SEAT May 5, 2026

Vivid Seats Q1 2026 Earnings Call - App Growth and Private Label Turnaround Drive Sequential Momentum

Summary

Vivid Seats reported a strong first quarter 2026, landing at the high end of guidance with sequential growth in gross ticket value (GOV), adjusted EBITDA, and cash. The company’s strategic pivot toward its mobile app is yielding tangible results, with app GOV up 20% year-over-year and now accounting for over 40% of total GOV. This shift is reducing reliance on volatile paid search channels and improving customer acquisition efficiency. Management emphasized that app users demonstrate higher engagement, repeat purchase rates, and lifetime value, reinforcing the long-term vision of driving a majority of transactions through the app by 2027.

On the private label front, Vivid Seats secured a new partner and extended an existing agreement, delivering sequential revenue growth and signaling a potential turnaround after the loss of a major client in 2025. While full-year YoY growth in this segment remains elusive in the near term, management expects the channel to outpace broader marketplace growth in the second half of the year. The company reaffirmed its 2026 guidance, citing operational leverage, cost discipline, and a favorable event calendar including the World Cup as key tailwinds. AI investments are currently focused on internal efficiency and customer experience enhancements rather than top-of-funnel disruption, with management expressing confidence that dynamic inventory and real-time pricing data will keep Vivid Seats integral to any emerging LLM-driven booking models.

Key Takeaways

  • Q1 2026 GOV reached $612 million, up 5.5% sequentially from Q4 2025, defying typical seasonal weakness in the first quarter.
  • Consolidated revenue came in at $126 million, essentially flat quarter-over-quarter, with a take rate of 15.9% due to mix shift toward lower-margin private label revenue.
  • Adjusted EBITDA surged to $9.5 million from $1 million in Q4 2025, driven by disciplined cost reductions and operating leverage as revenue stabilized.
  • Cash on hand increased by over $40 million to $144 million, bolstered by improved profitability and strong working capital dynamics.
  • App GOV grew 20% year-over-year, now representing over 40% of total GOV, with management targeting a majority of transactions via the app by 2027.
  • Private label revenue grew 20% sequentially following the addition of a new partner and extension of an existing contract, though YoY declines persist due to lapping a major customer loss in 2025.
  • Competitive intensity in paid search moderated after StubHub’s pullback in late 2025, though other players remain aggressive, particularly in sports pricing.
  • Industry volume grew low single digits in Q1 and is tracking flat year-to-date in Q2, with some concert cancellations attributed to mispricing rather than macro weakness.
  • Management expects the second half of 2026 to mark the return to YoY growth, supported by clean comps from the 2025 customer loss, new product deployments, and the World Cup tailwind.
  • AI investments are currently yielding operational efficiencies and customer experience improvements rather than disrupting top-of-funnel acquisition, with management asserting that dynamic inventory data will keep Vivid Seats essential to LLM integrations.
  • Cash flow expectations for 2026 remain intact, with adjusted EBITDA guidance of $30 million to $40 million and a trajectory toward cash flow positivity before working capital benefits.
  • International growth continues triple-digit GOV expansion, but near-term product investments are focused on universal upgrades that benefit both global and North American markets equally.
  • Market share remains sequentially steady and is beginning to flip positive year-over-year as Vivid Seats laps the most competitive marketing periods of 2025.
  • The World Cup is projected to contribute low to mid-single digits to full-year GOV, with high advance-on-sale events expected to favor Vivid Seats’ app-driven value proposition.

Full Transcript

Operator: Good morning, welcome to Vivid Seats’ first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Following management’s prepared remarks, we will open the call for Q&A. I would now like to turn the call over to Austin Arnett.

Austin Arnett, General Counsel, Vivid Seats: Good morning, and welcome to Vivid Seats’ 1st quarter 2026 earnings call. I’m Austin Arnett, Vivid Seats’ General Counsel. I’m joined today by Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, and Joe Thomas, Chief Financial Officer. By now, everyone should have access to our earnings press release, which was issued earlier this morning. The release, as well as supplemental earnings slides, are available on our investor relations website at investors.vividseats.com. Today’s call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our projections, including the risks discussed in our earnings release, our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, and our subsequent filings with the SEC. Today’s call will also include references to adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure that provides useful information to our investors.

