of live events and secondary ticketing. And then certainly, we continue to look at other elements, on the chart there for where there might be accretive opportunities for us to continue both accelerating TAM and driving synergies through the abilities that we already have. If you look at the portfolio, I think people look at where are you?
You know, Taylor Swift captures a lot of headlines, but in reality, yes, she's an amazing artist, and we ride the benefit of that, but the platform is very diversified in terms of the events that we have, with over 250,000 unique events sold, and pretty much a ticket to any single event across any category that you want's available on the platform. When you move it to the financial highlights of the business, $3.5 billion of 2023 GOV on the marketplace side, as we guide to that at the midpoint, $130 million of adjusted EBITDA and $630 million of revenue this year as we guide to continued growth across of that.
We've always been extremely profitable, and if you look at the comp to last year, $113 million of Adjusted EBITDA, and continue to be excited to, I think, invest and see leverage through that. And beyond just the EBITDA that you see, the strength of the business continues to be the ability to convert that into cash flow. And I think when you look at our balance sheet and the ability to be aggressive when we see assets like Wavedash come up, when we see assets that fueled our daily fantasy engagement profile, I think we're gonna be continued aggressiveness on that front when we see components that drive our strategy, that allow us to expand and accelerate things inorganically.
Over time, I think we've hit that before, but you continue to see, I think, strength on the top line as we take advantage of the secular trends. And again, I think that the advantages that our products allow us to yield, with a record Q2 in GOV in what is typically or seasonally not as strong of a quarter, so I think excited about that. Revenues at $165 million for Q2, and continuing to see strength in that regard as well. When you look at our engagement engine, we talked about this a little bit. You know, we think about engagement in maybe three, two different metrics. We've talked about repeat rates in the past.
As our loyalty program has now been out there for two years, we've seen every single cohort of user across every single category, whether it's baseball, football, comedy, R&B, rock, every user cohort is now repeating at a higher rate than they've ever repeated before. And beyond that, the question then becomes: What does that do to the mix of the business? You can see in 2018, we were at 47%-48% repeat orders. Since then, the end of the year, last year, we're up to 56% of orders as repeat. So we've driven a lot of mix there, and if you think about the profitability of a repeat order vs a non-repeat order, there's significant profitability there. So mixing into that, continuing to drive profitability. And then the third component, not on the slide, we've talked about a lot.
If you're driving that much repeat mix, what's happening on the new user front? Is that an area of potential weakness? In reality, we are acquiring more new users on a nominal basis than we ever have before as well. So higher repeat frequency, higher repeat order mix, and higher or highest new user acquisition. I think we continue to feel really bullish on our marketing ability and the ability for our products to drive continued engagement with our user base. All of that then results, as we've talked about, in significant profitability and cash flow. I won't go through the numbers again, but certainly I think continued EBITDA, continued priority on our spend, on our side to drive both growth, but perhaps more importantly, profitable growth.
And then finally, you know, I think when you look at what we have on the balance sheet, you know, really efficient when you think about the working capital of the business. You know, I think generated $83 million in the first half of this year. Currently in a net cash position vs our debt, gonna acquire Wavedash for $61 million. That, in and of itself, is the market leader, and perhaps more importantly, when we think about it from a capital perspective, is accretive from a margin basis, is a cash-generating asset. So I think excited to think about the strength that that adds to the portfolio, and we'll continue to be looking for aggressive opportunities to drive value into our ecosystem with the strong balance sheet that we have. So with that-
That's great.
Can you sit down, Jason?
Yeah, yeah, please. Please. So I'm gonna... You want him to sit over here?
Sit there.
All right, cool. So I think for 10 years I've heard about live and experiential, and these young Millennials d- you know, preferring it over goods and services, as you said, or goods. It took... It wasn't until this year that I finally came up with a hypothesis as to why. Do you have a hypothesis?
I'd love to hear yours.
It could be wrong, but this is my observation. My generation, we're so wowed by everything that the internet can do relative to what we grew up with, that to us, digital experiences still carry a lot of utility. But for these younger people, digital is cheap. It's always been that way, and so they put a premium on something that's live, right? That's my hypothesis. I'm sticking with it until I hear-
Hey, I'll add to that.
Yeah.
