Welcome, everyone, to this Capital Markets Day for Storytel. It's so great to have you all here with us in Stockholm, and also for you who are watching online from throughout the world, welcome to the event. Today's agenda will be divided into four content blocks. First, you will hear the opening remarks, covering sector content, strategic direction, and midterm financial targets. That will be presented by CEO Johannes Larcher. We'll move on to Storytel's content strategy, covering synergies, differentiation, and content economics, and that will be presented by Chief Content Officer, Helena Gustafsson, as well as CEO of Storytel Books, Linda Säresand. After that, we'll take a 20-minute coffee break.
After the break, you're gonna hear about Storytel's streaming strategy, covering the growth of value share across Storytel's geographic markets, and that will be presented by our President of Streaming, Luis Duran, our Chief Product Officer, Johan Ståhle, Chief Marketing Officer, Oleg Nesterenko, and General Manager of Nordics, Åse Ericson. Finally, then, the closing remarks, which will include a fireside chat with the incoming permanent CFO, Peter Messner. Finally, Johannes Larcher will wrap things up with Storytel's road to sustainable and profitable growth. There will be a short Q&A after each presentation, and at the end of the session in the afternoon, we'll have a longer Q&A session as well. We're gonna be taking questions from the room here in the room, and you can raise your hand, and we'll bring a mic to you during those sessions.
As well, online, if you have a question, please feel free to send those in. You can see a question field beside the video window on the right side. Let's take a look at our speakers for the day. We have Johannes Larcher, our CEO, Helena Gustafsson, Chief Content Officer, Linda Säresand, CEO of Storytel Books, Luis Duran, President of Streaming, Johan Ståhle, Chief Product Officer, Oleg Nesterenko, Chief Marketing Officer, and finally, Åse Ericson, General Manager, Nordic. With that, let's get started with our program, and I'm gonna introduce first our first speaker, Storytel CEO, Johannes Larcher. A little background on Johannes: Johannes joined Storytel in 2022. Prior to that, he served as head of HBO Max International at Warner Bros. Discovery.
He has served as Managing Director of Digital at MBC Group, co-founder and CEO of SubVRsive, and he's also been Senior Vice President at Hulu. Johannes, welcome to stage for your opening remarks, after which we'll have a short Q&A.
Thank you, Emily. Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. Great to be here. I'm representing the entire Storytel team, and I'd like to welcome all of you to today's event, especially those of you who are here in Stockholm. Despite the good weather, you made your way in here. That says a lot about us and about you. But also to those watching online and following along on the live stream, it's gonna be a great event. This is our first Capital Markets Day since 2020. A lot has happened since then in the world, with Storytel and our industry.
We're asking for a little bit of your time today to provide you with a deeper understanding of Storytel's current status, our plans and ambitions for the next few years, how we will deliver that ambition, and introduce you to the leadership team that is driving our business. Of course, we want you to have an opportunity to ask us any questions about Storytel that are on your mind. This is your day. It's really up to you to ask us about our business, and we are here to provide you with the information that you need, and we wanna show you the excitement we feel about the road ahead. Hopefully, we will all together have some fun along the way. Let's get into it.
Let's talk a little bit about what Storytel can be not too long from now, and how we will build this business over the next few years. It goes without saying that I and everyone on the Storytel team feel convinced that we have a unique, career-defining opportunity to build a leading company in a very fast-growing sector. That in success will not only be large, but very profitable, and as a result, of great value to our shareholders. Also, it will be a company that continues to meaningfully serve millions of subscribers and listeners and will enrich their lives by bringing them great audio stories that entertain, inform, and engage. This morning, we shared some updated financial information with financial targets for Storytel up to 2026. Let's take a moment to review these targets and put them in perspective. I wanna start with the revenue target.
In 2026, our group revenue will be in excess of SEK 5 billion. This implies a revenue CAGR of low double digits for the group between 2022 and 2026. We believe revenue growth can continue on a strong pace after 2026. The group revenue ambition is primarily driven by our streaming revenue CAGR, which we forecast to be 15% from 2023 to 2026. In terms of profitability, we expect to remain EBITDA positive every quarter from here on out. That's a tradition we started in the second quarter of last year. We expect to deliver over SEK 600 million in EBITDA in 2026. That equals a margin target of 12%.
EBITDA margins will increase from here on out to 2026. It's important that as we learn more and more about our business, we have become convinced that steady-state unit economics in this business will allow for improved unit economics and higher margin levels thereafter in the years following 2026. As we reinvest less in top-line growth and achieve better economies of scale, and we become more efficient with our content and marketing spend, the business has the potential, long term, to exceed 15% of EBITDA margin. In terms of CapEx, we expect to spend about 5% of group annual revenue on CapEx to cover content and tech investments. Based on SEK 5 billion of revenue and over SEK 600 million in EBITDA, we expect north of SEK 300 million in operational cash flow in 2026.
We are confident that from this year onward, we can run the company on a cash self-sufficient basis. To reiterate the ambition, we believe we can reach over SEK 5 billion in group revenue in 2026, driven by a 15% revenue CAGR in streaming. We also believe that we can deliver a 12% EBITDA margin, and we aim for CapEx levels of around 5% of group revenue. Our operations will generate strong cash flow from 2026 onward, and we are confident that our plan can be delivered on a cash self-sufficient basis from here out. Yes, these numbers are ambitious. They represent an almost SEK 2 billion increase from 2022 revenue levels. They also represent a nearly 5x expansion of our margin from 2022 to 2026.