To the extent reasonably available, a reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to its most directly comparable GAAP financial measure can be found in our earnings release and supplemental earnings slides. Now I’ll turn the call over to Larry.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We entered fiscal year 2026 with a clear focus and roadmap to enhance our market position and financial trajectory. With that focus, we delivered measurable progress in the 1st quarter, resulting in meaningful improvements across our business. Our 1st quarter results came in at the high end or above guidance. On a sequential basis, we delivered growth in GOV, adjusted EBITDA, and our cash balance relative to Q4 2025. This momentum and sequential improvement support our confidence in returning to year-over-year growth in the 2nd half of fiscal year 2026 and beyond. Our long-term strategy centers around Vivid Seats’ foundational strengths, leading technology and product innovation, operational excellence, and a differentiated value proposition for our customers and partners. Pairing a seamless user experience with a differentiated value proposition is central to our mission.

Vivid Seats strives to be the most rewarding ticketing company, and we are increasingly aligning our product, pricing, and messaging around that core idea. We deliver value through competitive pricing, seamless user experiences, and meaningful rewards that deepen customer loyalty over time. We are currently focusing our product innovation efforts on the core customer journey. We are improving funnel efficiency, enhancing conversion, and delivering a faster, more intuitive experience. We recently deployed an upgraded app checkout experience, delivering a streamlined flow to accelerate the customer journey while improving conversion rates. We are encouraged by the early results and are excited about the pipeline of enhancements to both our app and web properties that will be deployed in Q2 and Q3. Our enhanced app value proposition continues to deliver encouraging results. In Q1 2026, Vivid Seats’s app GOV was up 20% year-over-year.

This growth led to Vivid Seats’ app share of GOV exceeding 40% for the quarter. Increasing app adoption reflects the combined impact of the Vivid Seats Rewards program, our lowest price guarantee, and continued product improvements. Together, these investments represent a highly differentiated value proposition. App users are more engaged, return more frequently, convert at higher rates, and touch paid performance marketing channels less often. As volume shifts into the app over time, we anticipate more efficient customer acquisition alongside enhanced customer retention and growing lifetime value. Alongside our app progress, we are continuing to invest in innovation across customer acquisition by working closely with leading AI platforms. This includes our recently launched ads on ChatGPT. While still in the early stages, we believe these efforts will help us capitalize on the long-term opportunities AI presents within the ticketing ecosystem.

In tandem with the encouraging trends we are seeing with Vivid Seats branded properties, we were pleased to launch a significant new private label partner during Q1, with performance already exceeding our expectations. We also recently extended our agreement with a large existing private label customer, underscoring the value proposition we deliver to our private label partners. We are pleased to see the private label business deliver sequential revenue growth in Q1 2026 and believe this trend supports our expectation of a return to growth in the second half of the year. With that, I’ll turn it over to Joe to walk through our first quarter financial results in more detail.

Joe Thomas, Chief Financial Officer, Vivid Seats: Thank you, Larry, and good morning, everyone. As Larry mentioned, our first quarter performance landed at or above the top end of our guidance, underscoring strong execution across the business. We achieved meaningful sequential increases in GOV and adjusted EBITDA compared to Q4 2025. This improvement is encouraging as we pursue a return to growth in fiscal year 2026 and beyond. Q1 2026 marketplace GOV was $612 million, compared to $581 million in Q4 2025, reflecting quarter-to-quarter growth of $31 million or 5.5%. This is particularly encouraging as the fourth quarter typically represents the highest GOV quarter each year, due in part to robust sports volumes with all major leagues in season. Q1 2026 consolidated revenue was $126 million, essentially flat with $127 million in Q4 2025.