You know, back to the prioritize it, but... And it's similar to, you know, why we think the category is resilient from a consumer discretionary perspective. So I think, you know, as people talk about it, it's not the same perspective when you think about, "Should I go to, you know, Guns N' Roses, or should I buy a new TV?
Yeah.
Right? I think it's a very different mindset, and when you think about that generation, again, yes, they're tech-enabled, so maybe less of that, but they see all of these as FOMO-esque opportunities where they can go on social media and tell the world that this is what they do. I think that is just embedded again into that generation, and I think you're seeing all of those tailwinds kinda play out here.
Perfect. So I wanna go back. There was a slide you had that showed the secondary ticketing market growing about $1 billion a year, and I know that there's just an enormous amount of anxiety, given this sort of post-COVID surge we've seen in concerts and concert spending, that that's not really sorta sustainable on the primary side, really. The investors are just nervous that the primary side won't hold up that strong. And yet you had some numbers that showed 12.5% growth on the secondary side, about $1 billion a year getting added to the TAM. How much confidence can you have in those numbers if the concert slate, for lack of a better word, dries up, or this sort of post-COVID demand that we saw doesn't sustain itself?
Yeah. I think the good thing about that, Jason, is, you know, I think we're in... In my humble opinion from our side, I think we're way past the pent-up demand like that. That, I think you saw in 2021 and, you know, maybe the early parts of 2022. I think what you're seeing now is the strength of the industry and some of those secular trends that we've, that we've talked about. And maybe start with the qualitative differences between the primary and the secondary, and why we think secondary is outpacing and what we're continuing to see, and then I'll give you the numbers I think that back that up. So back to the generations, you know, and what's-
Mm
... happening there, I think you have two things that are fundamentally different. Everybody wants to buy on their own schedule now.
Okay.
That's a big deal, right? Like, I mean, I got two kids. I have no idea what I'm doing next Thursday, let alone should I buy a concert, you know, three months, six months out? How many people are committing to 81-game season ticket packages, you know, for baseball? Like, that's all going down, right? So I think if you just think about the timing nature and what consumers are now demanding, there is a need for a liquidity pool that allows instant access to this.
Mm.
And similarly, the rights holders who have that primary inventory need a way to offload that risk and move it into this pool to drive that. So I think just by that alone, you are continuing to see the outpacement of secondary-
Okay
... driving that. And then if you go back, you know, I think we look at the business, you know, in maybe since COVID happened, in a pre-COVID and post-COVID sense, and I think what we'd always seen there, and certainly there was a lot of visibility into the category with Live Nation, and certainly when StubHub was part of eBay. And I think what you could see was, you know, primary probably growing at the 3%-5% clip, secondary growing at the 7%-10% clip-
Okay
... clip, continuing to outpace that before. And then when you think about pricing as a nice indicator for what is that, you know, demand-supply relationship on the secondary side, because we are that, right?
Yeah.
Like, it's sellers with inventory. They're gonna price it at a point that demand can hold up to. It's the perfect intersection of supply and demand. You know, pre-COVID, again, you go back and you look at very steady with a drum beat, 3% every year on an average order size basis increase, almost like, almost in parallel with GDP, right? And then you look at, again, CAGR on the growth basis, 7%-10% on the secondary, you look at that... Then you had COVID interrupt that.
Okay.
You know, and that's where I go back to, in the first quarter of 2021, when you—or sorry, the second quarter of 2021 and throughout 2021, you index that to 2019, right, as the last full year. That's where you saw pent-up demand, right? You saw average order sizes 30% up vs 2019. You saw, you know, growth on top of that. Every element of what you saw was up.
Okay.
But then you went into 2022, and now here we are in the back half of 2023, and if you redraw those lines and you restabilize everything, we are right back in line with the same CAGRs on growth and AOS as we saw pre-COVID.
Okay.
Right? That's where I come back to. There was absolutely pent-up demand release. That was certainly a factor in 2021 and the early part of 2022. But where we sit right now, I think when you see us driving, you know, 20+ points of year-over-year top line growth against a pent-up release, I mean, I'm sitting here pretty confidently saying, "We're past that.
Okay.
This is now the industry, and I think the strength, frankly, of our product as we continue to grow and win people into our marketplace.