Of course, they are subject to various risks relating to the sector, to competition, and to execution. As a team, we believe that these targets are attainable and within our control and ability to deliver. Importantly, these targets are purely organic. The numbers we've shared today do not include any potential strategic transactions, such as M&A activities, which we may very well conduct. Any strategic transactions and their impact would come on top of the numbers I just presented. Now, having seen this sneak peek of the future from 2026 and the financial results we expect to achieve, let's take a step back and talk about who we are as a company. The results we deliver, after all...
The results we deliver, after all, are only a function of how well we serve our customers and how good a job we do convincing them to sign up, subscribe, and stay subscribed for Storytel. It all starts with that basic function. We need to serve our customers, and they need to stay subscribed. Our mission at Storytel is to move the world through story. Sounds simple. Stories have the ability to entertain, to educate, to inform, to challenge dearly held beliefs. They can help people escape their world or dive deeper into it. They can motivate people to do things or convince them not to do things. They can inspire, engage, and change people like no other force in the world.
The first stories humans ever told were conveyed verbally. We see lots of evidence that in a world of constant sensory, dopamine-fueled overload, the purest act of simply listening to a story is gaining in popularity. That is thanks to the ability of stories, audio stories, to uniquely stimulate the mind and engage the listener. That's why what our company is all about. It's all about audio stories, as is reflected in our name. At Storytel, we are in two businesses. We are in the business of creating stories, that's our Content business. We are in the business of bringing these stories to our listeners, that's our Streaming business. Our Content business consists of publishing houses like Norstedts and Gummerus, and our audio publishing house, Storyside.
In these publishers, we worked with creators, authors, of course, but also directors, voice talent, producers of audio stories. There we bring to life the most amazing stories of all kinds and in different formats: print books, e-books, and of course, audiobooks. We have a long history of success in this field. Hundreds of years, actually, as is the case with Norstedts and Gummerus, or dozens of years, as is the case building Storyside, the world's second-largest producer of audiobooks. Collectively, we represent over 30 Nobel Prize winners and many, many winners of other prestigious literary awards. We have brought beloved mega-hits, like the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson, to the world. In our Streaming business, we take the great content produced by our Content business, as well as content from other publishers, and we make it available in audio format.
We bring these audio stories to listeners around the world through the Storytel app that makes it easy to listen to your favorite stories anywhere, anytime, and on the device of your choice. We've been streaming audiobooks since 2006. To our audiences, we are synonymous with highest quality content, great ways to discover the content that is right for you at the right time, and a product experience that is intuitive and enjoyable. Today, we proudly serve over 2 million paid subscribers around the globe. Throughout today's presentation, you will hear us refer back to our two businesses, the Content business and the Streaming business, as we explain how the combination of the two creates unique value for Storytel Group. Let's take a look at how we got here, short trip back in history.
Storytel was founded in 2005 in Sweden, as you can see, we built the company through a combination of acquisitions, market expansion, and organic business development and growth. From 2011 to 2021, we expanded into over 20 markets. We acquired over 20 companies. For example, Norstedts, Sweden's number two publishing house in 2016. In 2013, we acquired a small company called Storyside, an audiobook publisher. The investments we've made in Storyside since then have been a critical enabler of our expansion strategy. In multiple markets, we've spearheaded the development of the audiobook category by publishing great audiobooks through Storyside. We also expanded rapidly geographically. We built a market-leading position first in the Nordics, where we are the largest audiobook streaming service. We also built strong positions in the Netherlands, Poland, Bulgaria, and Turkey.
In North America, we operate the second-largest audiobook streaming service under the Audiobooks.com brand, a company we acquired in 2021. Together, these 10 markets represent the vast majority and the core of our business, and we will come back to how we will drive further growth and further profitability in these 10 Core markets later in the presentation. Elsewhere, we operate streaming services dedicated to markets in 18 additional countries and regions, including Mexico, Brazil, Arab-speaking Middle East, Spain, and South Korea, to name a few. These markets are a relatively small part of our business today, but they [wholesome] didn't really scale all that well, unfortunately. In 2021, Storytel reached a breaking point. We missed our market guidance not once, but twice. Our EBITDA margin wasn't doing well. Severe pressure on that, and company was bleeding cash. It was time to regroup and take action.
An intense process started. We had to figure out where the company had gone wrong and what actions we needed to take to get back on track. The analysis clearly pointed to a few things. We had overextended by entering into too many markets, too quickly. We had failed to sufficiently customize our strategy and go-to-market tactics on a country-by-country basis. We had allowed content, marketing, and personnel costs to overinflate, and we had neglected to build an organization and a set of systems and processes that was able to keep up with the rapid growth of our company. It was obvious that things had to change. 2022, then, became the year of significant transformation at Storytel. First of all, we focused on profitable growth in a small number of markets. This has became the key priority for the company.
While growth is absolutely important to us, so is the need to be profitable and operate on a cash self-sufficient basis. We also maximized the organization's focus on these 10 Core markets and significantly decreased our investment in all other markets. We ran a transformation and efficiency process, resulting in a significant reduction of headcount and lowering our cost base. We transformed our board by adding Hans-Holger Albrecht as our Chairman, and by bringing on board members with deep subject matter expertise in technology, in content, and in direct-to-consumer media streaming services. The company appointed a new CEO in September of last year. I've been serving in this role ever since, and I'm bringing with me experience building some of the largest, most successful consumer streaming services in the world and trying to apply that here at Storytel.
We also solidified our balance sheet and conducted a directed share issue late last year. We began work looking forward, defining our go-forward growth strategy for the business. The result of which we are presenting to you here today. Storytel today, as you've seen over the last year, the transformation process has been successful. There is a lot that remains to be done. I will be honest, some of the necessary changes that need to be carried out will take more time to take effect, but we are confident and convinced that the business is now on the right track. Let me take you through where we stand as a company today.