Within consolidated revenue, private label revenue grew 20% quarter-to-quarter, highlighting a meaningful growth trend in the channel despite continued year-over-year private label declines as we lapped the 2025 loss of a large customer, as previously disclosed. Marketplace take rate was 15.9% in Q1 2026, compared to 16.8% in Q4 2025. The lower take rate primarily reflects mix shift as private label revenue tends to come with lower take rates. We continue to expect near term take rates to remain around 16% on a consolidated basis. Q1 2026 adjusted EBITDA was $9.5 million, compared to $1 million in Q4 2025. Adjusted EBITDA grew $8.5 million, marking substantial improvement on a sequential basis and highlighting the benefit of a material reduction in operating costs relative to a growing GOV and revenue base.

Cash increased over $40 million in the first quarter to $144 million. Cash flow benefited from improved profitability alongside seasonally strong working capital dynamics. Our first quarter results show significant progress across our operational and financial goals. Accordingly, we are reaffirming our 2026 outlook. For fiscal year 2026, we continue to expect marketplace GOV in the range of $2.2 billion-$2.6 billion and adjusted EBITDA in the range of $30 million-$40 million. This outlook reflects continued execution of our operating plan and financial profile. I will now turn the call back to Larry for closing remarks.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Our first quarter results indicate our strategy is working and we are moving in the right direction. We are excited about our momentum in the Vivid Seats App, where improving conversion and increasing engagement are supporting double-digit GOV growth. We are also encouraged by the sequential trends in our private label business as we seek a return to year-over-year growth later in the year. As we move through the year, we are confident that our core strengths, leading technology and data, operational excellence, and a differentiated customer value proposition will shine through. We are excited to continue executing against our strategy and to deliver long-term value to all stakeholders. With that, operator, please open the call for questions.

Operator: Thank you. At this time, we’ll conduct a question and answer session. To ask a question, you’ll need to press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please limit yourself to one question and a follow-up. Please stand by while we compile our Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Cameron Mansour with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Cameron Mansour, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Thank you. Morning, guys.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Morning.

Cameron Mansour, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Larry, last quarter you highlighted that you’re seeing some encouraging trends in terms of the competitive environment kind of rationalizing. Wondering if you’re continuing to see that and whether there’s any event category where you’re seeing more or less industry competition for activity, and whether competitive intensity from an event-specific angle is that whether the rate of change is better or worse in any specific category? I appreciate it.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Thanks, Cameron. I think the moderation that we saw start in Q4 from StubHub on the paid search side has continued. That’s been somewhat counterbalanced by continued aggressiveness in that channel by some other players. No question they’ve stepped back from their peak spend that we saw early to middle of 2025 on the marketing spend side.

Cameron Mansour, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yeah.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: I think perhaps still surprising to us. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen them shift to some price testing, price competitiveness. You continue to see, particularly in sports, across the ecosystem, competitiveness across pricing, while the marketing landscape seems to have really stabilized and moderated a bit.

Cameron Mansour, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Anything to follow up on that? Anything that you could add on, you know, I think the benefits on the push to kind of drive activity in-app probably makes you a little bit more insulated in terms of the vagaries of competitive intensity in the industry. You know, any additional color on kind of how you think about that and what the opportunity could be as more activity shifts to in-app?

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right in terms of the goal and the strategy. You know, we’re happy to have exceeded 40%. I think implicitly though at 40%, we still have exposure to the winds of paid search and marketing expense. The objective is very much to control our own future, bring folks into the ecosystem once and then have it more about building a long-term relationship with those customers versus continually needing to go back into the pond and acquire folks. We do benefit when things moderate, right? Given the remaining piece of the business that’s still out there. We’re pleased to see that, the surface area of that exposure has shrunk quite a bit relative to what it was two years ago.

Cameron Mansour, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Helpful. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes to the line of Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum. Your line is now open.

