More than six months after the announcement of deal between StubHub! and Major League Baseball (MLB), new details have emerged revealing that certain customer information received by the secondary ticketing giant will be given to MLB teams.
At the recent International Ticketing Association conference in Chicago, representatives from MLB told those in attendance that for any tickets that are sold on StubHub!, the information on who bought the tickets, who sold the tickets and how much they were sold for will all be revealed to the teams.
“At this point we’re not elaborating on any customer information sharing relating to our MLB deal,” StubHub! spokesperson Sean Pate told TicketNews. “The terms of the deal are confidential and we’ll be communicating any necessary information to our customers in the coming weeks.”
The agreement was announced in August as a five year deal for StubHub! to be the exclusive secondary ticket reseller for Major League Baseball. The three other major sports leagues (NBA, NFL, and NHL) have all inked deals with Ticketmaster to be their official secondary ticketer.
The data that would be potentially compiled for teams would help with team’s ability to market their tickets more efficiently. By knowing who sold and bought the tickets, and for how much, organizations can then focus directly on that person for any future transactions. For example, if the team knew someone bought a package of game tickets and was able to resell all of them on StubHub!, they could then market to him directly in the future.
But, the question is whether the deal could end up resembling what happened to StubHub! after it was sued by the New England Patriots. StubHub! was forced to turn over the names of 13,000 customers/members who bought or sold Patriots tickets, transactions the team has sought to prohibit.
Stephen Happel, professor of economics at Arizona State University, told TicketNews that with brokers always having consumer information to use for their own marketing purposes and with there being so much money on the secondary market, teams were bound to become involved.
Happel added that when StubHub! was first starting its online operations, the potential for sharing information with teams was always “a possibility”.
Consumers will likely be one of the possible losers in the deal because, according to Happel, primary tickets inevitably will rise in price.