Revenue growth has continued at an organic clip of 11%, that's per year in our Streaming business. We have guided that we will grow at or above this level also in 2023. Our group gross margin is nearly 40%, and thus is amongst the very strongest margins vis-a-vis our media streaming peers. Major cost drivers in our business, like content, billing, and other variable costs, are either stable or declining. Today, Storytel is in its fifth quarter of consecutive EBITDA profitability. We have guided that the group will continue to be profitable every quarter this year, that our full-year EBITDA margin for 2023 will be higher than in 2022. We are amongst a very small group of consistently profitable media streaming services worldwide. We've also shown that our largest markets are very profitable.
On the left, we showed a margin development in the Nordics, where we have our strongest market position, and our 10 Core markets combined on the right. These numbers demonstrate very clearly that ours is a business of scale, and when we achieve large subscriber numbers and high brand awareness in a market, we can be very, very profitable. To better understand these numbers, let's now look into the two sides of the business, content and streaming. I want to start with content. In Storytel Books, our publishing houses last year generated about SEK 400 million from physical book sales and about SEK 300 million from digital sales. Audiobook licensing is the fastest-growing part of Storytel Books revenue, and it stems from licensing our content to Storytel Streaming, as well as dozens of others of audiobook distribution partners in the Nordics.
Today, almost 50% of our books business is digital. Storyside, our audio publishing house, is today the world's second-largest audiobook publisher and a source of high-quality, high-margin content for the group. Last year, we produced about 6,000 hours, 6,000 titles, with a total listening time of 48,000 hours. I did the math, and if you listen 24 hours a day, that would take you approximately six years to listen to just one year of our output. Our total Storyside catalog comprises around 300,000 hours, 48,000 titles in 30 languages. Importantly, Storyside accounts for 14% and rising of all the hours streamed to our listeners on Storytel. Moving to the Streaming business, subscriber engagement on Storytel is at record levels, with nearly one million paid subscribers listening to more than 10 hours per month.
In Sweden, 45% of all our subscribers log into Storytel daily and listen to at least five minutes of content per day, and on a global level, that metric is at 40%. Customers are not only very engaged, but also very, very loyal, and the loyalty is getting stronger. Today, almost 50% of our Nordic subscribers have been continuously subscribed to Storytel for over three years. Our pay base has continued to grow, even as we've shifted our focus to profitability and away from subscriber growth at any cost. Comparing Q1 of this year to last year, our ARPU has also increased by an impressive 6%. We also see that paid churn continues to trend downwards, and our global churn is now at 6%. This is the lowest level of paid churn we've ever experienced in this business.
Churn is also trending down in a market like Sweden, despite recent price increases and despite the introduction of a new tiered product structure. We are, of course, aware of the pressures that inflation, rising interest rates, possible recession are putting on consumers in Sweden and elsewhere, and we monitor our KPIs very, very closely to see if there has been or might be, in the future, negative impact on our business from these macroeconomic developments. Besides paid churn, we also look at other metrics. We track subscriber acquisition costs, SAC, and we track the number of gross additions to our pay base. As you can see, SAC has been stable, and we are able to acquire the number of gross additions on our subscriber base that we need to sustain our subscription levels and to grow the business.
As of right now, I can say with confidence that our Streaming business is performing as expected, and we are not, repeat, not experiencing negative impact of macroeconomic trends the same way others in the streaming media business are. We are certainly not immune against negative pressure from macroeconomics, but we are very well insulated. Why is that? Well, one of the reasons for that is that our business is very different from television streaming. TV streaming, where I spent most of my career, is a well-established business model, and in many markets has reached near full penetration of the addressable market. That results in two things. One, the subscriber base of major TV streaming services looks very similar to the socioeconomic makeup of the full population in the total addressable market. 2, the number of subscriptions per household for TV is high.
In the U.S., for example, it's nearly four services per household, services like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+, Apple TV+, the list goes on. Our industry and business are very different. One, audiobooks are at a different stage of market penetration on the S-curve, with lots of room for growth still to be captured. Our subscribers tend to be, as a result of that, more affluent, more educated, and thus, less sensitive to economic pressures than the average person in our TAM. Two, because the content overlap between audiobook services, as of right now, at least, is very high, subscribers typically only subscribe to a single subscription for an audiobook streaming service. Canceling one or four or five TV subscriptions will absolutely save you money as a TV subscriber.
If you cancel your Storytel subscription, it means, in most cases, that you're cutting off completely from listening to audiobooks. Obviously, the barrier to cancel, in our case, is much higher than in television. It's partially for those two reasons that we are more resilient to macroeconomic pressures on consumers than OTT TV streaming services. When you reflect on where we came from and where we are right now here at Storytel, it can be summed up as follows: We have successfully transformed the company. We are in a healthy financial position. We're making progress on further improvements, step by step, quarter by quarter. We serve our customers exceptionally well. We are the number one independent audiobook streaming service in the world, and therefore, we are in a very strong starting position to further grow our business over the next few years.
Now, let's turn our attention forward. Let's look at where we go from here and our strategy that will build towards the 2026 financial targets we shared at the beginning. Let's start by looking at our market. Storytel is part of two markets, the traditional and mature publishing market, and the fast-growing, highly dynamic, direct-to-consumer media streaming market. The audiobook market alone is going to grow from what was a, excuse me, $4 billion business in 2020 to $20 billion in 2030. That's a 5x increase and represents about 15% annual growth. Based on that, we believe there are big opportunities for Storytel to grow further. Audiobooks, after all, are still under-penetrated relative to TV and music streaming services, even in the most advanced audiobook markets, like the Nordics.