Austin Arnett, General Counsel, Vivid Seats0: Hey, Lawrence Fey, Joe Thomas. Nice job on the sequential improvements and stabilization. I want to start on industry volume. I’m curious what you guys saw in Q1 and then Q2 quarter to date, acknowledging I know April was a very tough comp, but just curious to try and compare your results to relative to the industry and what you saw there.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Yeah. In Q1, the data we’re seeing, it was industry was probably up a smidge, low single digits. Started pretty nice in January and then, yeah, moderated a bit into February and March. Net growth but single digits. Q2 thus far, I’d say is roughly flat. Got off to a slower start with Easter timing, April picked up with a couple meaningful concert on sales in the last 2 weeks. We’re back to roughly flattish. Yeah, I think at the moment, generally continue to subscribe to what we had put forward at the outset of the year of modest industry growth. I think we’ve all seen the increase in some cancellations of certain tours over the last few weeks.

I think most recent was The Pussycat Dolls. We also saw Zayn Malik, a couple others, Post Malone delayed, which I think on some level is reflecting either mispricing or some cap on potential for growth for the year.

Austin Arnett, General Counsel, Vivid Seats0: Thanks, Larry. Just on market share, how that looked for you guys looking at Skybox data, on a sequential basis for the marketplace. Secondly, on the market share, what you guys are seeing from Skybox from your ERP customers.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Yeah. Our share has been sequentially steady in our data, when we look at Q4 into Q1 into Q2. As we’ve started to lap our most difficult comps last year, which started around now with the, call it, peak spending in the performance marketing channels, we’ve seen in our data, our share shift to being up year-over-year. Not dramatically, but up, which is refreshing. As you probably heard our theme throughout the call, yeah, I think we’re well situated to return to growth in the back half of the year, and those are the types of metrics that you love to see flipping green in advance of that.

Austin Arnett, General Counsel, Vivid Seats0: Great. Maybe just on Skybox too, if you’re willing to comment specifically to the ERP customer market share.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: There continues to be competition for those customers, but we have not seen any meaningful defections in recent months. We’re vigilant. We’re continuing to reinvest and refocus on upgrading the platform to defend those relationships. We’ve seen alongside our, you know, stabilizing and improving share and volumes, improvement in that dialogue and discourse with all of our sellers. Excited about the outlook on the Skybox front.

Austin Arnett, General Counsel, Vivid Seats0: Excellent. Good luck, guys.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Thanks, Ryan.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Ralph Schackart with William Blair. Your line is now open.

Ralph Schackart, Analyst, William Blair: Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. 2, if I could. Just first on the macro environment and sort of the reads on the consumer, now that we have some elevated oil prices. Lawrence Fey had said that maybe there’s some cap on prices. I’m not sure if those are related, but just any comments as it relates to that, and then I have a follow-up.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: There’s nothing we could point to in terms of the kink in the curve where, you know, the Iran conflict started, oil prices moved, and you can see a discernible shift in demand or purchasing in any clear way. You know, as we touched on earlier with some of the concert tours being canceled, perhaps that’s a reflection of at least some subset of the market being tapped out, or it also may just be part of the natural oscillation of some artists mispriced their tours, which is, I think the leaning at the moment. We have seen some weakness, you know, the lower end of the Vegas market has probably been the most palpable place where we’ve seen the impact of potential consumer weakness.

I think that’s a comment you’ve heard or I believe seen a number of the local operators, reinforce, and we have continued to see that continue into the year. In Vegas, we’re really looking ahead to 2027 when supply tailwinds arrive with the reopening of the Mirage. I think for this year, it’s gonna be more of a blocking and tackling type year in Vegas.

Ralph Schackart, Analyst, William Blair: Okay, great. Just maybe kind of switching gears to the app and some of the improvements you’ve talked about in conversion rates. I think you said you’re above 40% traffic now on the app. Maybe just kind of a sense how that’s trended over the last year or so, you know, just any thoughts on where you think that you could take that rate over time. Thank you.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: We’ve seen really nice increases in the share of GOV coming through the app. Ultimately the GOV function is how do you get more people into the app and how do you drive higher conversion? Our activities are centered on both of those. A lot of effort in the back half of last year on how do we make folks who see the app want to download and keep it through better messaging with the better value proposition, reinforcing the value proposition. The focus this year has shifted to the conversion side of things. How do you optimize the product experience? How do you collect more data to have better personalized information appear in front of folks? Have a pretty exciting deployment calendar over Q2 and Q3 on the app side of things.

