August 2026
Krueger had just walked through how StubHub never owns the tickets it sells: it sits between buyer and seller and handles only the money. What made that arrangement bearable to customers was the FanProtect guarantee, and she describes that promise as the actual product. A source from the early expansion years told her the company would eat the cost of replacing tickets because being the trusted filter was worth more than any individual sale.
Transcript
So StubHub doesn't actually own or sell tickets itself. StubHub is the middleman between a buyer and a seller. So StubHub never actually obtains that ticket.
What StubHub does do is handle the money. It collects payments from buyers and then, once the seller sends the ticket, transfers that money to them. But buying stuff online from strangers can still feel a little iffy. So StubHub offers what it calls the fan protect guarantee.
So this was this guarantee that if you don't get into your event, we'll provide a replacement ticket for you that's comparable. Or if in the worst case scenario, we'll give you a refund. But the idea was like, it's all good. You can trust us. This is, we're legit, and this is a legitimate way to get into the show or the game that you wanted to go to. It's interesting because StubHub's actual product never actually was tickets. It was trust. It was, we can trust us to be the filter through which people sell tickets. And that guarantee was the whole business.
How did that actually work? It was just a promise that they made to fans that, like, if you didn't get your ticket or something went wrong, we would cover you?
Yeah. So they invested really heavily in customer support in those foundational years. And I spoke to one source who was there in the early days of StubHub, you know, big expansion. And he described how they would have to spend a lot of money to replace tickets. And it sometimes was like, oh, wow, this doesn't make a ton of sense, but people really trust us. And we've really become this brand that people go to and feel okay using for what used to be a shady business.
Investments into customer service helped the company capture a big share of the ticket resale market. StubHub says it holds about half of the secondary ticket market in North America, which it values at $18 billion.
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