All right, we're gonna get it going. I'm Doug Anmuth, J.P. Morgan internet analyst. We're pleased to have with us StubHub co-founder, chairman, and CEO, Eric Baker. Eric co-founded StubHub in 2000, and it was later acquired by eBay. In 2006, Eric founded Viagogo as an international secondary ticketing marketplace, and in 2019, Viagogo announced the agreement to acquire StubHub. Prior to StubHub, Eric worked for McKinsey and Bain Capital. Today, StubHub operates the largest global secondary ticketing marketplace. Last year, buyers purchased more than 53 million tickets from more than 1 million unique sellers on StubHub's marketplace. This year, the company should generate around $10 billion in gross merchandise sales. Welcome, Eric.
Thanks for having me, Doug. Appreciate it.
All right. You co-founded StubHub 25 years ago, your path since then, kinda taking the company to where it is today, has been quite unique. Maybe you can walk us through a little bit of that history and just how that shaped your view of the ticketing industry today.
Yeah, no, it's crazy to think I've been doing this for 25+ years, Doug, long, long time ago when we started this. It's been interesting to sort of have seen this from when we started the secondary ticketing industry in 2000, through obviously, as you said, growing something internationally to really seeing that now people view sort of tickets. They don't really care about primary and secondary. They just wanna get tickets to go to live events, period. Sort of how that's evolved. You look at least, you know, I look at the analogy of something like YouTube that also in, I think, 2005, 2006, it was basically started as people with sort of their videos of their cats and user-generated content.
They had pirated content, and now all content is sort of through YouTube. It's been interesting to see how the business has grown. The other thing is what's really been amazing is just the resilience and endurance of how much people love live events, which is phenomenal. That's been a constant, and I think, even as the world gets more technology-obsessed, there's nothing like actually being live at a concert or at the Knicks opening game tomorrow night.
All right. Go Knicks. All right. You've been a public company since September of last year. How has that influenced how you view and manage the business?
I think we've-- You know, we really-- Doug, it hasn't changed in that we try and manage the business for the long term. The whole goal of what I'm trying to do, I think of it as just generate as much cash flow per share as you can over time, and do that by building sort of the best possible product and experience for consumers so that you've got an asset that will grow and revolutionize how people are thinking about tickets. All that being said, I think the big thing has just been it's important, and appreciate the opportunity today to make sure that we're communicating effectively to the investment community and making sure people know what we're doing and have their expectations set correctly. That's definitely important. The fundamentals of how we're trying to build the business have not changed.
Okay. Let's talk about the core resale business. North America live events growth has remained healthy. You've talked about continued strength in secondary ticketing, while the market has grown low double digits in recent years. All-in pricing had some impact in 2025. We're about to lap that. How do you think about North America secondary ticketing industry growth over the next few years?
Yeah, the industry has been great. When you look at live events, you have this great tailwind that there's increasingly more events that people want to go to. Things like the WNBA have taken off. Things like you've got folks like Matt Rife, who is a comedian who started on YouTube. There's more and more content going on, and the passion remains. I think if anything, people are much more focused on the experiences rather than buying goods. You know, that's why we've always seen, and again, going back 25 years, you know, the industry's always grown in double digits consistently with the exception of COVID, which it did not, Doug, during COVID. Other than that, it's been very healthy and in a good place. I think, again, it's really live events is just the engine that powers it, and we don't see that changing.
Okay. Maybe you can talk about all-in pricing a little bit. Maybe just explain a little bit of kind of what changed and what happened last year, and how you're doing as you progress through that. Is the impact kinda mostly behind at this point?
Sure, all-in pricing basically just means that the consumer sees the entire price and fees up front. It includes the fees, and you get that rather than historically, as in a lot of industries, you'd have the fees in the back. Just to understand that, we at StubHub had actually lobbied the FTC to get to all-in pricing as a standard rule for everybody, 'cause we thought it's best for consumers. We were publicly on record doing that, and in May of last year is when the FTC passed the all-in pricing rule. I think it was May 13th. We knew when we lobbied for it that that would have a short-term hit to what goes on because when consumers see the all-in pricing the first time, you get a conversion hit.