We’re north of 40% in Q1. I think the ambition is for a majority of the business to come through the app. I think realistic timetable for that would be at some point in 2027 to achieve that on a run rate basis, that’s what we’re aspiring to deliver.

Ralph Schackart, Analyst, William Blair: Okay, great. Thanks, Lawrence Fey.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes to the line of Brad Erickson with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Brad Erickson, Analyst, RBC Capital Markets: Hey, morning, guys. Thanks for taking the question. In terms of the return to growth, you pointed to, I think, the new private label partner giving you some added confidence there for the second half. Can you remind us any other items that could go, kinda could go right this year that gets you back to that growth in the second half of the year or at a high end of the guide type scenario? What would those drivers be?

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Yeah, I think, you know, as we frame why second half is where we draw the line for when we expect to flip back to growth. We lost the large private label customer in July of last year. July and really August will be the first true clean month without that customer in there. Subsequent to losing that customer, you know, as we noted, we brought a new meaningful private label customer on in Q1, which enabled sequential growth from Q4. Yeah, I think within private label, the path to incremental upside is twofold. There’s always the option of winning and bringing additional customers on. There’s an interesting stick or two in the fire on that front.

The other piece that we’ve redoubled efforts is how do we make sure our product and our support of our partners to maximize their organic performance is where it needs to be. We’re seeing encouraging progress on that front as well. With one of the big changes being any product enhancement that we are developing for the Vivid Seats marketplace, we wanna make sure we make it configurable and available to our partners in short order. Some of the upgrades that get us excited on the Vivid side, as they get pushed to our private label platform, I think provide an opportunity for organic outperformance in the second half of this year, but probably more prominent if you think about growth into 2027 and full year impact.

you know, beyond that, I think the concert calendar and supply slate is largely baked at this point. you know, upside from here I think will largely be driven by fundamental performance, right? Can these new product releases that we have upcoming in Q2 and Q3 deliver the type of conversion uplift that we anticipate, or event mix? I think the World Cup is probably the elephant in the room. If you get some great matchups in the quarterfinals, semifinals, finals, and you have, you know, a series of Super Bowl size events, that would be a wonderful tailwind. We’ll see.

Brad Erickson, Analyst, RBC Capital Markets: Got it. And then just bigger picture, as you continue to have conversations, assumably with the LLM companies, I don’t know, have you seen any indications or just any updates you can give us on how you’re thinking about, you know, their desire, ability, et cetera, to potentially grab economics of bringing the booking kind of closer to the four walls of the LLM? And then just, you know, generally, when you think about the risks related to that, remind us, like what do you point to as kind of the specific points of insulation where the ticketing sector can maintain all of its economics within an kind of an LLM booking environment?

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Yeah. I’d say on the AI journey broadly, we’ve actually seen to date quite little progress on the top of the funnel disruption and quite a bit of progress on optimizing the way we operate the business on our side. Not to say it can’t change, but everything we’ve seen to date has been more in the camp of the tools and capabilities allow us to be much more efficient and effective on a series of parameters to deliver a better customer experience, whether that’s building the software more quickly, automating processes, better information sharing. It really has been a nice tailwind on the operational side, including specifically our customer service experience.

If you look longer term, you know, nothing that we’ve seen indicates that the premise of like a fully captive transaction where the marketplace is boxed out, is likely in the near term or the focus of the LLMs in the near term. I think the biggest barrier, it’s this idea of when you have dynamic inventory in a deep vertical search category where you have a ton of individual preference. You need a lot of data. The LLMs don’t have that data across every subcategory that they service. They’re ultimately reliant on the folks like Vivid Seats or our competitors who have aggregated the inventory, have built the seat maps, have the dynamic real-time pricing. Unless we compile all that information and provide to them, they won’t have it.

