Viagogo’s Cris Miller: A ticket’s value is “what someone’s willing to pay”

Cris Miller, doesn’t give many interviews but the online secondary ticket market he helped pioneer, and the company he’s global MD for, Viagogo, have been taking a reputational battering. Over the last twenty years, he’s faced a range of crises from an initially sceptical market, to a major rival announcing a competitive service… to a global pandemic shutting down the world.

In this interview we talk about:  

• Why his first employer, StubHub, was set up because its founder couldn’t get tickets for a date 
• How the company saw the opportunity in a fragmented, untrustworthy secondary ticket market 
• Why it’s the buyer that sets the market value of a ticket, not the seller 
• The “constant hustle” to find and secure partners to help get the start-up off the ground 
• Why the company wasn’t “really ready” for government scrutiny 
• The £300 million hit they took during the covid pandemic, and how they survived 
• Advice on when the best time to buy a ticket on the secondary market might be 

For more news, interviews and analysis, read the Evening Standard newspaper or go to standard.co.uk/business. 

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