If we think of ourselves not only as the audiobook service that we have and will always be, but also as a purveyor of the very best spoken word audio stories that go beyond the traditional pure audiobook format, the market growth story becomes even more exciting. If you add in alternative spoken word content, such as podcasts, lectures, radio, the total market size goes from $30 billion in 2020 to $60 billion in 2030. Even if you exclude certain markets that we cannot participate in, like China and Russia, it's obvious that we have a very strong global market growth opportunity. In publishing, growth is obviously expected to be more modest.
As a maturing industry, there are fewer opportunities for incremental growth, and therefore, what you see represented on the right side points to top-line growth in publishing that is roughly at inflation, about 2% CAGR from 2022 to 2030. Yes, there are absolutely very fast-growing parts of publishing, in particular, digital, which comprises of e-books and audiobooks. In Sweden, for example, digital now represents almost 30% of the total publishing sector revenue and continues to grow very quickly. However, this growth in digital is offset, in part, at least, by lower growth or sometimes declines in print publishing. Now, let's talk about competition, and the first thing I'll say is that when we talk about competition, there are two different kinds of competitors. There's very large-scaled global juggernauts, like the big tech companies you see represented on the screen behind me.
These companies have hundreds of millions of paid customer relationships, and they have built-in ecosystem advantages to cross-sell, at least in theory, cross-sell audiobooks into that base. They have proven over and over again that they are not very shy doing that and taking advantage of their competitive advantages. We compete with these large global players every day. Fortunately, for Storytel, each of them is at a very, very different stage of maturity when it comes to audiobooks. Importantly, competition in the audiobook sector is also very different than in television or in the music streaming business. Consumer tastes and preferences in audiobooks are highly local. Unlike in TV and music, there are few truly global hits in audiobooks. The vast majority of audiobooks consumed is by local writers in the local language.
In fact, in Sweden, 85% of all hours listened are by Swedish writers in the Swedish language. This hyperlocal preference for content makes it much harder and slower for global competitors to roll out a successful service in every market, and forces them to go country by country, step by step, publisher by publisher, offer by offer. It also means that our ownership of high-performing local content businesses through our Content business is a valuable competitive differentiator. This brings us to local and regional competitors. It was Oscar Wilde who said that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Well, here at Storytel, we get a lot of flattery.
Lots of local and regional players have picked up on the fact that listening to audiobooks is an increasingly popular form of entertainment, and they have built more or less good carbon copies of Storytel's service to try and take a slice of that cake. How do we compete in this sector? The content on offer on the different services, if you look here in Sweden, for example, it's a significant overlap. Unlike in TV streaming, the content you will find on local services is pretty much identical: the same books, the same offers, the same stories. The products used to deliver those stories to our audiences are also very similar. Yes, there are differences, and certainly here at Storytel, we of course, believe that we have an edge on our competitors when it comes to things like content discovery, personalization, and an intuitive user interface.
By and large, all competitors offer variations of the same underlying set of features and technologies. Yes, the brands are different. Storytel in the Nordics, by far, enjoys the highest brand awareness and the highest brand favorability, and we've developed a well, well-deserved brand reputation as the premium player in this segment. Again, the differences in how we position our service and which audience segments we target aren't all that significant. What do we compete on? Well, the unfortunate reality in our sector is that historically, we've competed primarily on very aggressive promotions and very aggressive free trials. These are available to consumers almost continuously. This hurts everyone.
It hurts the services like Storytel, it hurts the publishers, most importantly, it hurts the authors, whose works, as a function of being included in irrationally long free trials, are being devalued and branded as not representing the kind of creative work consumers should be paying money for. Storytel is committed to changing this dynamic and to avoid a race to the bottom. We believe that the dimensions of content, user experience, brand, are very possible to compete on in this sector, will be much more defensible elements of differentiation of our services over time. Our strategy, which we will explain more thoroughly throughout this event, aims to leverage all four areas of differentiation shown on this slide. We have segmented this into three categories: Content, Go-to-market, and Company.
Our strategies within these three categories will enable us to deliver profitable growth organically, while we remain open-minded about strategic opportunities. This coming section, I will take you through some of the key points and parts of this strategy before the team moves into deep dives, focusing on the two businesses, Content and Streaming. It all starts with great stories. We're a story business. It's in our name. After all, stories are the reason more and more consumers trust us with more and more of their most valuable good, their time. We are committed to offer, at any given time at Storytel, a great selection of audio content, audio stories that fit every type of user, every situation, and every need.
That is reflected in the wide range of genres we cover, from crime to comedy, from romance to self-help, from children's stories to the classics, and it is reflected in the types of content we offer as well. Audiobooks are clearly at the core of Storytel, and will always remain there. We have classic audiobooks with single-voice narration, we have radio plays, but we also increasingly offer stories that could be called podbooks or could be called lectures. We also offer stories based on long-form journalism of high quality. These are all great audio stories based on the written word. We are continuously diversifying our content lineup and expanding it to ensure that we have great audio stories available for every subscriber, and that we can bring new listeners into our service who have yet to discover the amazing power of audio stories.
Our commitment to a best-in-class content offer is also reflected in the fast-growing number of Storytel Originals and exclusive content only available on Storytel. While their number as a percentage of our overall catalog today is relatively small, we know that these titles have the power to attract new listeners, more deeply engage existing subscribers, and in the process, help define our brand. They also help consumers understand the differences between our service and those of the other guys, and thus, they are a critical component of our ambition to achieve a higher level of product differentiation. In our efforts to bring the world's greatest audio stories to our subscribers, a core part of our strategy is to own publishing houses like Norstedts, Gummerus, People's, in select markets. We believe that publishing, despite the changes that are taking place in this industry, is a solid business.