It’s incumbent on, you know, us in the industry to make sure that we don’t, just, you know, give away the farm, without being properly compensated. That, I think, is at least what we’re seeing today. That’s a multi-year journey, and not one we’re seeing progress being made on the LLM front at the moment.

Brad Erickson, Analyst, RBC Capital Markets: Understood. Thanks, Larry.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes to the line of Stephen McDermott with Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Austin Arnett, General Counsel, Vivid Seats1: Hi, thank you for taking the question. I was wondering if we could shift a little bit to your partnership with United. Kinda any updates there, and is that really driving any incrementality that you’re seeing? I have a follow-up after.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Yeah. You know, United’s a great example of one of the, they call it many partnerships and partners we have across the ecosystem. You know, it’s been a nice tailwind throughout the year. It’s not a, you know, explicit needle mover of results. It’s been great to add them. Excited to continue to grow the partnership and iterate on how to maximize it. Would not consider that a primary influence on the results that you’re seeing in Q1.

Austin Arnett, General Counsel, Vivid Seats1: Gotcha. Thank you. you know, as we look at your cost position after your recent reductions, do you feel as though you’re kinda in a comfortable position to return to growth? To that, can we expect a more aggressive OPEX spend in the second half of this year?

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Yeah. I think the cost side of the equation continues to be a bright spot. I think first and foremost, the cost reductions that we’ve actioned are flowing through, so they are real. Second, we have not seen any loss in productivity or capability. In fact, I think I’ve actually seen our productivity and deployment rates increase alongside the efficiency gains. That’s, you know, one part optimizing and getting the right people in the right seats and one part utilizing some of these AI capabilities I was alluding to earlier. As we sit here today, you know, our objective is operating leverage. As we grow, disproportionate amount of that growth flows through to the bottom line.

I think we have more opportunity to capture on the expense side as we move into next year. There are some variable costs, right? As you, as you complete transactions, even including in our G&A line, right, some software that’s per dip and that type of thing. I think our objective is, even as we return to growth, our expenses remain steady on the G&A side.

Austin Arnett, General Counsel, Vivid Seats1: Gotcha. Thank you so much.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes to the line of Thomas Forte with Maxim Group.

Austin Arnett, General Counsel, Vivid Seats2: Great. First off, Lawrence Fey and Joe Thomas, congrats on the quarter. Lawrence Fey, sorry about the Fighting Illini, and at least, Oklahoma City Thunder is playing the Los Angeles Lakers in this round. My first question’s more exciting, my second question’s a little boring. On the more exciting front, what gives you confidence you can maintain your share and capitalize on World Cup this year? If you’re able to do that, how might World Cup contribute to your numbers this year?

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: I think World Cup has been a pretty meaningful tailwind. I think broadly consistent with what we’ve touched on in prior quarters, where we framed the opportunity as something larger than an A-list concert tour, but perhaps less than Taylor Swift. What we’ve seen in terms of volume flowing through to date, so the World Cup first went on sale in November, so we’ve been selling for 6, 7 months now. With a couple months to go as we approach the start of the games, it’s tracking to those levels, right? If a typical A-list tour is 1% of GOV for the year, Taylor Swift, you know, more like high single digits. It looks like overall the event will be low to mid single digits as a percentage of full year GOV.

We’ve had, you know, really nice performance and strength to date. These are high AOS events, and what we’ve generally found is that value proposition matters quite a bit when you’re talking about these high AOS events. Incumbent on us to continue to get the message out that our app is the place to purchase these high AOS tickets. If we’re able to continue doing that, I think we’ll get our fair share a little bit better as we enter the playing phase of the tournament.

Austin Arnett, General Counsel, Vivid Seats2: Great. For my boring one, now that we’re a quarter in, do you wanna give your updated thoughts on cash conversion for adjusted EBITDA for 2026?

