StubHub still listing resale tickets despite Ontario’s new price cap rules

Ontario’s move creates an immediate compliance bifurcation that likely hurts the smaller, slower, or less-automated resale platforms first. In the near term, the winner is the platform with the fastest rule engine and enforcement workflow, because inventory that remains noncompliant becomes a liability rather than a revenue source; that favors the incumbent with the deepest consumer trust and operational scale. For STUB, the bigger issue is not just delisting revenue, but the risk that Ontario becomes a template for other provinces/states, compressing a premium-priced secondary market segment that likely contributes outsized take-rate dollars.

The second-order effect is a market-share transfer, not a total demand destruction event. Resellers still want liquidity, and buyers still want access, so inventory should migrate toward the venue with the least friction and best compliance UX; that creates a near-term lift for the platform that delists aggressively and can relaunch fastest with guardrails. Over a 1-3 month horizon, the key variable is whether enforcement is real enough to change seller behavior, or whether sellers simply move inventory off-platform into more opaque channels where platform economics and consumer protections are weaker.

The contrarian read is that price caps can actually entrench the largest intermediary by reducing the strategic value of open-market arbitrage. If the cap reduces the expected resale spread, smaller undercapitalized resellers may exit while the dominant platform consolidates transactional flow around a more controlled, regulated marketplace. That means the long-term loser may be the fragmented gray market, while the short-term loser is any platform slow to comply; STUB’s delay increases the probability of both regulatory scrutiny and customer churn at the exact moment ticketing activity should be seasonally strong.