EBay Buys StubHub, Scalps Tickets

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

Ebay (EBAY) is reportedly purchasing ticket auction operation StubHub for $300 million. That is about 30 times cash flow according to the Wall Street Journal. Ebay currently has a unit that competes in the same space.

The deal is very expensive, considering that a number of sports teams have blocked StubHub from selling tickets to their games. The teams consider the sales a form of "scalping" which is actually not legal in some states. Many teams also have provisions on the tickets saying that they cannot be resold in the open market.

But, Ebay has a big bank account and the New York Yankees and Oakland Raiders may want to ask for some of that cash for selling tickets which are marked "This Ticket Is The Property Of The Owner, And May Not Be Sold To Third Parties."

Thirty times cash. Ouch.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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