It's a one-time hit to the industry, and we estimated that to be in the neighborhood of 10%. The reason we did it is because over the long haul, it's much better for consumers. If it's better for consumers, it's better for us, just because as leader in the industry, if consumers are happier, they're gonna be buying more. The other thing it would do, we believe, is it prevents if there are other people out there who are not as friendly for consumers who are trying to arbitrage, it would take that away.
To your question, Doug, it was last May that that passed. We believed in stuff that we'd seen. It's around a 10% plus or minus conversion hit, and now we're lapping it. That's now behind us or will be. It'll really be behind us in Q3 and Q4. Q3 will be the first quarter where we really have a clean pass from AIP. Obviously getting past that, you know, should make things a little bit smoother.
Okay. Let's talk about the upcoming kind of slate when you think about events. What are your views on the summer concert season, the World Cup, just overall event slate this year?
Yeah, the live event slate for this year has been very strong. There have been a number of great concerts that have gone out that should do extremely well, sort of. Whether it's like, you know, Bruno Mars went on sale, BTS, a number of other people that we've seen. Obviously, as you mentioned, the World Cup is being played, the World Cup's always a great event. It's great.
Particularly, we have a global platform, we're, you know, in 200 countries and territories, and we see a ton of event tourism all the time. The World Cup's just a phenomenal event for us in terms of not simply what it provides in terms of sales, but it's a great way for us to more global folks to become aware of our reach and how much that we can do. You know, I think 2026 is a very solid year for live events.
Okay. You've outgrown the market, you know, really over the last several years. You've close to 50% share. How do you think about the right balance between continued share gains and margin expansion going forward?
Yeah. I think, as you point out, Doug, you know, we're the leader in our market and our space, and something that we were clear about and have explained to people is that the past two years, and we had taken possession of the company back from eBay to build back market share and take that commanding leadership position, we had intentionally made a number of investments into market share and sort of doing that. We believe now, and as we said, going into this year, we would be harvesting on that, where basically now you've got a leadership position. We also had always said we're in a, from our lived experience, a marketplace business that has network effects and flywheels.
When your relative market share becomes commanding and you have half the market or more, that is very beneficial, you should be able to grow while you inflect and increase your margins and eliminate some of that trade-off. That was implicit in the guidance that we put out for this year, Doug, and said, "We're going to grow while we inflect margins." And that, in fact, is what we demonstrated in Q1, and we have a lot of confidence in that for the year as we laid out.
I think the key is just to understand when you have a leadership position and high relative market share in this network effect business and marketplace business we're in, it is actually allows you to grow and inflect margins. You don't have to have a trade-off between those two things. As we believe, and as I've said, we expect that to continue.
Okay, great. Let's shift gears, talk about open distribution. You've evolved your strategy from what was business development-led to now more of a product-led approach. You recently announced the StubHub Distribution Manager tool that allows content to sell directly through your platform. Maybe you can talk about the pivot, early feedback, and why this is the better approach for you.
Sure. No, absolutely. Let me start by just making sure everyone's familiar with what is open distribution fundamentally, and then I'll get into how we've evolved our strategy and what we're doing to make it a reality. Open distribution's a very simple concept. It's basically the belief that if you're a content owner, you could be a theater owner, you could be an artist, a team, anyone with tickets, you should sell your tickets over StubHub just like everyone else does and use our data and distribution.
When we go to someone who's a seller of a ticket, whether it's the Dodgers or whomever, we're basically saying, "You should sell over StubHub on a non-exclusive basis," so you can sell anywhere you want, including StubHub, a non-exclusive, and we don't charge you 'cause we have a marketplace model, the consumer's buying. You're really just like any other seller over our marketplace. That's been extremely well-received because if you go to someone and say, "I'm gonna give you more data and distribution at no cost, and if we don't perform, then that's fine." What we found, Doug, is we had started that model and doing things like that, where we'd sign the Yankees and other teams to do this and had a lot of success with them.