Given that there is a fixed number of sports teams that are out there, a fixed number of games, is it reasonable if those growth rates that you cited are true, that your mix will become, just by definition, skew more towards concerts and sports become smaller over time, or is that the wrong way to think about it?
You know, I think because we're under-indexed on sports, I think that remains an opportunity to continue to-
Okay
... grow into that, right? I think is one. I think the, the great part of, of where we are, so we are over-indexed on the concert and theater side, and by nature, almost as you said, that is not constrained in the same way-
Right
... that sports are with seasons, right?
Right.
Almost as you talk about the trends here, artists needing to go out more and more to tour. We saw examples of that this year, right? Like we normally don't see, I would say, you know, tier one artists announce mega tours in the year, right? The typical seasonal cadence is, let's announce a tour in the fourth quarter for the forthcoming summer. But this year we saw Drake, we saw Aerosmith, Q1 of Q2, announce same-year tours, right? So I think due to our over-index there and our kind of ability to capture that and perform well, I think we're actually really well positioned for that segment as that continues to grow.
Okay. Can you step back and just for maybe people that are less familiar, just take a second and just list who your primary competitors are in the marketplace? Who, if anyone, you sort of think is sort of catching up to you, or who's most threatening, and what is it, among all the things that you reviewed on your slide, that you think is most important for investors to take away that differentiates Vivid from those competitors?
Sure. Yeah, so I think if you paint the landscape, I, I always like to go back to, I think, look at 2019 again, 'cause nine-
Okay
... 2019's a year where you had a lot of data out there. Industry, I think, was estimated to be $11 billion in North America, secondary.
Okay.
StubHub, which is fully part of eBay, right? So, and probably our best pure competitor because their business, the business model is fairly identical. They were at $4.5 billion of North American GOV and shrinking, right? I think as, as disclosed by, by eBay. We did $2.3 billion, that year, and growing. And then Ticketmaster, which doesn't break out its resale business, but because of SkyBox, we are able to, triangulate that. We had them at about $2 billion, and from their commentary that year, flat. So I look at 2019 as a good view of the landscape and say, 9.5 out of the avail- of the 11 sat with three scaled, profitable players, of which we were the only growing one.
And then you had the tail of, I would say, niche, subscale, trying to figure out what their staying power is, generally all unprofitable, the largest of which was, SeatGeek, I think, at the time.
Yep.
Right. I think when you ask what differentiates the competitors, I'd start with not everybody has the same business model.
Okay.
Well, I can happily tick through some of that, but if you go through who we are and the users and where we stand apart, we have been very clear in our journey that we are a marketplace, and therefore, we must build products that service the constituents and ultimately drive the flywheel. That's marketplace business, that's how we win. On the consumer side, we walked through a lot of that 'cause that has been our investments over the past few years, and I think, you know, a fairly safe statement to make is the other competitors, regardless of their business model, as it comes to a consumer perspective, they've built transaction facilitation platforms. Right? Like, that is what they do, and they're fairly synonymous in that.
It's, they're platforms that facilitate a transaction, and there's not a lot of reason to go back to that platform.
Right.
I think we've taken the opposite approach and really invested in economic, experiential product ways that keep you in the platform that no one else has. Now, that's not to say they don't have things. Like, I go back to when you look at Ticketmaster and StubHub, the years that they've been around, they have a fantastic asset in their brand, right? I mean, we've looked at that for a long time. We under-index all of them on brand, but on the product side, I think we remain strong. And on the product side, not only have we invested in the consumer side, we invested on the seller side, right? And-
Right
... again, 55% of the seller base on our platform growing, continued investment in SkyBox Drive to enhance and innovate that. That's where we've continued to invest. And then on the pure customer service side, which I didn't hit, but, you know, I think just last week we were announced again, you know, we've been continually investing in that. And again, this year, we were recognized by Newsweek as best customer service in ticketing, right?
Right.
So I think all of those things fueling-
Mm
... a great experience for constituencies is where we are. And then you go down the path of everybody else, like, I think, I don't need to talk about Live Nation, but Live Nation has a very different business model, where ticketing is a component of a larger, vertically integrated behemoth. But because of the nature of that business, they are constrained in what they can do on the secondary, right? They have just natural conflicts that don't allow them to come in.