Fundamentally, EBITDA margins for large publishers in large markets can be very healthy and can run as high as 20%. Cash flow conversion in publishing can still be very strong. For example, take Simon & Schuster, global publisher in 2022 on revenues of $1.2 billion, almost 20% EBITDA margin. We also believe that ownership of publishing houses can make our streaming service much stronger. The access to authors, the ability to tap into the submission pipeline for new books from new writers, and the deep catalog that, in some cases, has yet to be digitized and turned into audiobook format, these are all valuable contributions the publishing business can make to our Streaming business. Vice versa, we believe that our ownership of a streaming service, which is market-leading in many of our countries, can help elevate our publishing business.
Authors appreciate the opportunity to create new, original audio stories, partnering with our experienced team to take full advantage of the creative opportunities afforded by audio streaming. Our ability to feature and actively promote our authors who want to get more personal branding and enjoy better economics in our off-channel marketing, as well as on-site, and how we feature their content, is attractive for authors. We are already seeing examples of major authors in the last few months switching to our publishing houses because we can ensure optimized exposure for them and their works on what is, in many of our markets, the single largest digital books platform. That is why we operate both a Content business and a Streaming business. The combination of these two creates unique value that is much bigger than the sum of its parts.
High-quality content, of course, costs money, a lot of money, and whether we produce in-house as a Storytel Original or we license content from a third-party publisher, content, by far, is the single largest item of cost on our income statement. In 2022, we spent well over SEK 1 billion on content, and over our lifetime, we've paid out approximately SEK 6 billion to authors in the form of royalty checks. That's not an insignificant contribution if you think about the size of the Nordic publishing industry. Improving content cost as a percent of revenue, for us, is a powerful economic lever to increase our gross margin, and there are many ways to do that. For one, we are getting rid of some contracts, licensing content that is very expensive and unprofitable, and is only enjoyed by very small numbers of listeners on Storytel.
We are also working hard to increase what we call our internal share of content. Attractive content from Storytel Books and Storyside will drive higher internal share of content consumed, and that results in a higher margin to us than content licensed from a third party. Adding new content types, such as Podbooks, lectures, long-form journalism with more favorable financial terms, such as a flat fee arrangement or a pure revenue share arrangement, also helps us improve overall content costs and get to higher gross margins. We are in the process of renegotiating some of our biggest third-party content licensing deals. Some of them have terms that are, frankly, unfavorable and unsustainable. We are seeing good success so far in the first few months of this year, achieving better economic terms and outcomes with these partners.
Lastly, our tech team is also making an important contribution to help us lower content costs by making changes that impact content consumption. One small example, we've recently tweaked our sleep timer function so that we can limit the cost of content being delivered to subscribers who've fallen asleep. That saves money, gets us to better margins. Our goal is to lower content costs gradually over time, while preserving fair compensation for the creators. Very important to us. We believe that by 2026, our content cost as percent of overall revenue will be reduced by several percentage points, while our yearly payout to creators will increase by SEK 1 billion compared to 2022. We believe that long term, and I mean long term, Storytel can and should absolutely be a truly global company, accessible to anyone, anywhere.
In the medium term, we are going to avoid the overexuberance of our earlier global expansion efforts. From now to 2026, we will stay highly disciplined. We will focus our attention and efforts, along with the vast majority of our investment dollars, on a narrow set of 12 to 12 1/2 markets. In addition to our 10 Core markets, the Nordics, the U.S., the Netherlands, Turkey, Poland, Bulgaria, we have identified several markets around the world where we see opportunity and where we believe we have the right to play and a good chance of winning. We will experiment in those markets, test and learn, we will do so in a highly efficient manner.
Every additional dollar invested will be subject to performance hurdles, and we will leverage central teams as well as commercial, as well as strategic partnerships, to grow quickly but efficiently. Idea about how we go about prioritizing Expansion market opportunities. In our process of transformation for Storytel, and making it fit for the future, we obviously recognize that our team plays a very, very important role. When I joined last fall, I found a team of very highly skilled and very passionate employees, and I've, you know, now been able, through several additions and changes, to almost complete my build-out of the senior leadership team. Several of them will be presenting here today, and all of them will be present throughout the event.
The changes we've made on our team have been focused on both efficiencies and on enhancing our ability to attract and retain the world's best talent. In 2022, we significantly reduced our headcount. Finding efficiencies throughout the organization remains a priority for us in 2023 and beyond. Through centralization and automation efforts, as well as building the most efficient organization possible, we are convinced that staffing and personnel overhead costs as a percent of revenue will go down significantly as we grow our top line and subscriber base. We are right-sized as an organization. We can deliver on our strategy without growing headcount significantly. To do so, we also need to make sure we have the right people on the team. We are bringing additional domain expertise to Storytel, particularly in the areas of data and analytics, partnerships, and marketing.
There, we've added team members who've seen what good looks like and are ready to do it again. We've also diversified our team to better reflect the increasingly global nature of our customer base and business. When I look at my leadership team today, this is reflected. We have people from Spain, Brazil, Canada, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, and Ukraine on our leadership team. They run the business day to day. We're becoming more global. In 2022 and this year, we've made, I feel, great progress becoming a more efficient organization. We will continue to seek efficiencies. We will continue to seek opportunities to operate on a leaner and more frugal basis going forward. That matters because we understand and we are committed to our path of profitable growth.
We recognize that in today's environment, we have to deliver strong top-line growth, but not at any cost. Our plan today reflects that reality. We are committed to operate the company on a profitable basis every quarter going forward, and gradually increase margins in 2024 and 2025 before reaching higher levels of profitability consistently from 2026 onwards. The continued optimization of our cost structure plays an important role in delivering the targeted profitability levels and maintaining our cash self-sufficiency. Importantly, my team and I realize that we need to be disciplined, and that the midterm focus of Storytel has to strike the right balance between investment and high ROI opportunities, steady top-line growth, and gradually increasing levels of profitability. I have lived through the gold rush era of direct-to-consumer streaming services.
