2022 Super Bowl could be 'the most expensive' for fans, TickPick CEO says

TickPick Co-Founder & Co-CEO Brett Goldberg joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss how more Americans are attending live events and how 2022 Super Bowl ticket prices are way above average but falling as game approaches.

Video Transcript

EMILY MCCORMICK: Welcome back. The show must go on. And as concerts, sporting events, and other in-person activities begin to pick back up, so too has business at many companies offering tickets to these events. Brett Goldberg, TickPick co-founder and co-CEO joins us now with the latest on the events industry. Brett, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. Tell us how business has evolved for TickPick over the past several months or even weeks as we've passed the peak in Omicron cases here in the US.

BRETT GOLDBERG: If you go back a year, I'd say 2021 obviously started off quite slow. But by the time vaccinations became widely available, it was pretty shocking how quickly ticket sales came back. So for us, 2019 numbers were the bar. And we were beating those numbers by July 2021. Then Delta obviously kicked in in August. And there was quite a bit of slowdown. But then by October, we were surpassing our 2019 numbers by about 20% to 30%. And then we're doing great in general between sports, and concerts. Everything was on the rise. And then obviously more recently, Omicron has slowed things down.

But we've kind of seeing the end of that now. And things are starting to pick back up again. And Super Bowl is a great topic, obviously, going right into that. Because prices now are all time highs for Super Bowl.

BRAD SMITH: And so let's talk a little bit more about the Super Bowl and what we're seeing. And especially on your platform, if we can break it down that way too, where are some of the average purchase prices? Because we understand that they've dropped a little bit from even when the two teams were of course decided in their conference championships. But even with that price drop, I mean, we're still looking at some pretty high prices at the end of the day.

BRETT GOLDBERG: Yeah, it's one of the most volatile events. And there's just so many people that are interested in depending on the fan base that goes can have a drastic impact on pricing. So when the 49ers got knocked out, leaving the LA Rams in, you would think the home team may create more demand. But the 49ers travel really well, really close to LA. And so that ended up having some negative pressure. Good thing for Bengals fans, pricing coming down quite a bit after the 49ers got knocked out.

And then for us still across the board since tickets have been selling, it's the highest average ticket price that we've sold for any event ever. We've been around for 10 years. So around $7,600 on average right now. Pricing has come down drastically actually in the last two days. So now we're seeing [INAUDIBLE] prices around $4,500. That's all in pricing on TickPick. So a lot of fluctuation, a lot of volatility there.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Looking at your business more broadly, you are a no service fee platform. You also offer a price match guarantee for the lowest ticketing prices among major competitors. How are you bringing in revenue as a business? And how is your business model actually working compared to some of the competitors like a StubHub or a Ticketmaster?

BRETT GOLDBERG: So the business model is pretty straightforward. When we started in 2011, we looked at what Amazon was doing at that point. And it's not like you get to check it and their fees added. For some reason, the ticketing industry, it's one of the few industries that that still happens. So we said we're going to show all in pricing. And the big players are making around 25% on a sale. And we said we know we can undercut them. So we're working more efficiently, starting in 2011, being completely technology focused. How do you do things more efficiently, staying away from really big deals that may cost a lot?

You could work and choose to be an NFL partner. But there's costs to that. So we stay away from deals that add incremental costs to the consumer. And we pass on those savings to the consumer. So we're making 13% on average on a sale, where our competitors are making 22% to 25%. And we're showing all in pricing. StubHub had try doing this in the past. They knew it was the right thing for consumers. So 2015, they went all in pricing but then lost a lot of business to competitors that were not doing well in pricing. So actually happens to be some federal movement right now and showing all in pricing and making a requirement similar to how the airlines got regulated and hotels have.

So that may end up happening in the ticketing space.

BRAD SMITH: Considering the average purchase prices that we were just looking at, as of noon today, could this be the most costly or the most expensive Super Bowl ticket on record?

BRETT GOLDBERG: I think across the board, it will end up being the most expensive. When it comes day of the game, you may see pricing that is normal compared to other years. But so many tickets have sold already at prices that are way above what we've seen other years. So I believe it will be the highest average ticket price that we sell. But like you said, in the last day or two, it's come down by 10%, 15%. And once you start to see those trends, it's unclear. Sometimes that brings in massive amounts of buying that then ends up popping those prices back up.

And that's what we've seen the last three years. It seems like it's going down. So every day you check, kind of like stocks, every day keeps going down, keeps going down. And you think, is it going to just keep going down that trajectory until a massive wave of buying comes? And that typically happens on Friday, Saturday. So it's always like trying to catch a falling knife.

EMILY MCCORMICK: All right. We'll leave it there for now. Brett Goldberg, TickPick co-founder and co-CEO. Thank you so much. Coming up, we'll bring you a discussion with the CEO of Trivago.