We'd originally, some of those major deals were, as Doug alluded, what I'd call a business development approach, which is you'd meet with leadership at these clubs, get them to sign up for a period of time, have a certain number of tickets, and you could sort of build that out. Again, having done this a long time, it sort of, as we looked at it, sort of said, "Wow, imagine if you could shift this model." Sort of that's more like what Yahoo did to build their advertising business back in the day. They would go, and they'd say, "Hey, we signed up Pepsi, Coca-Cola, General Mills," and stack them. While they were doing that, Google sort of perfected a platform that was very product-driven. By having a product, it sort of becomes self-serve.
You don't need a contract, obviously, the rest is history as they got that right, and Google far surpassed what Yahoo had been doing. What we saw in the past number of months was that we really had people coming to us who were saying across the spectrum of various sizes who wanted to use the open distribution model. That rather than it being about a long conversation biz dev-wise in order to have a partnership and a press release, you sort of started when the Dodgers had approached us and said, "We'd like to sell directly over StubHub," and we were prepared, "Oh, maybe I've got to go out to Chavez Ravine and meet with ownership, and we'll" They're like, "No, no.
We have some people in-house set it up, allow us to sell the tickets. That worked very well, gives them a ton of flexibility because they can determine on a game-by-game, day-by-day basis what they do or don't wanna sell. To be clear, they could stop selling tomorrow if they wanted to, or they could triple the amount they want to sell. It's all what makes sense for them, and it's been very mutually successful. What we realized is that you need to just eliminate the barriers and the friction for everybody else in the tail so that it should be as simple for someone if you have a theater in Amsterdam as a soccer, MLS soccer team in the U.S. or the Dodgers to sell these tickets.
In order to do that, it's really about getting the product and making it very simple, and getting it right. You mentioned Distribution Manager, where we took, you know, used AI to create a very easy tool for these people to be able to sell their tickets in a simple way. That eliminates the friction for that. We've done integrations with their access control companies to make it easier on their dashboard to sell tickets. As we do that, we think we position ourselves extremely well to capture this massive opportunity of $160 billion of tickets that could be open distribution tickets over StubHub. Again, this year is all about, for us, getting that product right and laying the groundwork for it so that afterwards we can then get to really ramping up the volume.
How do we think about, just product innovation roadmap there? Any timelines in particular around open distribution?
I think the way I'll talk about how we think about it. We obviously, this is already people are using this product. We have hundreds of millions of dollars that goes over the pipes. We're trying to refine it and get it right, as I said, so that we can really push it out in a big way in the future. What we have said, timeline-wise is this year we're not focused on driving more GMS as the goal, but rather getting the setup correct. Once we have that, we'll certainly communicate to folks about what the timeline financially should look like and what the GMS expectation should be. For this year, where we wanted to make clear is we put out a guidance that sort of assumes no material growth in that area as we work on the product. That's factored in.
How do you frame the size of the open distribution opportunity? How should we think about economics relative to core resale?
Yeah. The exciting thing about open distribution, again, it's really just more supply that can come on the marketplace, right? Just think of it as we have fans, we have professional sellers, and then you've got content holders. It's really tapping into that content bucket. That content bucket, if you look at it, and I think as we've talked about in prior presentations, there's about $160 billion globally on an annual basis that flows through what would be accessible. Even if you took out what Ticketmaster does, 'cause Ticketmaster is probably not clamoring for open distribution, although they may end up there. They probably, on a paid ticket basis, I think this flows somewhere around $35 billion-$40 billion. If you look at everything that's touched by Live Nation more broadly, you might total the whole thing inclusive of Ticketmaster in the $70 billion-ish range.
