StubHub Holdings, Inc. Class A

today, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to StubHub's third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. All participants are in a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. Please note that this conference call is being recorded today, November 13th, 2025. I will now turn the call over to Clinton Hooks with StubHub.

Thank you for joining us to discuss StubHub's third quarter 2025 results. For reference, our third quarter 2025 earnings release and presentation are available under the quarterly results section of our investor relations website at investors.stubhub.com. Before we begin, please note that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements within the meeting of federal security laws. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. We assume no responsibility for updating these statements. Therefore, please exercise caution in relying on them. For detailed risk factors, please refer to our SEC filings. We'll also discuss certain non-GAAP measures which we believe are useful to investors for evaluating our performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as substitutes for GAAP results. Full reconciliations to GAAP measures are available in our earnings release. Unless otherwise noted, our profitability and EBITDA discussions today refer to non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA. Joining me today are Eric Baker, our founder, chairman, and chief executive officer, and Connie James, our chief financial officer. They'll provide opening remarks, then take questions. With that, I'll turn it over to Eric.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our first earnings call as a public company. I want to welcome all our investors, both those who have supported us throughout our private journey and those who are new to the Step Up story. We're grateful for your trust and partnership as we embark on this next chapter together. Today, I'll focus primarily on the progress we've made in establishing StubHub as a leading live event ticketing marketplace and on our strategic initiatives. I'll then hand it over to Connie to speak to our third quarter financial performance. While we won't be providing detailed 2026 guidance on today's call, we look forward to sharing our outlook during our next earnings call in early 2026. With that said, I want to begin by stepping back and discussing the business that we have built over the last two decades and share the long-term vision of where we are going, one that continues to be defined by a customer focus and relentless drive to make live entertainment accessible to everyone, everywhere. The past few years have been transformative for our business. We completed the StubHub acquisition, navigated the pandemic, fully rebuilt StubHub's technology stack, restored StubHub as the clear category leader, and have now entered the public market. Our thesis for the acquisition was to restore StubHub's market leadership in North America and create a unified global ticketing marketplace. Our business today is the result of the successful execution of that thesis, and we are very proud of the asset that exists as a result. Today, StepHub operates what we believe is the largest global secondary ticketing marketplace for live event tickets, selling over 40 million tickets annually across more than 200 countries and territories from over 1 million sellers all over the world. Our many years of leadership in the resale market have created brands synonymous with the category, resulting in moats around our business and durable competitive advantage through customer loyalty and trust, organic traffic, and superior acquisition and conversion. We maintain what we believe is the most comprehensive operations and supply chain capabilities in our category, the largest event catalog in the world, and the capability to fulfill virtually any ticket across any category all through a single global marketplace. Our business produces a huge data asset as tens of millions of people interact with our product surfaces on what we believe is the largest floating price marketplace for live events in the world. This data on supply, demand, pricing, user behavior, et cetera, provides structural advantage to differentiated product innovation, marketing optimization, and pricing intelligence. Finally, this is all built on a single modern, globally deployed technology stack, allowing us to rapidly innovate across our product surface and nimbly deploy features using new technologies, something becoming increasingly important as AI development shapes the future of digital commerce. Our business has built a rare combination of best-in-class financial attributes that create exceptional value at scale with proven durability. First, we are growing rapidly with nearly 20% GMS growth over the last 12 months. Second, our marketplace models operated with enduring economics, consistent take rates and high margins. Third, we built a profitable customer acquisition engine that allows us to grow and take market share while generating profits through our performance marketing channels. Fourth, our asset-light business model and the natural flow generated by our marketplace dynamics results in exceptional cash conversion. Fifth, we've demonstrated remarkable resilience through academic cycles, consistently growing nearly every year since inception. And finally, we operate in a large and expanding core global secondary ticketing market with durable long-term tailwinds. In addition, we have opportunities for significant TAM expansion through accessing the broader ticketing ecosystem. We believe you would be hard pressed to find many other companies to check these boxes. That said, we are most excited about leveraging these assets to realize