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: I think largely consistent where if anything, our CapEx is maybe coming in a little bit lower than we had previously estimated. Directionally, net interest expense in the $20 million range, CapEx software in the low to mid-teens, and then a smidge of taxes relating to our international operations. If you get to EBITDA in the $35 million-$40 million range, you’ll be cash flow positive before considering working capital. As we have outlined, we feel pretty good about our volume trajectory and that overall working capital will be a source of cash on balance over the course of the year. Believe what we’re tracking, assuming we continue to deliver against the numbers and guidance for a cash flow positive year.

Austin Arnett, General Counsel, Vivid Seats2: Great. Thank you, Larry. Thank you, Joe.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes to the line of Kunal Madhukar with DB. Your line is now open.

Kunal Madhukar, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Hi, thank you for taking the question. A couple if I could. One, on the app side, wanted to understand how the app user demographic differs from the, you know, the regular customers that you have on the website, in terms of maybe age, in terms of their interest, in terms of engagement, in terms of geography, in terms of the type of tickets, concert versus sports, that they are buying. Then I have a follow-up.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Yeah. I think the biggest delineation between app and web users tends to be that the most frequent live event attendees, those who repeat most often are the ones intuitively, right, who would download an app for buying live event tickets. That generally corresponds to the categories that have the highest recurrence, which would be sports, right? The highest recurrence example would be Major League Baseball, right? There’s 81 home games. If you go to 1 baseball game a year, there’s a decent chance you’ll consider going to 2 or 3. In contrast, Taylor Swift goes on tour once every 5 or 6 years. The fact that you bought a Taylor Swift ticket might mean that you’re interested in buying a Sabrina Carpenter ticket.

The fact that you bought a Cubs ticket means you’re really likely to be interested in buying another Cubs ticket. The biggest element that we see across the app is folks repeat more often, right? If you buy on our app, the prospect for you buying again is higher. The second is that you over-index the sports because of the inherent recurrence within sports. Beyond that, there’s not a lot to flag across like geography or demographics that I would say is of note. It’s really more the frequency profile with a bit more sports orientation.

Kunal Madhukar, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Got it. Then, when I was doing basic back of the envelope math, given app GOV grew 20% and is now over 40% of the overall GOV, that suggests that the non-app GOV probably declined about 40%. Then you mentioned that we should expect that by 2027, app GOV on a run rate basis should be a majority of the business. What kind of growth rate should we expect on the app side versus the non-app side for the remainder of the year?

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: First, first definitionally, when we reference app GOV, that’s of our Vivid Seats properties, so we’re not speaking across the entire GOV footprint of the business, namely, you know, Vegas and Wavedash and our private label would not be part of that definition. I would tweak the math a bit. You know, I don’t think we’re in the business of forecasting or projecting by device type explicitly. I think implicitly, we’re expecting the business to grow, app to grow disproportionately. You know, as we start lapping some of the most competitively intensive periods, I think we expect that we can get web back to growth. Whenever you’re looking at these aggregate GOV numbers, you just have to fully decompose it, right? You have to pull private label out.

We lose private label partner that is different than competitiveness in the web, competitive landscape lens, us versus StubHub, versus SeatGeek. Yes, it is, it’s an implicitly true statement that app was up and other parts of the business were down, but decomposing is pretty important.

Kunal Madhukar, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Got it. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes to the line of Andrew Marok with Raymond James. Your line is now open.

Andrew Marok, Analyst, Raymond James: Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. One, with this quarter’s results coming in nicely and the reiteration of the guide, is the business just kind of becoming a bit more visible in your view? Are you able to maybe have a little bit more forecasting confidence than you have had in the past? Then I have a follow-up.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Yeah. Thanks, Andrew. I think I would agree with the statement overall. Certainly as we move through a year, right? As we get to Q4, where the concert on-sale calendar solidifies and crystallizes that through the back half of Q4, first half of Q1, we sit here with a pretty good sense of what the supply side of the calendar will look like. I think the fact that we’ve really tightened up our expense base lowers the bar, if you will, which helps mute impact. Then the last piece is we’ve reduced the surface area and exposure to paid search. It’s still present, but we’ve reduced it. I think that helps diminish volatility from things that are exogenous, namely competitive or competitor posture. There will still be variance, right?