Even if you backed all that out, it's a $90 billion opportunity, even if you weren't to touch any of the other stuff, and we already are. It's a large, it's a large opportunity. It's a large ocean of tickets. It's a big TAM expansion for us. To your second question, which is, well, how should I think about when those tickets flow? We obviously already have tickets flowing, and the economics to us are the same. By which I mean, again, when we sell a ticket from a season ticket holder, a fan, a power seller, broker, we have our fees, our take rates. You know, we make around 20%. That is the same if the Dodgers are selling a ticket or anyone else.
Which makes sense when you think about it 'cause we're just running a marketplace, and so if you wanna sell in our marketplace, that's how it works, and it's non-exclusive. You know, you can sell simultaneously on many marketplaces, many outlets, many stores, and if we do our job and we're able to monetize the ticket for people, great. It doesn't cost you anything.
Does the recent DOJ Live Nation settlement help increase open distribution in your view?
Yeah, I think the first thing, let me just frame it, Doug, is that everything that I've talked about with open distribution and what has already been in motion has no reliance on the DOJ and the Ticketmaster stuff. This is all assuming just the status quo is forever. That being said, Doug, as you point out, with Live Nation and the DOJ, Live Nation came to a settlement with the DOJ where they said, "Okay, we'll do A, B, C, and D," and you can read sort of what they put together.
What was really, heartening and positive is that it really revolved a lot around open distribution, by which I mean they said you need to be able to distribute the tickets more openly, make it easier for people to interact, have larger percentages of tickets even through their network that are open. The fact that that is something that was front and center, I think is only a tailwind for us. It's only helpful. Again, I caveat that with who knows what will be enforced, who knows what will happen, but anything that does transpire along those lines is only to the upside for us.
Okay. Let's shift gears, talk about advertising a little bit. If you can just walk us through the opportunity that you see to open up the platform to advertising, what would it look like? How big of an opportunity is it for you?
Sure. The advertising we believe is a massive opportunity. We have a great motivated, passionate base of folks that people want to reach in a very targeted manner. One of the most exciting opportunities that we've talked about is sponsored listings, which is that we know that it's very common on a marketplace, and that sellers want to bump their listings up and make sure that they can pay to get them in front of as many people as possible. That's been proven in a lot of marketplace businesses. We have said, Doug, as you know, is that the key to us is making sure that the customer experience doesn't get compromised and that actually it's maximized and enhanced.
What we've been very careful with is we've tested it, and we started testing it in the fourth quarter, is trying to get that right before we scale in a dramatic way. What do I mean by get it right? What are we looking at there? One is, again, on customer conversion experience. What we've realized is it's no longer, especially with what you can do with AI and being innovative, a goal of just having do no harm. You can actually end up with a solution that could enhance your customer conversion and experience. The second thing is getting the right sort of framework, both economic and product-wise.
Product-wise is now what you can do with the products, even on that side, if you, if you build for the generation of AI-powered products, is make it simpler, eliminate the friction, roll the thing out the right way. Then what's the right economic framework to charge for people and how to collect? We wanna get all of that right before we scale it. We've been testing and rolling out ads and doing all that, getting that set up.
Again, from a timeline perspective, we wanted to be clear to communicate that for our guidance in 2026, it does not assume any appreciable ad contribution. Again, the idea is that we lay the groundwork, and then going forward, then we can direct and indicate what that will be. We're very excited about the opportunity. We know it exists. We know people want it. We just wanna make sure we get it right for the long term.
Okay. What about on the kind of the second opportunity within ads, more of the brand side and, you know, bigger companies?
Yeah. I think what you're talking about there is there's this concept of partnerships and ad partnerships where think about it, if you're going to a live event, there's like, how do I travel to the live event? We've done some stuff that we're testing with Booking.com. Can I get a car ride? You know, things that one might do with an Uber or someone like this, or Waymo. Where am I gonna eat before the game? You know, what's my merchandise? Those are all very natural compliments. We've done a little bit of that where we're testing it out. Again, it's about getting it very seamless in the customer experience.
