Goal: Create legislation that allows a non-profit organization to opt-out of having their org be used in a resale ticketing site, such as StubHub. 

How Resale Sites Such as Stubhub Affect Non-Profit Theatres & Their Community
The Seacoast Rep is a 220 seat non-profit theater. We currently have A Christmas Carol the Musical up and running. It’s doing pretty well for us. Holiday shows tend to sell well.

Recently, someone sent me a screenshot of a promoted Facebook post by Stubhub with a call-to-action to purchase A Christmas Carol tickets at the Seacoast Repertory Theatre. This means Stubhub created a targeted ad and spent money so it would be distributed to people like my friend, who is a theater goer.

Curious, I did a little investigating and discovered some shocking news - there were hundreds of tickets purchased through our ticketing system, Vendini, by an individual(s) with a variety of email addresses, fake phone numbers, and fake mailing addresses. They were then resold on Stubhub for a ridiculous markup. Our most expensive $44 tickets were being sold (or at least trying to be sold) for up to $800.

I monitored this fairly closely. I even had my box office release two tickets for me to sell on Stubhub so I could go through the process to see how easy it was. It was incredibly easy. It took less than 2 minutes to add to their website and if someone were to purchase them, it was a quick and easy transfer over to them.

I went to the theater and watched our audiences during nearly sold out performances to see if people were actually purchasing these tickets. They were, but it was mixed - some were filled but there were blocks of seats that remained empty. I imagine this must be a numbers game to our reseller. All they have to do is sell a couple of premium tickets to make a profit and if they don’t sell the rest, it’s no financial loss to them.

The most frustrating part was the discovery that our reseller was using our honor system and purchasing discounted tickets such as Veteran’s discounts, teacher’s discounts, and senior discounts and reselling them for hundreds of dollars. Who would do that?

Needless to say I’ve been venting about this a lot, and I am mad about it. I’ve received feedback such as “what does it matter, your seats were purchased, you have your money.”

It does matter. It really does.

Our mission is to enrich the culture of the Seacoast through the shared experience of live theater. When we have purchased seats that sit empty, we’re failing at our mission.

But let’s talk about the lost revenues from these empty seats.

Yes, we have sold our $44 Prime Seats for $39. We captured our $39. It’s in our bank. But we have lost the concession sale for that person. On average, we capture $10 per person.
Then there are merch table items. This varies widely per show, but for a show like A Christmas Carol during the busy holiday season where people are actively purchasing gifts, we miss out on an opportunity to sell a gift card, a raffle ticket, a piece of merchandise to this missing person. We make thousands of dollars in our merch table to our audience members during intermission during the run of a show.

After the show we send up performers to collect donations. We average about $100 per show. Some weekends we have seven shows. This is a pretty significant way for us to capture additional donations and we rely on those. So if we have 100 seats that are sold and a person doesn’t show up, we could be losing $2000 in additional revenues that we would most likely have if Stubhub wasn’t throwing our tickets away.

But we haven’t even gotten into the lost revenues that would otherwise be spent out in our community.

The most recent AFTA survey shows that the local non-profit arts & cultural organizations in Portsmouth inject $58M a year into our local economy. The Rep estimates that for every $1 we bring in, $3 is spent in our community. This means we have patrons spending money to park (which helps fund our parking garages so taxpayers don’t have bear that burden), we have patrons going out to dinner before a show and tipping a local worker, we have patrons shopping at a local boutique, helping to support a family run business, we have patrons going out for a drink after the show, again, helping to contribute to the livelihood of the workforce in our area. Some patrons even make an entire weekend of it and book hotel rooms which means an entire weekend of funds going into our community.

An empty seat that is paid for is a huge loss to our theater and to our community, and I don’t know how to stop this from happening over at Stubhub.

I have contacted them and all I have received is a washing of hands and responsibility along with a “thank you for your feedback”.

So I’m writing this to encourage people to not resell tickets on Stubhub. Do not purchase tickets from Stubhub. And if you’re affected by Stubhub in any way, please help me figure out a way to write legislation that would prevent them from doing this to non-profits in the State of NH.

Most importantly, I'm hoping to get support so we can have legislation that allows non-profit organizations the option to opt-out of having their venues used in sites such as this.