Event mix is still a real thing, right? If we have great World Cup matchups or bad World Cup matchups, long series, short series, more concert cancellations, right? Those are all exogenous and can introduce volatility. Competitor behavior, competitor posture can still introduce some volatility. In terms of the controllables, I think we’ve dialed them in quite a bit and feel better about putting outlooks in place.

Andrew Marok, Analyst, Raymond James: Appreciate that. Then maybe as it relates to the app business, I think you mentioned this, a little bit in your prepared remarks, but I just kinda wanna ask it directly. There’s kind of this, you know, meme out there for older people, especially, where big purchases are done on the desktop, right? Like ticketing, hotel bookings, flights, et cetera. How do you sorta combat that to drive app growth? Is it purely demographic, or are there kind of nudges that you can give your consumers to get them to buy on the app? Thank you.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Yeah. Thanks, Andrew. It’s a great question because, you know, I guess this probably reveals where I sit on the age bucket, but I will do that as well, right? When you’re in discovery mode, you wanna be able to, you know, either consider a bunch of different events or a bunch of different seating areas. Sometimes I’ll actually do some searching on the bigger screen. But I think the objective we have is to make sure folks know that there’s a better value proposition available in the app. If you wanna transact on desktop, that’s great, and we’re gonna deliver the optimal experience for that.

If you also wanted to discover on desktop and then download the app, properly messaging that the lowest price guarantee and typically our lowest prices will be available in the app. You know, increasingly, we’re gonna have, you know, our rewards program prominently appear in the app and less so on web. There’ll be material inducement to transact in the app, but we of course wanna support people wherever their you know workflow wants them to transact.

Andrew Marok, Analyst, Raymond James: Appreciate it.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Your last question comes from the line of Maria Ripps with Canaccord. Your line is now open.

Maria Ripps, Analyst, Canaccord: Great. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. First, I just wanted to follow up on your private label business. You mentioned a new customer addition there, which is encouraging. How should we think about that segment going forward beyond sort of returning to growth? Do you think it can return to the run rate you had the business at about a year or two ago?

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: I think in absolute size, it’s unlikely that we’ll, in the near term, reclaim where we had been before the large customer loss. What I think we aspire to deliver is that the segment will grow at or above the broader marketplace and at or above industry rates. I think the two paths there would be enabling our existing customers to organically outpace the industry. Where it gets exciting is you have the option and the opportunity to add new customer wins on top of that organic growth. We’re seeing all of those signs pointing in the right direction, where we can have both happening in parallel, which could lead to some nice sequential growth, and starting in Q3 set us up for delivering sustained year-over-year growth.

From an absolute standpoint, I don’t think returning to the pre-customer loss levels that we saw in 2024 or early 2025 is a near-term target that we think we can deliver.

Maria Ripps, Analyst, Canaccord: Got it. That’s helpful. Just a quick follow-up. Can you maybe update us on your international strategy and how important is it, kind of on the list of your investment priorities at this point?

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Yeah, we continue to be encouraged by the international opportunity. I think we mentioned in our last call or two that we’re positive on the contribution margin standpoint in 2025. We grew GOV triple digits in 2025. We’ve continued to see GOV grow into 2026. In the spirit of focusing our efforts on the highest impact priorities, what we’re focusing on are upgrades that benefit not only international but also North America. As you think about things like our checkout, regardless of your location or your geography, that’ll benefit the business. The near-term roadmap is really focused on that type of improvement. As we get through these universal upgrades, they will benefit international but also benefit North America.

We do have an interesting roadmap of international upgrades queued up. It’s just a matter of if we can get to it in the next quarter or the next couple quarters.

Maria Ripps, Analyst, Canaccord: Got it. That’s helpful. Thank you, Larry.

Lawrence Fey, Chief Executive Officer, Vivid Seats: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. I’m showing no further questions at this time. Thank you for your participation in today’s conference. This does conclude the program, and you may now disconnect.