The big thing is, oftentimes you might have some advertisers who want to control that customer experience, and that's the fastest way to monetize immediately. That's not worth it to us, so that's why we're taking our time to get it right. It's clearly an area that is well, well-trodden by other people that exists. It's about a matter of getting it right, and we're just trying to make sure that we have our ducks in a row before we put our foot on the accelerator.
I know it's still early, but any view on where ad penetration levels could go over the long term, just as a percentage of GMS?
Yeah, no, we want to. We're obviously very bullish on it, Doug, and believe there's a big opportunity. You know, wanna be very measured in, until, as I say, until we have a firm sense of what we believe we wanna roll out when we wanna be careful about setting expectations. Again, I think what's great is, again, people can look at various benchmarks for marketplace businesses and see what is possible, which is, you know, pretty exciting and make your own judgment. We'll guide you as we know more.
Okay, great. Let's talk about regulatory a little bit. There are some efforts just across different markets to implement caps on the resale price of tickets. What are your views on these initiatives? How do you think they impact the business?
Yeah, sure. I think on the price caps. Let me first set the stage on, I think, Doug, the stuff that's mostly in the news and what people talk about these days and when people are looking at it is really about you have these very few high-end concerts every year, which would be like a Taylor Swift type of concert, and people are like, "Oh my goodness, we don't want someone coming in, a bad actor, hoovering up a bunch of tickets, and then selling them at huge markups." That's really what dominates the discussion. One way people have looked at stuff is they'll talk about, well, we should have price caps. I'll talk about that. The first thing is, obviously, we work for fans, consumers.
Like, that's not just happy talk. Like, that's our business. Like, they have to come back and be happy, or else we don't have a business. We always want what's best for the fan and consumer, and I believe that legislators and regulators, basically, they're just trying to make events more accessible on a fair basis for people, and make sure things work, which we're sort of aligned. We have the same goal. The key is, like, educating people about how do you achieve that. When we've looked at what we've seen in the few instances where price caps have been placed out there, they don't work in jurisdictions. What happens? What happens is you drive a black market, which raises the prices in the black market, and the fraud grows up. Fraud goes up tremendously.
Reports have shown from economists even 4 x as much fraud. That doesn't work. The other issue is that it's very hard to even enforce these types of things because you increasingly have the concept of even what the face value of the ticket is doesn't make much sense because they're dynamically pricing in the primary market, and there's no longer a face value of a ticket. For all those reasons, it's just not practical, doesn't work, has been rolled back in many places. And what I would say is you can even look at the U.K. I think it was about five months ago, Doug, or six.
There was a public announcement, maybe it was October, it said a government official had said they're gonna recommend a price cap in the U.K. The first thing it was misunderstood here that people thought there already was a price cap, which there wasn't. It's a process, legislative process. They have to take it to something called the King's Speech that happens every spring, propose it, and then it takes another year to go through Parliament if it goes through, and then it takes more time to activate. We said at the time, "Look, this is a complicated issue. We're educating them. It's not so simple." In fact, the King's Speech was just last week, and it was not in the King's Speech, so they're not moving forward at this time with that. They'll have to see if they come forward again.
Again, I think that's because as they get more educated about it, they realize it's probably not doing what they'd hoped it would do. The last thing I'd just say about price caps and since 'cause it's been helpful, Doug, and we mentioned this on one of our earnings calls for investors, is to say, "Okay, let's just back up." Sometimes people have said, "Well, how do I boundary, you know, how much of your business is this?
What if the Intergalactic Court just said price caps everywhere like this, and it just happened? We try and explain to people, "Look, it's really just a sub-segment of our business." We looked, and I think we explained if you took high-end concert tickets for the high-end concerts that are bought by these professional sellers that they're talking about and at the relevant price caps, you know, you're talking around 10% of our GMS. That's it. Again, that's if across all 200 jurisdictions and more you had a problem. I t is containable. It's a discrete issue, which, as I say, we believe is not gonna occur. Even if you disagree, you can boundary the impact to what I said.