Of course.
... StubHub, I think a marketplace business with a great brand, but encumbered by $2.5 billion of debt that they had to, you know, do to finance the transaction. So I think in a very different spot than we are with, you know, a brand, but I would say not, not a lot of product differentiation. And then SeatGeek, just a very- I think has evolved into a different company, right? I think it looks like, you know, I think their focus is, you know, they're building a primary business to take on Ticketmaster at, at subscale. So-
Right.
You know, I think, again, the business models for each seem to be fairly different, but I'd say where we are is we're focused on, again, building a product ecosystem that drives stickiness, retention in a profitable manner, and, and, and we remain focused on that vs the competition.
That's great. You noted that 56% of your purchases on your platform were from repeat buyers, up, I think, what was the earlier number? 41?
47.
47. Okay. One of the things that confuses me a bit when I go down your P&L, is when I see a number like that, I would naturally think that, like, the sales and marketing expenses as a percentage of revenue would be inversely correlated to that number, right? As the repeat order rate goes up, it feels like the sales and the marketing intensity of your business would go down. Why don't we see that? What, what, what is the missing piece of the puzzle?
Yeah, I think it's, you know, when you look at our marketing lines, you know, I'd break it out into two, which we do, right? We have online and offline marketing.
Yeah.
I would think about online in this space as it's like contribution margin, right? Like, it's variable.
Yeah.
So it's not a fixed element of marketing. You always need it, it's always part of some of that. And, you know, based on and we've talked about this, based on competition, I think that's gonna drive a little bit of what we have no control over the cost of the ad, right?
Yeah.
That's the market-driven component. We have a lot of control over how do we get people to not have to use the ad, hence our order mix and repeat, right?
Yes.
How do we get people to come direct? I think that's what we control. I think on the other side, on the offline marketing, almost the other comment I made is we see opportunity to continue elevating our profile, again, in the long term, to get you into the ecosystem in a direct manner. And so when I look at that time horizon, you know, we're two years in on loyalty, we're probably a year and change in on some of the brand components that you're seeing, and we're seeing all of the great areas in, in the user behavior that we've seen in a very competitive environment, right?
Yes.
So I think, you know, certainly we have confidence that over the time horizon, you will see leverage, and you will see leverage specifically in the, call it, fixed marketing components of that.
Yeah.
Very similarly, I think you'll see leverage through the entirety of our G&A as well.
Okay. Can you roll the clock back? You touched on SkyBox, which I think is really important, but can... Do you mind just giving us a little bit of history of what was the... It's such a unique asset to have. Can you just roll the clock back? How did this come to be? What was the original vision? Has it evolved over time?
Yeah.
And then talk a little bit about the changes that you're thinking about making going forward on pricing-
Yeah, I think that is-
As well as drive.
It's a great area of our story. You know, I think that's, that's an amazing testament to the founders. You know, so I think Vivid Seats was founded 20 years ago, but for the first 10 years, we... You know, Vivid Seats was a professional reseller of tickets, not a tech company, not a marketplace, right? And so the founders had deep, deep knowledge into what was happening in the industry, how sellers worked, and perhaps more importantly, where the gaps were-
Okay
... in terms of products and services that served that part of the ecosystem. So, you know, 10 years into Vivid Seats' founding, that's when they saw the opportunity and said: "Let's pivot this business. Let's use what we have. Let's build a marketplace-
Yeah.
- and also let's build technology that enables the professional sellers." And so, you know, Vivid Seats, the marketplace company, along with SkyBox, came to market almost the exact same time SeatGeek did, right?
Yeah.
And so I think those two companies came in at the same time, and I think that's where the ability to build, you know, the first, maybe not, I think first, one of the first cloud-based point of sales or ERP systems with full integration into every, you know, call it front-end distribution, call it third-party integration open tool set, super flexible, tied into that. I think that was what drove the charge with, of course, all the friendly UI and personalization.
Yeah.
And again, the history, if you think about that, as to why that was so important and why that came about, a lot of the old systems were rooted in almost a wholesale model. If you think about how this industry operated before the internet, before phones, and all of that, you had people with almost tickets at the box office, right, selling wholesale. So the ERP systems were really designed to facilitate that.
Mm.
