Six tickets, seven euros and twenty-one cents

Elisa in concert, 10 April 2010. Six tickets bought at €41.40 each and resold at €55. Thirteen euros sixty of spread, times six tickets: at a glance, eighty-one euros sixty of profit.

The actual profit was €7.21. One euro twenty a ticket.

The number sits in a spreadsheet I dug out of the archive, Seatwave.xlsx — the last event listed is from February 2014. Nine concerts inside — Muse, Madonna, Depeche Mode, Pearl Jam, Adele, Editors, Florence, and Elisa — each with the same grid of columns, filled in by hand. It isn't the spreadsheet of someone doing deals. It's the spreadsheet of someone who wanted to know, before selling, the price below which he'd be losing money.

Where the other seventy-four euros went

Into the rows in the middle. The same ones, identical, for all nine events:

• the platform commission on the sale — 10%, in that case 12.5%: €41.25;
• VAT, which applies to the commission, not to the ticket: another €8.25;
• the reseller's booking fee at purchase: €14.90;
• shipping: €9.99, flat, always, no matter what.

So €330 gross collected becomes €280.50 net, and €248.40 of tickets becomes €273.29 of cost. In between sit seven euros and twenty-one cents.

The three rows that justify this post

Muse, 8 June 2010: six tickets bought, four sold at €90. Final result: minus 38 cents. Two tickets left on my hands, and break-even missed by thirty-eight cents.

Madonna, 16 June 2012: break-even computed at €100, sold at €99. Minus €2.99. One euro below the right price, on four tickets: that's all it takes.

And Elisa, the famous 7.21.

For the sake of honesty: the same sheet holds clearly profitable rows too — the best is an Adele night closing at €321.03. But it's the three rows near zero that teach something, because they're the ones where the gap between the two prices you see — bought at X, sold at Y — says the exact opposite of what actually happened.

Margin is never the gap between the two prices you see. It's what's left after the rows you don't look at.

What changed in sixteen years (and what didn't)

That market is gone: lawmakers tightened it, and the platform those sales ran on shut down. The fees, on the other hand, are doing great. They only moved, and today I find them in the last line of the sign-up page for the first-grade class pizza night: Payment processing: €0.69. Same physics, sixteen years on, plus the good habit of declaring it instead of burying it.

And the spreadsheet? Today an agent writes it for me while I'm still explaining what I want. That isn't the point. The point is that the break-even column stays empty until somebody lists every deduction — and that somebody, for now, has to know the trade. A model that doesn't know the €9.99 shipping exists will hand you a beautiful sheet, full of correct formulas, containing a margin that isn't there.

The fastest wrong number in the world is still a wrong number.

Six tickets, seven euros and twenty-one cents.