our vision to become the global destination for consumers to access live entertainment. We believe that buyers want one destination where they can purchase any ticket for any event in their language and currency. Sellers want to optimize revenue and attendance through broad distribution and pricing intelligence. We believe we can service these needs by building a single product that puts the world's live entertainment at fans' fingertips and services their needs throughout their entire journey. This is not something that exists in our category today. This is a product and service that can only be built by applying technology and relentless customer focus to eliminate friction around the live event experience. Technology businesses innovating on behalf of consumers have reimagined access to many products and services, information, music, video, food, but not yet for live entertainment. This is exactly what StepUp is, a business with a core competency in technology development focused on applying its expertise to revolutionize the way consumers interact with live event commerce. With this context, we can turn to some of the topics I think are top of mind regarding recent developments in our operating environment. First, we wanted to discuss some recent developments in our core resale market. Restoring StubHub's market share in North America was the key tenet of our acquisition thesis. Following our acquisition of StubHub in 2020 and the completion of the technology migration in 2022, we have consistently gained share in the North American market. transforming StubHub from a business that was roughly comparable in size to the nearest competitor in 2022 to one that is now approximately four times larger than that same competitor based on GMS and comparable metrics. This momentum in share gains and the subsequent positive impacts of relative share we observed led us to invest in accelerating this dynamic via disciplined customer acquisition and conversion levers. Specifically, take rates and performance marketing, which continued in the most recent quarter. I want to highlight one specific downstream impact of this share gain, our growing share of the point of sale market. In our market, the point of sale is a software product used by power sellers to manage the listing, pricing, distribution, and fulfillment of their ticket portfolios. Sellers build their operational workflows around the software infrastructure, which becomes sticky as a result, like many enterprise software products. For many years, the technology was provided by one of our competitors whose product had the majority share of the market. We recently launched our own product called Reach Pro. As our relative market share of sales volume has increased, we've seen rapid adoption of our technology. We have benefited from a powerful network effect as our marketplace captures a larger share of sellers' sales These sellers are increasingly willing to migrate their operations to what we believe is our far superior technology, backed by our unmatched data and insights. In the secondary market, installation of Reach Pro naturally produces higher relative market share. When sellers use our tool, they tend to index their behavior around our marketplace, ensuring competitive pricing and high standards of fulfillment, leading to structural advantage and benefits for our buyers. It also provides valuable data insights which can be used to improve the quality of our products and a strategic product development surface to launch advertising products and innovate with features that will serve large sellers, even of enterprise scale. Q3 was both our largest relative market share quarter to date and the largest quarter of new seller adoption for Reach Pro. We believe we have line of sight into becoming the largest provider of this product in the medium term. a durable and strategic asset created in part via our relative market share investments. This brings us to the next topic, direct issuance, which we believe will be a major innovation to original issuance ticketing distribution that will promote competition and improve the fan experience while improving economics for ticket issuers. As I mentioned earlier, we believe buyers want a single platform that offers access to all the world's live entertainment, At the same time, sellers maximize revenue and attendance by accessing the broadest possible distribution with the smartest pricing intelligence. Our strategy to unlocking this value proposition is through what we call direct issuance. Generally speaking, there are three seller types in the market, individuals, power sellers, and enterprise sellers. StubHub and Viagogo began as platforms to service individual sellers, season ticket holders, cost of goers whose plans change, and so on. As liquidity of the market grew, market makers developed. Power sellers selling large quantities of tickets to the marketplace on a regular basis, and we ultimately developed products such as Reach Pro to allow these sellers to manage the listing, pricing, and fulfillment of tickets seamlessly. For our business, direct issuance simply refers to expanding the supply side of our platform once again to allow enterprise sellers, content rights holders like teams, artists, and venues to access our marketplace through a frictionless technology-enabled experience as any individual or power seller does. We believe simultaneous, multi-channel, or open distribution using data-backed pricing intelligence is the future of ticket distribution as it will maximize value for fans and content. To be clear, this is a very different model to legacy primary ticketing companies. Primary ticketing companies' core service is to provide access control to venues, and secondarily, they provide a retail web storefront with limited or no