Get Used To Large Announced Attendances With Sparsely Populated Seats At The New Yankee Stadium

We were recently introduced to the extremely useful FanSnap.com. It is essentially Kayak.com - but for event tickets instead of airline tickets. In other words, the search engine has access to inventory for tickets from multiple sources and aggregates them within a well-designed website (why don't we ever think of this stuff?!) In perusing the website for Yankee tickets, we realized that there is considerably more inventory on the secondary market for Yankee tickets than for any other baseball team. This may explain why Yankee Stadium looked so empty during the first homestand.

This shouldn't come as a surprise - it was months ago when we first pointed out that Yankee fans were justifying irrational ticket upgrades with ideas of putting excess on the secondary market. Finally, we have some proof of the Yankees success in scaring fans into purchasing tickets that they had no intention of using.

The Yankees officially state the maximum capacity of the new Yankee Stadium at 52,235, which includes "approximately" 2,000 standing room only tickets. However, the Yankees announced opening day's crowd of 48,271 as a sell out. Therefore, we will operate under the assumption that 48,271 is the maximum number of Yankee tickets that could ever be on the secondary market (standing room only will only be day of game sales, if they ever start selling them).

Referring back to FanSnap.com, the number of tickets available for the remaining 75 Yankee games is ridiculous. Doing math based on the rounded numbers of tickets available according to the site (which does not include all ticket brokers, or Craigs List), an average of 16,900 Yankee tickets are available on the secondary market for each game. In other words, 35% of the per-game inventory sold by the Yankees is now back on the market, presumably with the intent of making a profit. Even worse, ticket inventory for "premium" games such as the Red Sox and the Mets come in at over 20,000 tickets available. According to FanSnap.com. nearly half of the tickets sold for the premium games were bought just to sell and and these totals don't even include outlets such as Craigs List. For some perspective, the Mets secondary market doesn't have one game with 10,000 tickets available - not even when the Yankees visit their cross-town rivals in Queens.

While large portions of the empty seats at the new Yankee Stadium can be attributed to the fact that the team still has plenty of good (and overpriced) seats available directly from their box office, there are other contributing factors. As evidenced above, the secondary market is completely flooded with tickets. It appears that people who purchased tickets in the "cheap" seats did so with the intent to sell many of the games in order to subsidize their ticket purchase. Premium games in these "cheap" seats are still going for above face value, so there is obvious secondary market demand for them. For such games, the unsuspecting ticket brokers (hardcore Yankee fans forced to upgrade to larger plans to keep their tickets) and regular ticket brokers (the people who take advantage of the free market) are taking profits, and the stadium is full.

However, when hardcore fans fail to attend the non-premium games and ticket brokers are unable to sell them, the result is a half-empty stadium for mid-week games against Oakland, as we saw last week. We were stuck at work last Wednesday and had to sell a pair of Grandstand tickets for $10. We were happy to get that, as some people were giving them away on Craigslist.

Aaron Elstein touched on the financial aspect of this in a recent Crain's NY article, but there is also a fan-friendliness angle to the new-fangled ticket sales model. By encouraging fans to sell tickets, the Yankees have made it harder on everyone. Typically, nobody feels bad for ticket scalpers. In this case, many of the "scalpers" are simply defacto ticket brokers, hawking their extra tickets so they can afford to attend the number of games they originally intended on going to.

Other Yankee fans, who can't commit to attending a game until the last minute, are left without an obvious venue to purchase affordable seats - even while outlets represented on FanSnap are flooded with tickets. Many of us are well-versed in the ways of Stubhub, but the majority of casual fans have never purchased tickets from an online broker and are leery about being ripped off. These people would rather go to Yankees.com or go to the Yankee box office to buy tickets for games that clearly aren't in high demand.

We don't have access to the numbers, but it can easily be assumed that walk-up ticket sales in the new Yankee Stadium have dramatically decreased. How couldn't they? All of the available tickets are on sale through websites like FanSnap.com, and are deactivated a few hours before the event. Affordable tickets are wasting away in cyberspace, while they could be in the hands of the box office to sell on the day of the game. Until this is fixed, Yankee fans who are priced out of the new stadium will have to deal with the frustration of seeing empty seats while they watch at home on TV.
Read the full post, after the jump

The Business Behind The New Yankee Stadium - Mohegan Sun Sports Bar Obstruction And Fans As An Extension Of The Ticket Office

For the past couple of weeks, sports business writers have been having a field day with New Yankee Stadium material. Amidst all of the chaos, we here at New Stadium Insider have had the privilege of being a source for some these stories, and are racking up the press clippings to prove it.

Today in the NY Times, Richard Sandomir provides an exposé of the business dealings behind The Mohegan Sun Sports Bar. As usual, the Yankees come off looking pretty bad. It was revealed in the article that Mohegan Sun was not informed that they would be associated with the worst obstructions in the entire $1.6 billion stadium until it was too late. The Yankees, for their part, claim that they didn't have to tell Mohegan Sun because there are no obstructed view seats in the Mohegan Sun Sports Bar. According to experts in the field, the naming rights to the sports bar could have cost upwards of $3 million. Shame on the Mohegan Sun for not doing due diligence before dropping that huge of a sum of money on naming rights, but this is completely the fault of the Yankees and their poor planning.


