Ticket marketplace Viagogo announces tennis deal, strong Q1 results
Viagogo, the online marketplace where anyone can buy or sell tickets for live events, announced today that it is partnering with the French Tennis Federation to create a special ticket exchange channel for tennis, making it the first secondary ticketing platform to land a deal in France. Reinforcing the good news, the London-based company also reported strong first-quarter earnings and rapid growth.
Viagogo recently hit more than one million ticket listings on its site, with sales growing by more than 250 percent in 2009 alone. It has also forged partnerships with a series of major European events, including the Leeds,Latitutde and Isle of Wight festivals in England. Still, scoring secondary-seller rights for the French Open is the biggest achievement thus far. Basically, the site can now open its platform to tickets for landmark tennis events, including Roland-Garros and the BNP Paribas Masters as well.
The site, which may sound a bit like legit electronic scalping, is designed to allow ticket-holders who cannot attend events, concerts, games, etc. to offload their tickets at face value prices — no markups allowed. The platform guarantees these transactions, making them safer for both buyers and sellers. In doing so, the site says that one of its goals is to reduce if not eliminateblackmarket ticket exchange.
It might actually have a chance of reaching this goal in England, where “hooligan laws” restrict reselling rights to a single vendor in order to keep thuggish fans out of the stands. There,Viagogo has an exclusive license to re-sell tickets for Manchester United and other world-famous soccer (football) clubs — no small toehold. It might face a bit more of a challenge in the U.S. where RazorGator and TicketsNow are both also vying for the reseller market. Not to mention that the goliath that is Ticketmaster is battling reseller services tooth and nail.
Still, Viagogo has a couple things going for it in the U.S., including a distribution deal with the Cleveland Browns. It also has a savvy founder,StubHub co-founder Eric Baker, who left the company before eBay acquired it in 2007 for $310 million. Some evidence of success: Viagogo sold more tickets and brought in more revenue in 2008 than StubHub did in its first three years combined.
The company has also been fortunate when it comes to venture capital. It has raised $70 million to date, including $15 million in common stock financing raised in February from tennis greats Andre Agassi and StefanieGraf — in addition to Index Ventures and lastminute.com. It raised $30 million upon its U.S. launch in 2007. In the past, it has also been backed by LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, German media mogul Herbert Kloiber, and international financier Jacob Rothschild through his family’s interests.
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About the Author, Camille Ricketts
Camille is the lead writer for GreenBeat. She came to VentureBeat from Google where she worked on its traditional platforms team, particularly in TV. Before that, she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York and London. Follow her on Twitter at @camillericketts, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.
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