StubHub the real winner

With ticket demand, website capitalizes big time on big fight

While scores of fans would like a refund for what they spent on the Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao fight, StubHub is among those giddily calculating how much it made on the event.

Since the company’s inception in 2000, a StubHub spokesman said, 156 million tickets have been bought and sold on its site. After the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, one ticket stands alone — one that sold for $40,955, the most expensive ever sold on StubHub, company spokesman Cameron Papp told USA TODAY Sports.

For that floor-seat ticket, StubHub pocketed about $10,000 — representing a 25% service charge split by the seller and buyer. Papp said StubHub does not disclose the number of tickets sold on its site for an event, but it’s safe to say the company felt better about the fight than the person who paid $40,955 for that floor-seat ticket.

Papp said ticket sales for the fight were comparable with ticket sales for the college football championship game or a World Series game.

“It didn’t quite stack up to the Super Bowl, but nothing really does,” Papp said via email. “The Super Bowl sells at a much higher volume due to the arena capacity difference and inventory availability.”

Soon after fewer than 1,000 tickets for the fight went on sale April 23 to the general public, about the same number ended up on StubHub, evidence that tickets allotted to the private parties — Mayweather, Pacquiao and MGM International — found their way onto the secondary market.

Initially listed for no less than $5,000 on StubHub, tickets sold for as low as $1,894. Papp said tickets listed for $23 moments before the fight began probably resulted from a software error and ringside tickets listed for more than $100,000 were outliers.

“Most likely, the seller is going to the event and is listing their ticket for an astronomical amount and seeing if he/she can hit the lottery,” he said. “After a while, if the seller is truly trying to unload the ticket, he/she will start to drop the price.”