Our quote in Sandomir's article actually elicited a direct response from Randy Levine when we opined that the Yankees should just tear down the bar and start from scratch:

Ross Sheingold, who runs the New Stadium Insider blog, said by e-mail that the Yankees, not the Mohegan Sun, were to blame. “The Yankees are likely too stubborn to do this,” he wrote, “but it might not be a bad idea to tear the sports bar down and go back to the drawing board.”

Levine stayed strong, claiming that there were no plans to eliminate the structure causing the "architectural shadow" in the bleachers. As he explained, "they've [$5 obstructed seats] completely sold out." What he failed to mention was that the seats were sold out before the obstruction was revealed to the season ticket licensees assigned to those seats. Those people were told to "take it or leave it" when the obstruction was announced - there was no other availability in the bleachers, or any other affordable part of the stadium remaining. Those seats might not be completely sold out in the next couple of years when the shine of the new stadium wears off.

Switching gears a bit, there was an article in Crain's Business NY by Aaron Elstein this week, touching on the point we have made in the past about Yankee fans becoming an extension of the ticket office. Elstein is actually a Yankee season ticket holder himself, and has been commiserating with us throughout the relocation process. Because of that, we shared our story:

Ross Sheingold, who holds two $20 seats in the upper deck, says he sold his tickets to next week's home opener for $476. After that windfall, he's now thinking about selling more tickets, to Red Sox and other premium games, so he can cover the $1,700 he spent to buy his 41-game ticket plan with his dad.

“Hopefully, it'll help pay for playoff tickets,” says Mr. Sheingold, who runs the New Stadium Insider blog.

For a while, we were torn on whether to share the story of our opening day tickets with the New Stadium Insider readers. Eventually, we realized that most people reading this blog (or Crain's Business NY) understand that we live in a society built on capitalism, and that selling the opening day tickets to recover 25% of the season ticket investment was a no-brainer. Further, we have work next Thursday, and taking off for the day would have cost us even more money in lost pay.

The Yankees embrace the idea of fans reselling their tickets for huge profits. It means that the same fans are more likely to dump their non-premium games for below face value on Stubhub if they can't make it to the game. Because of the revenue sharing agreement that the MLB has with Stubhub, the Yankees generate secondary market revenue from the sale of these non-premium games even when face value tickets for those games aren't even sold out.

Our readers likely remember our complaints about the Yankees encouraging season ticket holders to become brokers, and the questions we brought up about how people have the time to do it. Upon utilizing Stubhub's system for the first time we now understand that ease of use is the main force. Selling our opening day tickets (and making $476 profit) took us no more than 5 minutes. We listed the tickets for just under market value in order to make a quick sale and two days later, the sale went through. All we had to do was enter the bar code from the tickets and now we are waiting for our Paypal payment. For their efforts, Stubhub took a 15% fee of of our total sale (which was $550), and they added service fees to the buyer's total.

At the end of the day, everyone was happy - the Yankees got their cut (albeit a small one compared to what we received), Stubhub tacked on their fees, and the buyer who obviously has expendable income will be in the new stadium for opening day 2009. Welcome to the new age of ticket sales.

It is pretty exciting that trusted sources like the NY Times and Crain's Business NY recognize the theme of New Stadium Insider and have come to us for quotes. Our goal is to share the stories that affect the every day experience of Yankee season ticket holders, and the mainstream media is starting to catch on. Going forward, we hope that our stories will continue to be shared and that more of the media in New York will stop being lapdogs to the hype of the Yankees PR machine.
Read the full post, after the jump

How The Yankees Profit Off Of The Secondary Ticket Market

Everyone is probably aware of the issues that we have had with the Yankees' handling of ticket sales for the 2009 season. Rest assured, as soon as the on-sale is over, we will spare everyone the around the clock coverage. For now though, something else has become apparent that needs to be written about.

As we have noted many times, the Yankees have made the business decision to cater to their full-season clientele in regard to ticket sales. Whether it was in the relocation, or availability of pre-sales and private workouts, those fans are taken care of. At face value, it seems like the honorable thing to do - the people who spend the most money get the best perks. However, looking a bit deeper reveals the Yankees full motives.

Back in 2007, a deal was struck between MLB and Stubhub, promising every team a cut of the profits from ticket resales on Stubhub's site. The Yankees are privy to this lucrative deal and have adjusted their ticket sale strategy to reflect it. Since the relocation process for the new Yankee Stadium began, it has been clear that the Yankees were attempting to "de-fragment" the stadium, meaning that they would move more people to full-season plans. Besides serving the obvious purpose of simplifying the rest of the ticketing process, this is an obvious way of positiong the team to secure more profits for each ticket sold over the course of the season.