I've seen what that looks like, but I've also worked and delivered in environments where bottom-line performance was front and center to every decision being made. I plan to apply that very playbook to Storytel. Again, we need to deliver strong growth, but not at any cost. We are committed to responsible conduct towards our stakeholders and take the impact we have on the planet and our fellow human beings seriously. We are committed to reducing our climate impact and are in the process of setting science-based targets. However, I do want to stress that the Storytel Group's emissions are not significant. An hour of audiobook consumption generates around 2 g of emissions. That's approximately 95% lower than one hour of watching video. Even a print book's environmental impact is small, about 20% of consuming one hamburger.
The core of our impact is, of course, what we do for our 2+ million paid subscribers and readers, where we aspire to have a significant positive impact on people's lives and well-being by providing them stories that have the ability to entertain, educate, and inform. The plans we're presenting today and the numbers we are sharing with you are purely organic. They do not reflect any strategic growth opportunities yet. That doesn't mean that we aren't interested in potential transactions that would further strengthen our business case. There are several categories of potential transactions that are of interest to Storytel. As you saw, we've successfully acquired audiobook streaming services like Mofibo in Denmark in the past, and we've used their early success in a market as a springboard for Storytel.
Additional acquisitions of successful streaming players in other markets could potentially accelerate our growth to more subscriber and revenue scale. Therefore, they are of interest. We are also believers that potential additional acquisitions of large publishing houses in key markets could make sense for us. As we've seen with Norstedts and Gummerus, there are numerous advantages to owning scaled and successful publishers in priority markets. Thus, we are open to look at potential transactions in this area. Lastly, I think we've all seen how amazing the success of well-managed IP franchises can be. Take Harry Potter, take Marvel in movies, take ABBA in music, take Angry Birds in gaming. We believe there may very well be opportunities for franchise ownership in publishing that could potentially be interesting to Storytel.
Our success is not dependent on strategic M&A, we see opportunities and believe that perhaps can amplify and accelerate our development through such opportunities. I've taken up a lot of time. I've hopefully given you a good idea and overview of where our business will be in 2026 and how we're gonna get there. Before I hand it to the team, I want to summarize the highlights. We expect Storytel to be over SEK 5 billion in group revenue by 2026, based on a 15% streaming revenue CAGR. We expect our EBITDA margin to reach 12% by 2026 and believe that this margin expansion will continue beyond 2026. We expect to be cash self-sufficient during the 2023-2026 period, and we believe that this performance can be achieved purely based on organic growth and without additional financing needs.
We will deliver these results by growing at or above market rates, by providing a differentiated offer to our customers, by tailoring our strategies and tactics on a market-by-market basis, and by improving the go-to-market strategy with more efficient customer acquisition. We will apply strong discipline to gross margin management. We will increase our customer lifetime value, and we will focus on Core markets and a very limited set of additional Expansion markets. Lastly, we will tightly manage support function and shared resource-related expenditures. You will hear a lot more about this in the sections to come, but this is how we're gonna do it, starting.
Great, thank you for the presentation. Now we'll open as you said, for a short Q&A. If anyone has a question in the room, please do raise your hand, and we'll come over with a mic. I see we have a couple already. If you could give your name, please, and also your company before you ask your question. Thank you. Go ahead.
Very much, Derek Laliberté from ABG. I was wondering. Thank you for the presentation, by the way, Johannes. With regards to the sales growth target, if we could dig into that a bit more, and if perhaps you could give some additional color on to what extent it will be subs driven and to what extent ARPU driven. It seems from your comments this morning that it would be primarily subs driven. Can you say anything about the.
Yeah
... the ARPU side there? Because it, yeah.
Look.
You have ongoing campaigns, et cetera. I guess that's only temporary, but it seems like price pressure is only increasing.
Yeah. Thank you, Derek. Look, we'll take growth any way we can get it, right? Hopefully, we'll get both subscriber growth and ARPU growth. We communicated today that we believe that by 2026, we'll be, at the end of the year, around 3.2 million subscribers. That number could be a little higher, it could be a little lower, right? I think it's a realistic middle-of-the-road type of number to aim for. Look, we've made dramatic progress on extracting more value of our most important markets. We are focused not on subscriber numbers, but on share of value in the industry. In the Nordics, we are more than 50%, we believe, in terms of total share of revenue generated in audiobook streaming.
We've also seen recently, as I mentioned in the presentation, our ARPU levels rise quite significantly. I think the reality is that in the, in the Nordics, we've certainly captured a lot of the potential upside that is to be had there for the foreseeable future. So I wouldn't expect dramatic ARPU increases going forward in the Nordics, and Luis can talk more about this with you later. I do think we have opportunity for ARPU increases in Growth markets and Expansion markets, and there we will also see significant subscriber growth. It's a combination of both, and we will balance this as we go along. It's not either/or.
Thank you. Do we have another question? Oh, okay. Then we'll take you next.
Short question. Stefan Wård from Pareto Securities. Thank you for a very detailed and interesting presentation, Johannes. Regarding the gross margin expansion to 2026, you mentioned a couple of percentage points, and then you also mentioned that you would give away part of that to creators, if I understood it correctly. Could you just give a little bit more detail on the gross margin.
Yes.
Expansion potential, please?
Yes. Look, I think, first of all, really important to stress again, Stefan, that we have industry-leading gross margins in our business. If I look at a company like Spotify, for example, or others, the 40% or near 40% that we're at is really, really good. Of course, we aim to increase that gross margin, and we do think we have ample opportunities to do that by optimizing our content spend, et cetera. Part of the optimization, part of what we're doing is we, of course, have to invest in growth as well, right? If I look at our marketing spend, for example, in this business, over the next three, four years, marketing spend as % of revenue is actually pretty flat. We're not decreasing, we're not increasing as a percent of revenue.