If you think about the volume and the scale that goes through that, that's totally fine with a local data center, right? I mean, you got a line of 200 people, you're still processing at most 10, 10 a minute, maybe, if you're fast.
Mm-hmm.
You move to the level of we're talking about now, where, you know, the emergence from COVID of live events was when Bad Bunny broke the internet, right? I mean, that's not the same tech that you need. And so I think this came out again, disrupted a lot of that, and now we've built on top of that, right?
Mm.
So beyond just having, I'd say, reliable and stable infrastructure, we invested post-COVID in a fulfillment service, or during COVID, right? Sellers cut a lot of their OpEx, and we said: "What's a way we can be more helpful and beneficial to our seller community?" At our scale, we have the economies. We set up a fulfillment service that's only available to our SkyBox users because we said: "We should be able to handle this at a better cost structure than you can at subscale, because we can fully leverage those resources across the entirety of the base.
Sorry, fulfillment means physically getting the ticket in the hands of the buyer?
Yeah.
Like a paper ticket?
So managing the fulfillment, whether electronic or not, right?
Okay.
Like, electronic tickets still require account management of the electronic account. There are still events, you know, whether, think tennis, think festivals, where you need wristband... physical wristbands, lanyards, things like that, that get you access. So handling all of that for sellers-
Okay
... at an advantageous cost structure. Huge win, right?
Yep.
The minute we launched that, again, the line was up, and our only bottleneck for that was hiring fast enough to keep up with that demand. So we added that service. We then, this year, announced our investment to build a pricing product for sellers, right? So our SkyBox Drive is going to be an auto pricer for sellers. Today, there are industry incumbents that do that, so think about that as, again, technology that automates that. And there's two things that don't exist, which sellers really want: one, turnkey integration into SkyBox. So again, while SkyBox is easy, you still need APIs, you still need to connect, you need to integrate it. We'll build it so that if you're on SkyBox, you can flip a switch, and you'll have access to an auto pricer immediately.
Perhaps more importantly, when you think about how to price inventory, relative pricing and what you index to is the most important. You know, again, you go back to the charts that we referenced, we had $3 billion last year out of a, you know, arguably somewhere between $10 billion and $12 billion-dollar industry-
Mm-hmm
... so a very significant sample. So sellers have asked us all the time, "Hey, how can we- can we provide our data to others so that they can use that in an index?" And we've always said, "No." And so therefore, the pricing tools that are out there have other ways to grab data, or they're using subscale data elements to do that. SkyBox Drive will be the only place where there is automated, access to Vivid Seats marketplace data to drive pricing decisions. So I think, again, a little bit more of our continued commitment and enhancement to build differentiated products that are-
Okay
... valuable and desired by our users.
Okay, now SkyBox historically has been free for sellers, and you've talked about maybe changing that, but I was a little bit confused about, are you talking about just explicitly charging sellers to use it, or is it more about charging for Drive?
Yeah, I think we've never talked about charging for SkyBox, right?
Okay.
I would say that's always been a free offering, which is part of its advantage, and we like the adoption there.
Okay.
I think the way we've talked about SkyBox Drive is auto pricing is not a new thing in the industry. There are incumbents, like we've talked about, and every single one of those products is a monetized product.
Okay.
Right? So on SkyBox Drive, while we haven't talked about pricing or what we're gonna do when we bring that officially to market, I think what we've said is it wouldn't be out of place if we decided to monetize that, given that that entire product line-
Got it
... is monetized in the industry.
Got it. Can I ask a dumb question about your loyalty program?
Oh, man, Jason, you've got no dumb questions.
Okay. So just roll the clock back before you had the loyalty program. You guys had to decide: how do we decide how many tickets need to be purchased before we give a free one, right? And you came up with 10. Buy 10 tickets, get one free. Can you just sort of walk us through in simple math how the economics, from your perspective, are better under the loyalty program as opposed to going out and spending marketing to go get a new customer?
Yeah, so I mean, I think about it this way-
Okay
... right? Like, so if you look at what that benefit, you know, buy ten, get one means, you, you can almost equate that to that's like half your fees off, right? And, and again, it's not gonna be one order or two, it's gonna be, you need to make a couple of orders to come back. If, if you think about then the cost of having to reacquire every single transaction from a marketing perspective, we are almost happy to split that difference with users, right? So, you know, if you think about the economic benefit to the user, if you come back to us direct, we split that. If you come back to us again direct, I have no marketing cost from that. I'm happy to split that with, with you in terms of that benefit to the user, which then encourages you to continue buying, right?
