Vivid Seats is a secondary-ticket marketplace trying to prove that last year's cost reset can restore earnings power even though the platform is still smaller than it was a year ago. Chief Executive Officer Lawrence Fey, elevated from the finance seat in November 2025 after Stanley Chia stepped down, is running a thinner organization against StubHub and SeatGeek while the FIFA World Cup juiced second-quarter traffic. Sequential growth in marketplace gross order value, the total ticket-and-fee volume that flows through the platform, is real. The harder question is whether that bounce is a tournament spike or the start of a durable recovery.
The cost program is the part of the story that already shows up in reported earnings. General and administrative expense fell sharply versus last year, and adjusted EBITDA, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization with management add-backs, expanded sequentially even as revenue remained below the year-ago print. Marketplace take rate, the share of gross order value kept as revenue, held near sixteen percent despite cheaper pricing on marquee World Cup inventory. Cash rose from year-end, but the first-lien term loan still dwarfs the equity's market value, and shareholders' equity sits in deficit.
Second-quarter revenue came in near $130 million. Marketplace GOV reached $659 million. Both figures improved versus the first quarter and still trailed last year. Management lifted the low end of full-year GOV and adjusted EBITDA guidance after the print. The investment debate now turns on whether owned-app conversion, private-label wins, and a leaner cost base can produce year-over-year volume growth in the second half once World Cup tickets drop out of the mix.