Long term, I see marketing revenue in this business potentially going into the low teens, 10%, 12%, 14%, that range. Some of that some of those gains will be reinvested in growth. Our EBITDA levels in the business, I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. This is not a straight line growth until 2026, when we hit 12%. We do see that this is a little bit of a, not an exponential, but a curve for sure, where EBITDA levels will get better. I think they will be better this year as we have guided than last year, and they will be better again, hopefully next year. Real profitability kicks in to 2026 at 12%.
As I said, long-term unit economics, if you just do the math, we think we can be at 15% or higher in long-term EBITDA margins. Gross margin obviously plays a role in that, and we pay careful attention to that, but ultimately, what matters is EBITDA margin and free cash flow. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll take one last quick question here, please. Thanks.
Thank you. Joachim Gunell from DNB Markets. To what extent would you say that Storytel has reached, call it, sufficient scale, and that we are seeing market dynamics reach a point where you will actually, quite sustainably be able to differentiate the offering by the factors you highlighted beyond the price and different tiers?
Yeah.
If I understood it correctly, the average consumption on the platform was 30 hours per user back in 2020. Are you seeing any shifts in how consumptions pattern are now at a more mature state?
No, we are seeing. As we said, we are seeing engagement levels by consumers at an all-time high. We've never had a more engaged audience. We take that as proof that we are serving our customers very well. We are not very well penetrated at all. Therefore, we're not at scale yet or at the level of scale I think that this business has the opportunity to achieve. That's one of the key reasons we are committed to broadening our content lineup beyond the traditional audiobook. That's a 10-hour, 15-hour commitment to ask from a consumer, and that's perfectly fine, at the right time. Many consumers also want shorter content. They want content to bridge them between two big books.
For us, the idea of increasingly offering alternative spoken word audio entertainment formats is to actually draw new users into the platform that have traditionally shied away from the heavy audiobook brand reputation. It is also to engage and keep subscribed and retained our existing subscribers. We think, short answer, lots of growth ahead. The market is not mature. We're not yet at the scale that we want to be in, and frankly, I think that with 3.2 million subscribers by 2026, we are starting to approach reasonable scale. Hopefully, we go well beyond that, right? Scale, efficiency effects, and a decreasing percent of our revenue spent on content are the key drivers of the financial goals that we shared with you today.
Thank you so much, Johannes.
Thank you.
You'll be joining us again later at the end of the program for a longer Q&A.
Lucky me.
Great. Now we're going to move our focus to Storytel's content strategy, and this will be in two parts: Streaming Content strategy and Book strategy, followed by a short Q&A. We're going to hear first from our Streaming Content strategy Chief Content Officer. She's our Chief Content Officer for streaming, Helena Gustafsson. First, let me give you a little bit of background on Helena. She is responsible for all content that appears on Storytel, whether licensed from within the group or third parties or produced originally for Storytel. Helena is a veteran of the publishing business and has been with Storytel for over a dozen years. With that, Helena, please.
Thank you. Thank you. Hello. I'm just gonna move this. My name is Helena, and mindful of time, I will jump straight into the content strategy that Storytel has. As Johannes outlined here today, Storytel's mission as a company is to move the world through story. Our commitment to our subscriber is that every day, for every subscriber, our content should be fresh, unique, relevant, and exciting.
... To deliver on that ambition, we have a set of priorities that will guide us in the strategy, execution, and delivery of our 2026 targets. We have, as you heard, ambitious growth targets across the regions, and all investments that we make in content are directly linked to what we are trying to achieve in any given market. This includes acquiring or producing content that drives engagement, attracts and retains subscribers, and that sets Storytel apart from competitors. A portion of that investment will be dedicated to broadening focus from audiobooks to audio stories. While we will continue to serve as the premier destination for audiobooks, we recognize the opportunities in other audio categories. Last, but not the least, we're committed to achieving sustainable content cost levels, ensuring every investment delivers exceptional returns.
Great content costs money, there are multiple levers at hand that we can apply to increase cost efficiency, and that ultimately will allow us to continue investing in quality content. Taking a step back, when building the most attractive catalog, we have a set of principles. We have relevance, differentiation, and efficiency. Starting with relevance, there are two dimensions to relevance that are important to us: content types and content market fit. To be relevant, our catalog needs to be as diverse as the customers we serve. The bulk of our catalog, which is in the lower part of this picture, comes from third-party publishers, but we also have two internal sets of publishers, Storyside and Storytel Books. Together, these three sources provide us with 1.3 million titles in 41 different languages that we offer to our customers.
As you heard, audiobooks will always be at the core for Storytel, and they make up the vast majority of our catalog. However, for quite some time, we have been more than just a pure audiobook service. As an example, we have been offering e-books since 2013. From an internal user survey, we know that 89% of our Storytel users would listen to podcast if offered on Storytel. Building on the diverse catalog that we already have, and with a steadfast commitment to maintaining audiobooks as our core offering, we aim to provide our subscribers with more choice and will be adding new forms of spoken word audio content to our service. We believe that this will increase the engagement by our customers, lower churn, expand our appeal to a wider audio target audience, and unlock new opportunities for growth.
Therefore, I'm happy to be able to present for you today two new partnerships that we have. From Perfect Day Media, we will commission a larger amount of podbooks. Podbooks might be best described as books that is remade in a shorter, more to-the-point format, and they may or may not include U.S.. We will continue to select successful Storytel Originals from across our markets to translate and produce in the English language. In our Growth markets, Storytel has grown to be a well-known brand, but there are still potential customers that doesn't think that audiobooks are something for them. To build credibility for both Storytel and the wider Audio category, we need to continue expanding the catalog. As these markets continue to mature, Storytel Originals will be an important strategic pillar upon which we can strengthen our competitive market position.
