I don’t know what’s going on with Stubhub, but…it seems bad?
On Sunday, I went in to list a few tickets for this week, and discovered that 1) the Cubs’ ticket software was no longer tied in with the Stubhub selling software and 2) the “best value” feature no longer existed on the Stubhub desktop platform.
This was bad for me.
There were other things wrong as well, as I was quickly alerted to when I Twitter searched “StubHub,” but those were the two big ones for me, personally, and after an electric but troubling dalliance with SeatGeek (high upside/high downside with those guys), I spent time this morning speculating on market share in the world of ticket resale. If these issues with StubHub continue, I will get a lot of answers to the internal questions raised during that speculative period. I hope I don’t get those answers. I hope StubHub starts working.
It does sound like this was unintentional by StubHub, based on them tweeting about how they were working to resolve various issues and then turning off the replies (an unexpected benefit of Twitter adding that feature, a benefit I did not anticipate, is that you can really see visually when someone is getting owned online). Which makes me think the “best value” feature will come back. Which is important to me. We got nice seats!
What it reminds me, though, and this is a pretty big deal in the “gig economy,” broadly defined in this case as anything where a person is using a third-party product to make some portion of their income, is that there is a lot of pressure on the platform to function. We are not large-scale ticket scalpers over here. But there are people who are, and those people rely on sites like StubHub, and things like this demonstrate the risk in that. It’s one thing to take on the risk of your employer going out of business or abruptly firing you. There are protections in that sphere. It’s another to exist in this symbiotic relationship with a third party who could, at any point, consciously or unintentionally leave you high and dry. I guess that’s something that was a big deal at the beginning of the pandemic, specifically with unemployment benefits, but this is my first encounter with it. We yo-yo between socializing this risk and placing it on individuals.