To understand this idea, one needs to think about the following: who is more likely to sell a ticket to a Yankee game on Stubhub? Would it be the full-season ticket holder trying to figure out how to make it out to 81 games per year, or would it be the partial plan holder just happy to have a ticket plan? Obviously, full-season licensees are more likely to resell tickets in order to recoup some of their investment when they inevitably can't make it out to select games.

In the past, the Yankees were unable to profit from the secondary market that inevitably develops. The team was happy to collect their sold out gates and brag about huge attendance figures. When the deal was struck with Stubhub back in 2007, it changed the landscape of ticket sales for sports organizations. An entirely new revenue stream was created for the team, and it was done in a way that would not ruffle any feathers or receive any negative press. The majority of fans selling their tickets on Stubhub understand that there are significant commissions cutting into their bottom line, but likely don't realize they are glorified brokers for the team. Even if they do understand the logistics, they don't care because the Stubhub system is so well-designed and easy to use.

With each passing day, this "conspiracy theory" makes more sense. Why wouldn't the Yankees allow full-season and 41 game plan holders the first crack at purchasing more tickets via a pre-sale? These people are likely to view the opportunity as a well-deserved perk to their ticket plan that they must take advantage of. In their eyes, the new stadium means that people will be pining to see a game, especially the premium ones. The dollar signs light up in their eyes since they have already been stretched thin by their investment in the team. They are able to rationalize that if they lay out a little more money (and time, since they are now ticket brokers), they can recoup some costs and cut into the large investment they made to secure full-season tickets.

While the full-season licensee are buying up more and more tickets, the Yankees are laughing their way to the bank. They are employing their most loyal fans as ticket brokers and are double-dipping on the profits that they take from them - once for the initial sale and once via Stubhub. The PR campaign surrounding ticket prices in "half of the stadium" remaining at their old Yankee Stadium prices was all smoke and mirrors. The Yankees have made sure that most, if not all of these "cheap" seats will be sold out by full-season ticket licensees whether it be in the relocation process or the many pre-sales. When the Yankees commissions via Stubhub are counted at the end of the season, they are sure to have made more than face value for the seats, without having to do any extra work.

A quick glance at the Stubhub page for 2009 Yankee tickets reveals that more tickets are available for Yankee Stadum than any other venue, and most of the tickets are available in the Bleachers and the Grandstand. Looking deeper, many April and May games are selling for below face value for the "cheap seats" and the Yankees are fine with that. The team has guaranteed their initial cost of $12, $20 or $25 sales for those "same price as least year" seats, and are also collecting whatever undisclosed commissions that Stubhub is paying them. Once the weather warms up in the summer, the Yankees commission will only increase, as their ticket brokers season ticket holders will be able to raise prices.

Full-season ticket holders will probably read this instinctually defend their purchase, claiming that the Yankees are not taking advantage of them. Sure, if the tickets are resold on Ebay or Craigslist, or to co-workers, the Yankees aren't going to receive their piece of the pie. However, based on the sheer number of tickets for sale on Stubhub, it appears that most people are being used. They have foregone their chance to cut the Yankees out of the picture due to the fact that the Stubub system is so convenient. Stubhub has introduced a completely electronic ticketing system, so the full-season ticker holder broker on Stubhub doesn't even have to go through the sometimes stressful excercise of sending tickets through the mail.

The casual fan should not direct their ire at full-season ticket holders when general public on-sale day comes and there are very few affordable tickets available. Keep in mind that most of these licensees did not purchase the plans to profit off of their fellow Yankee fans. Their logic in upgrading to full-season was that they were guaranteeing the best value seats in the new Yankee Stadium, and they were locking in full playoff rights. To these people, selling tickets on the secondary market had little to do with profiting off of the average fan, and everything to do with recovering some of their investment in full-season plans.

The best suggestion we can give to the casual fan looking to attend a few games at the new Yankee Stadium is to be patient. The United States is still struggling through one of the deepest recessions in recent memory, and discretionary spending is lower than ever. While the secondary ticket market is sure to heat up in the summer when tourists (even in smaller numbers than in the past) come to the city, there will still be deals to be had.

The game-plan should be to scoop up some bargain tickets in April and May when full-season ticket holders are willing to take losses on their tickets due to factors such as cold weather and school still being in session. Let the tourists buy up the expensive summer games on Stubhub. If the urge to see a game happens to strike in the summer, go on Craigslist the day of the game and wait out some good deals. There are always people who have to unload tickets at the last minute and are willing to sell for face value or below. Also, don't forget to check out ticketmaster.com on the day of games for face value tickets, or even go up to the stadium to see if standing room only tickets for $20 are available.

There is only one way that Yankee fans can make the team pay for this non-transparent revenue stream, crafted to inconvenience the most loyal fans: not buying the full-season plans unless you plan on going to the games. The Yankees have their hands in the primary and secondary market, so think before you become an unpaid ticket broker for the richest franchise in all of sports. Read the full post, after the jump