Yes.
'Cause you now have that entrenched currency with us, you have that. And then the double win, which we're starting to see some of that, right, is not only if you come back direct is it the win, but because loyalty, you know, at its crux, is a combination of, am I winning wallet share, and am I accelerating wallet spend?
Yeah.
If you also come back faster-
Mm
... than you would have without it, that's the double win, right?
Yeah.
So if you come back cheaper and you come back faster, that's the win. We've certainly seen both of those things be true, right? They're definitely coming back now faster than they ever have in our history, and we're certainly seeing goodness again as we mix into more and more repeat orders as well.
Okay. You recently... There was that last slide you had on there about all the things that you could do that are sort of adjacents, and I can't remember whether international had a star under it or not, but you recently moved into the international market with this acquisition in Japan, Wavedash. What attracts you to the international opportunity? Why does that percolate to the top of all of the potential things that you could do that were on that last slide in terms of adjacencies or expansion?
Yeah, I think, you know, I frame the international market, you know, I think... We think it, call it loosely, double or more than doubles our TAM, right?
Mm.
When we look at what's out there in terms of secondary ticketing. The interesting, I think, area about that is it's probably, you know, as we continue to build internationalization of the platform, but once we build full internationalization, we're ready to go, that's a very clear path on how to launch almost in market with a platform that we believe we have a lot of benefits that scale. We then went out and looked, you know, across the landscape and said: What are the markets that make sense to us?
Mm.
You know, not every market is equivalent. So I think we've looked very broadly at saying, "Step one, let's look at the world." Favorable market means regulatory conditions encourage secondary, and, you know, is the local kind of buyer-seller base ready for this? Like, highly connected e-commerce is become standards in life, all that. That's almost the priority list of markets-
Yeah
... that are out there. And then, as we look at that, then we say: What's the right path? Like, is it an organic launch of the brand of the market? Are there inorganic opportunities?
Mm.
In Wavedash, in particular, I think we met the benefit, like the, we got the best of everything, right?
Right.
Japan's a great market for live events, well-established, highly connected society. E-commerce is a very standard way of doing business. We found an asset that is the market leader, profitable, accretive on margins, generating cash, and thought we got great value on that. So almost, if you think about that as the prong to our international approach, I can't think of an easier way-
Mm.
to start testing internationalization, where there is no pressure to go rightsize a subscale asset. There's no need to make sure our product is right and pull it back because we have an asset that already works.
Mm-hmm.
And right, and so I think there's a really, really simple path there as we continue to grow. And then, on the industry side, we think the international market is behind the U.S. market in terms of secondary adoption.
Yeah.
And so, as we're seeing it now today, where our secondary is outpacing primary growth, I think it behooves us, again, it's opportunistic as we get into that, to get ahead of what is almost certain to be the acceleration of secondary market growth, I think we see as a really favorable dynamic, too.
Okay, my last 30 seconds, I'm gonna squeeze one in here. It's very hard to get numbers in my seat about how big the secondary market is, both domestically and internationally. With your disclosures, it's getting a little bit better domestically. When I've looked at the international market, I would say it's, like, 1/3 the size of the U.S., but you said double the TAM.
Mm.
you really think the international market is as large as the U.S. market today? Or you're sort of prognosticating of, "Hey, we think it's gonna evolve, and it's gonna look like the U.S., and eventually it will be an $11 billion international market"?
Yeah, no, I think today it's a-
You think it's eleven-
It's a 2x across.
Okay.
Right, I mean, when you think about, again, the U.S. market and the differences, you know, I think you've got Europe and, you know, I think we're placing a lot of sports. You have football over there-
Yeah
... which is huge, right? I mean, you see now the artists making their way.
Okay.
So I think you certainly have developed countries a lot of this, and I think, again, you're on the precipice of that becoming even more, as I think live events continue to be priority and catalyst across the rest of the sector.
Perfect. Stan, thank you so much.
Thanks, Jason.
All right.
Thanks for having me today.
Thank you.