marketing. Content today, for the most part, sells their inventory through antiquated distribution methods. They often sell tickets, expiring products that drive huge economics, exclusively through these access control providers. The result is an opaque market with huge inefficiency, narrow distribution, lack of pricing intelligence, and ultimately, unsold seats and tremendous value loss for content, not to mention a lack of competition, leading to a terrible experience for fans. We are not competing with this model, and we are not providing access control technology. We offer something new. The ability for content to access StubHub's distribution engine through a variety of options that does not require them to switch their access control provider. We make our distribution available to content rights holders with no exclusivity requirements, broadening their distribution and empowering them with robust data insights from our scaled floating price marketplace to make informed pricing and utilization decisions. This means content rights holders can access our marketplace, distribution, data, and customers in the same way individuals and power sellers can. They can list tickets multi-channel across retail outlets at whatever price points they choose to optimize their utilization and yield, and we compete to sell inventory the same we do today. We're actively making investments to grow this business and demonstrate the benefits of open distribution's content and are excited about the progress we are making. We recently signed a partnership with Major League Baseball, a great example of one of the world's premier sports properties endorsing open distribution. MLB momentum has continued, and more teams are continuing to become sellers on StubHub, several of which are doing so without any additional economic incentive or protection from us. They're selling just as any other seller on our platform does. We have also had success in the music festival category, adding Peachtree Entertainment, one of the largest independent promoters in the Southeast, and LED Presents, an independent EDM promoter on the West Coast. These promoters combined put on dozens of events attended by hundreds of thousands of fans annually. We've also continued to add talent to lead this initiative. Sean Stewart, who has spent much of his career building supply chain for travel businesses, such as Expedia and Airbnb, joined as VP of direct issuance. Sean will be reporting to Raj Gary was instrumental in building uber eats a pack business and recently joined StubHub as chief business officer to oversee all global supply. Direct issues represents an addressable market opportunity well in excess of $100 billion the transformative growth vector that we believe will drive substantial long term growth value creation for our business and shareholders for years to come. The other business we are in the early stages of developing is advertising, which we believe can be a large and profitable business for us, as it has been for many other marketplaces. We are pursuing two advertising models initially. First, sponsored listings, where sellers can bid for premier placement on event pages to dramatically increase exposure. For any given event, we may be merchandising hundreds, even thousands of tickets on our event pages. These are expiring products, meaning that sellers receive nothing if the ticket does not sell. With a sponsored listing offering, sellers can bid for higher visibility among competing inventory, improving the likelihood of a buyer seeing and ultimately purchasing their ticket. Conversations with sellers on our platform have demonstrated tremendous interest in features such as sponsored listings as an additional and powerful tool for sellers on our marketplace. As Reach Pro has gained users and market share, we've also established a ready-made distribution platform for sponsored listings, as we can build access to the feature directly into Reach Pro's user workflow without the heavy lift of a Salesforce. The second advertising model is through more traditional corporate advertising partnerships with businesses in adjacent product categories that can be additive to the customer experience. One example of this is Booking.com. Event tourism is a rapidly growing category, and we know that many of our customers are purchasing tickets for events outside of where they live. Our partnership with Booking is a great example of how we can monetize post-purchase real estate in our product to deliver a travel offering to customers. And it is also a great example of a high-quality business recognizing the value of our customer base and paying us for access. We believe this will extend to other categories adjacent to sports, music, and live event attendance. We are very excited about the potential for advertising on our platform. Of course, as with everything we do, our number one priority is ensuring that we do not adversely impact the customer experience. Therefore, introducing advertising thoughtfully and methodically remains our focus. We recognize investors are eager for more details on direct issues in advertising. We intend to provide a more fulsome update and a long-term opportunity on our call early next year. To close, StubHub is a business that is growing fast at scale while generating profits and cash flow. StubHub is a global category leader with the data, technology, and customer focus to continue capturing share of the global ticketing market. Indeed, we are very proud of all that we have accomplished today. However, the real goal for us is to reimagine our market to create an unprecedented experience for fans and an asset of tremendous value in the process. That is what is really exciting. With that, I'll turn the call over to Connie to discuss our financial results.