Okay, great. Let's shift gears, talk about AI. The potential for marketplace disintermediation in an agentic world just obviously remains top of mind for investors. How do you think about that AI threat and opportunity for StubHub?
Sure. AI is obviously a huge disruptive technology across the board. Lot of exciting things going on. No one knows exactly how everything will play out, we take it very seriously. That being said, we think we're positioned for this to be a great tailwind for us and very positively positioned. Why do we think that? First of all, we're dealing with live events in a real world product. You know, we run a two-sided marketplace with a lot of complexity, where at the end of the day, you're going to the Red Sox game or you're going to a concert and whatnot. We think that's a good place to be. It's not like we're not selling software. We're not selling, you know, content that you can replicate. We think that's great.
That also means that the supply chain, everything from payments to fraud to gathering all our disparate suppliers, it's not the type of thing that is in the sweet spot for what AI is trying to do. Where we see the upside is that there's a tremendous ability to use this technology to revolutionize in a positive way the experience for consumers. We believe that you have an agentic experience through StubHub, where basically it'll say, "Hey, Doug, we know you. You love Michigan. Here's where you like to sit. This is what you're interested in." It can present options for you, and the experience of buying tickets will look completely different, and whether you're doing that through a voice modality or whatever you may be doing. We think that's very exciting.
Obviously, it's as many people have said, you can then take the technology to eliminate friction through the rest of the chain, you know, and do that in a very cost-effective manner. You can take costs out while you're improving your product, and you are actually improving the, you know, improving the revenue component. You're making more money with a better product experience at lower cost. We believe the key is to be a leader in a vertical like ours. If you're the leader in the vertical, a vertical marketplace like this that's well-situated, you can really get a huge data advantage that we have. That data advantage that we've talked about before, we think becomes even more insurmountable and powerful. That's a long way of saying a lot of exciting things.
We have done integrations with Claude and with ChatGPT. One thing to comment there 'cause people often are interested, today that's for de minimis, you know, Google search, Facebook, those are as strong as ever, going great. We wanna make sure we are wherever the consumers are gonna go. We wanna be on the cutting edge of that. It's very exciting to be integrated with these partners, and we'll see how it plays out. You know, it's exciting times.
Okay. Anything to call out just in terms of kinda internal product development and increased efficiency?
I think there's two things I'd say 'cause I think a lot of people understand, and it's across the board that most companies obviously can be more efficient, your people are more efficient. You can start taking back office costs out, that's all exciting in the future. Two things I think are underappreciated. One is the speed to ship. We're a product organization and a product technology organization, the faster we can ship and innovate product that's a hugely beneficial thing for us. What you can do now is really increase that speed in ways that you couldn't before. The second is, I think, the ability that we have now to take our data and analytics and really get much better insights much more quickly and much more actionably.
In other words, imagine we've always prided ourselves on using our data to test, to think about things. What you can do now is really amazing. You have that data almost instantaneously, the ability to analyze the data so quickly, to then make better decisions on a quicker basis. If you can make better decisions on a quicker basis, and you can therefore ship your product faster, and that compounds, I think that's gonna create, again, a scenario where when you're the leader, as we talked about, or any leader in any space, and you've got a data flywheel, that benefit's just gonna compound and sort of create an even more yawning gap between the winners and people who are not the winners.
Okay. In terms of, just thinking about kind of 2026 guidance and financials, you've guided to about 9% GMS growth at the midpoint for this year. That implies accelerating to double-digit growth in the back half. How do you think about shape of the year? I guess, what gives you the confidence in that back half growth, recognizing you'll lap all-in pricing?
