So Viagogo has raised another $15 million and hooked in former tennis champions Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf both as board members / investors as well as advisors to help it push its secondary ticketing market into Europe. The funding now gives it $70 million of external investment. That’s some war-chest.
Agassi and Graf invested in the common-stock round alongside existing shareholders Index Ventures, Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA; German media mogul Herbert Kloiber; and international financier Jacob Rothschild, via his family’s interests. The new funding values Viagogo at more than $300 million, although I hear from sources that they were aiming for a $30 million round.
The company currently serves ticket seekers in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and the Netherlands. Founder Eric Baker says Viagogo has annual sales close to a $100 million annually and expects those figures to double or triple this year. Viagogo, which charges buyers a 10% fee and sellers a 15% fee on each confirmed transaction, handled $100 million in transactions in 2008.
The London-based secondary ticketing site has deals with UK soccer clubs Manchester United, Chelsea and Germany’s Bayern Munich as well as music companies Warner Music International, Live Nation and Madonna. It is looking to push into more European markets such as Spain and Italy, and the US, but Germany is key to this.
Graf and Agassi are going to open their contact book for partnerships in tennis, and Graf is clearly a draw in the key German market – but one wonders if signing up a celebrity is really going to give Viagogo the extra juice it needs.
Because it’s not just about having deals with clubs and live music promoters. A growing proportion of resold tickets are sold by fans to other fans. To that end Viagogo competitor Seatwave has a 3-year exclusive deal with StudiVZ, the “German Facebook”, for instance.
Seatwave is Viagogo’s headache in Europe. According to a Hitwise spokesman I spoke to today, Viagogo is the third largest secondary ticketing site in the UK. As of January this year Seatwave is on 35% market share, GetMeIn (a UK startup founded by US guy James Gray and acquired by TicketMaster) is on 25%, and Viagogo is on 14%.
Seatwave also has deals with European soccer and rugby clubs and saw a 50% increase in transaction volume in the fourth quarter last year. Seatwave is also London-based and backed by a phalanx of investors including Adinvest, Atlas Venture, Fidelity Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners to the tune of $36 million. Seatwave was founded in 2006 by Joe Cohen, formerly with Ticketmaster and Match.com, and is widely tipped on the London scene as a smart entrepreneur.
One of those backers, Fred Destin of Atlas Ventures, has blogged vociferously against Viagogo, at one point last year calling out Viagogo as being poised to deadpool.
Clearly he was wrong, but third party observers Hitwise reported last October that Viagogo’s traffic numbers had fallen from 3.8% in April to 1.7%. We know traffic leads to sales but Baker denied it was of significance and preferred to talk about transactions. Nevertheless, perhaps that’s why they signed some high-profie celebs to push the site? Agassi is liked in the UK, Graf in Germany. Queue advertising blitz maybe?
Then again both Viagogo and Seatwave stand to benefit in the recession, which is driving down prices for live events. That’s good for secondary ticket markets of course, because people start to sell their tickets more often. Viagogo said ticket prices for this year’s Super Bowl dropped 40% – a $5,000 ticket last year sold for $3,100. People are now bargain hunting which puts more power in the hands of secondary markets. The trouble is, these markets have to get volume.
In the US it Viagogo faces StubHub, which in 2007 signed a five-year contract with Major League Baseball to be its official ticket reseller and TicketsNow, was acquired by TicketMaster Inc. in 2008. Forrester estimates U.S. online secondary ticket sales reached almost $3 billion last year, up from about $2.6 billion in 2007.
Last year TechCrunch named both Viagogo and Seatwave a well placed to weather a downturn.
Viagogo was launched by Baker in August 2006 after reportedly fell out with Stubhub CEO Jeff Fluhr, hence Viagogo. StubHub was sold to eBay in 2007 for $307 million.
this looks money!
cooljobsalways
http://tinyurl.com/7uj5ay
pretty cool concept; worth keeping an eye on this!
i thought ticket touts were illegal – oh that’s right, not on the web.
why did you use an image of a ticket to a The Police concert in Rio de Janeiro in 1982? Doesn’t seem that Brazil is one of the markets where viagogo will launch, and neither is possible to go to that concert, unless you can travel back in time…
In the UK market, a “new” player will arrive soon, Play.com will offer as well secondary tickets…
It becomes a crowded market already.
To viagogo’s point though, I’m curious to why Seatwave never talks about revenue numbers. I have to assume that their revenues are less than viagogo, otherwise they’d talk about it, in which case the question is either (1) are the traffic numbers flawed or (2) why is viagogo’s conversion rate so much higher.
Nice comment, Eric!
Combine the minty fresh taste of Twitter with Viagogo and boom.. what do you get? Tweetseats!
No, it doesn’t exist. I just made it up, because I’m like that.
?????
In the UK market, a “new” player will arrive soon, Play.com will offer as well secondary tickets…
Deadpool by 2010.
These guys are clearly just burning through their funding with pretty disappointing returns. How can a company with a revenue-focused business model be valued at $300m on a turnover of $25m (no doubt at a loss). Crazy…
Why does Baker need another $15m? I guess it’s because he burns money with every ticket he sells. The deception of secondary ticketing is that tickets come from fans…they simply don’t. Most tickets sold on Viagogo come from brokers. These brokers have zero loyalty and list across all the reselling sites. This is why Seatwave’s traffic share of 35% really is the key metric. There’s little to differentiate the players in terms of inventory so traffic is likley to equal sales. While Baker has signed exclusives with the likes of Madonna etc, rather than that setting him above the market it simply means he’s had his margins screwed even lower. I can’t wait to see the power of Steffi and Andre’s roller decks…I’m sure they’ll also have great tips on improving Viagogo’s truly shocking UI! Viagogo’s value..not much i’d say.
Looking online reveals some unhappy experiences with the delivery and guarantee of tickets. Seems like they tone down the brute force tactics and work on their approach at offering a better service.
No amount of money can replicate company culture that drives happy customers to return.
“Then again both Viagogo and Seatwave stand to benefit in the recession, which is driving down prices for live events.”
Why would a secondary market benefit from prices collapsing in the primary market? Because less concerts will sell out? Because the uplift from reselling is lower??? Er…am i missing something?
Thanks for the post Mike. I’m James Gray – one of two founders of GET ME IN!, no longer physically with the company, but still there spiritually =)
What Hitwise should have pointed out, is that SoldOutEventTickets.com is also a GET ME IN/Ticketmaster website. While it’s a very average looking website, it still gets a high volume of traffic. In fact if you combine the traffic of that site together with GetMeIn.com, you have as much or more market share of traffic as seatwave!
While GMI maybe doesn’t shout for attention as loud as its competitors, the business is set to outpace both seatwave & viagogo – ESPECIALLY if the Live Nation / Tickemaster merger goes through!
To get an idea of GMI’s growth – have a look at Alexa for example, not the most accurate tool – but a decent measure nonetheless.
Also I wanted to point out the other founder of GET ME IN is Paul Montagne from the Netherlands – and the business is currently run by US guy Andrew Blachman, former consultant to StubHub, and former European Director of (Qwikker) WideRay.
Last note – while I’ve been a fan of Andre Agassi my whole life and have an enormous amount of respect for the man – I think one thing is for sure – he should stick to tennis!
Gut!