Yeah, no, absolutely. As you pointed out, Doug, our guidance is 8%-10% growth of GMS and $400 million-$420 million on the EBITDA line. We just reiterated our confidence in that guidance on our last call, which we're very excited about, again, with the health of everything going on, the inflection and the growth. I think in terms of the shaping, clearly, you know, when we look, and we look at it annually, but, as I think you alluded, you know, the back half of the year typically is where there's a lot of stuff going on. There's a great calendar this year. There's a lot of positive benefits from, we believe, from lapping all-in pricing, w e're very confident in our guidance and stand behind it.
Okay. Anything to call out just in terms of how we should think about contribution from the World Cup?
World Cup's a, you know, it's a great event. I think obviously what I would say is we've always said, and I think, as we said on our call, it's like a tier 1 event. The way that we've thought about it, that's like a top concert, something like that. I will say sometimes people are like, "Well, isn't it like Taylor Swift?" I just would reiterate, there's only one Taylor Swift. I don't think that's anticipated. We'll let you know if it turns out that's different. You know, it's a great event, and it's performing exactly as we anticipated up till now.
That's factored into the guidance we just talked about and how we think about the year. We'll obviously know more after it really goes through June and July are the key months where the tournament's going on. As we know more, and that closes out, we'll certainly inform you about it. It's tracking as we would expect, as a very strong event, as we sit here today.
Okay. Your guidance also suggests margins will expand pretty meaningfully this year. Maybe you can just help us directionally kind of bridge that expansion across, you know, take rate normalization, improved marketing efficiency, operating leverage, just anything else we should be thinking about.
Yeah, sure. As you point out, and we mentioned before, implicit in the guidance we gave is obviously that we'll grow and we'll inflect margins, which started happening sort of in Q1 and we think will continue. To your point as we laid out, well, why does that happen when you get, again, scale leadership in a business like this? I think, Doug, you alluded to a number of the points that contribute to that. One is that you just get obviously operating leverage as you get bigger. The second is that as you have leadership in the market, you're just more efficient naturally, we've found, in everything that you do. Because what's happening as we've gone into an upward, an upward trajectory, other people go into more of a downward spiral, right?
In terms of how much liquidity they have and how efficient they can be. You end up being more efficient through the channels that you market through. You get the compound effects through your repeat usage and your direct traffic. All of those things are extremely positive. Doug, I think as we also had mentioned and you mentioned here, you know, you get normalization of the take rates, which will approach 20%, which is normal course for us, as opposed to what in the past and the last two years we were in that mode of sort of solidifying the market position.
All those things come together to end up with why we believe we will report those numbers that we talked about, which will demonstrate that we've been able to grow while inflecting margins. Hopefully, again, I would just say, you know, because it's important that we do that to demonstrate that we've lived that experience before. Obviously, there are folks who may believe or could say, "I don't know, you're in a commodity business, and in a commodity business, if you're not a network effect marketplace business, you only have price and advertising. In those businesses, you either lower your prices or you spend more on advertising to grow." That's not the business that we're in. That's why, you know, we look forward to posting those numbers and demonstrating confirmation of that we will be able to grow while we inflect our margins.
Okay, great. Just wrapping up, what are you most excited about? Is there anything you think is misunderstood about the company or its positioning in the industry?
Obviously, as you can tell, very excited about, I mean, thank God I'm in the live events business. That is a great business to be in. I, you know, lucked into being in live events. People love sports. They love concerts. It's more and more global, so that's great, and we have leadership in our marketplace and so many TAM expansion cases. I think in terms of misunderstood, you know, it's on us to communicate better. I think, Doug, I appreciate the opportunity to address some of those things. I think, like we talked about, some of the regulatory stuff, not understood what's actually going on.
We brought up, like, the ad people who think, "Oh, in the U.K., you're already outlawed," or the exposure of price caps, and so hopefully trying to make sure people understand that. People just understanding the dynamic of the marketplace business with the leadership position. I think there are people, again, who I don't think fully appreciate how our business works and the way it does, but that's why it's important that we do what we say we're gonna do and grow and inflect margins and demonstrate it. Appreciate the time and appreciate the interest.
All right. We're gonna leave it there. Thank you, Eric.
Thank you.