In our Expansion markets, where awareness of audiobooks is often low, our primary focus is to educate audience, about the benefits of audio stories. Here, local bestsellers are crucial to us to showcase the value of a Storytel subscription, and we rely on our internal publishing , and on selected translations of originals where we see it strategically fits. Let's talk more about differentiation. The vast majority of the Storytel catalog comes from third-party publishers, and it's not exclusive to Storytel. To move away from competition based on price promotion and free trials, we want to differentiate Storytel with product features and, of course, with content. Since we know that great content is a strong intake and retention driver, we partner with select publishers across the world to offer some of their content exclusively for a limited period of time.
A great example of this is with Pottermore. Storytel has been working with Pottermore, the publisher of Harry Potter, since 2016, producing the Harry Potter series in seven different languages in exchange for exclusivity. The series and J.K. Rowling, the author, are to this day, our most popular series and author, and having them exclusively on Storytel has been a strong driver of acquisition. In addition, the series of around 140 listening hours has been a powerful retention driver. Let's zoom in on the top of the pyramid. A small but growing portion of our content is always exclusive and only available on Storytel. That's our Storytel Originals. We have been publishing Originals through Storyside since 2016. It's audio-first stories, unique for Storytel. Why do we invest in Storytel Originals?
As Johannes said earlier, there is no more powerful thing in the world than a good story well told. We want to take advantage of this power. Many of our Storytel Originals generate media buzz and strengthen our ability to attract new users. Some of them is series that has been going on for multiple years and now serves as retention drivers. Most importantly, Storytel Originals is good business for us. During the years, we have developed the creative experience and toolkit needed to make investments that ultimately deliver a positive return of investment, which takes us to the last principle for building the Storytel catalog: efficiency. While we will continue to invest in building the most attractive content catalog for the markets we operate in, we are equally committed to maintaining group content cost at a healthy level.
In our commitment to lower COGS as percentage of revenue, we have multiple levers at hand. For example, improving the deal terms for the content that we license to gradually lower content costs, broaden the range of content we offer to appeal to a wider audience and to capture new market segments, optimizing pricing and packaging to secure strong margins. We also have several product and tech solutions that will enable the levers I mentioned. Let's dive into the second lever: increase our internal content catalog. As I mentioned, we are extremely well positioned to continue to publish world-class audio, as we have decades of experience and rich and insightful consumption data that we can embed in our content creation process.
For example, we leverage completion rates of all titles, drop-off points between specific titles, search trends by our users, and this enables us to create highly attractive content that performs very well on the service. As you can see, Storyside and Storytel Books account for roughly 11% of the total catalog available on Storytel, but they capture a significantly higher share of consumption. When it comes to first books, which is the titles that are picked first by all new subscribers entering the Storytel service, our internal catalog overperforms even more. As such, our internal catalog has a strong attraction power and acts as an effective customer acquisition tool.
Attractive content from Storytel Books and Storyside has proven to drive high internal share of content consumption, resulting in higher margins to us than content from third party, especially in combination with efficient content investments and as the size of our pay-based grows. To summarize, it makes great sense for us to pursue investing in internal content. Stay tuned. We will continue to deliver unforgettable stories that will make you come back for more.
True stories. Crime stories. Love stories. Exclusively for you.
Thank you so much, Helena. Now we will hear about Storytel's book strategy from the CEO of Storytel Books, Linda Säresand. Linda is responsible for all our publishing houses and has over 20 years' experience in leading positions in the book and publishing industry, including CEO, CFO, and publishing director for the nonfiction unit. Linda has also held several different board assignments within the book industry. For this section, I'm going to invite Linda up for a little chat. We're going to do that format, come on up to stage. Welcome, Linda.
Thank you.
Let's jump right in.
Sorry.
Yes. For this one.
This one.
Yes, there we go. First of all, why don't you tell us a little bit about Storytel Books and the publishing houses it comprises?
Yes, of course. Well, the first publishing house that Storytel acquired was Norstedts Publishing Group in Sweden, 2016. Of course, being the second largest but also the oldest publishing house in Sweden, I mean, of course, this was big news when this happened, and it was a real game changer when this tech year-old company acquired the 200-year-old publishing house. This really changed the market positions, I would say. Norstedts became much stronger in the market, and of course, Storytel also strengthens against their competitors. After that, there have been several other acquisitions. In 2017, People's Press in Denmark.
... 2018, Gummerus in Finland, and in 2021, Lind & Co in Sweden, and Aula & Co in Finland. of course, this has, it's been a quite a good journey acquiring this. as we can see in the chart, there's from the beginning, the digital share of revenue was 10%, and now it's even up to 45%. of course, that differs between some genres and even up to 70% in some of the fiction genres.
Okay, what is the benefit of Storytel Group owning more traditional publishing houses that publish books in all formats?
First of all, publishing is a solid business. As Helena and Johannes was referring to, it's also very local business. It's also the consumption in the streaming service is very local, and we are operating in local markets. Especially the older publishing houses, expertise when it comes to collaborating with authors, attracting or acquiring the most attractive rights in each market, and of course, the wide catalog of backlist rights. That's all valuable resources for a Streaming business. Also, our publishing houses have very well-established brands that attract the main authors. This is all these are contributions that we can give to the Streaming business.
How is Storytel Streaming helpful to the publishing houses that you manage?
When looking at the authors, they want to reach wider audience, of course, I mean, they want to read new listeners and new readers. Storytel's ability to feature and actively promote their titles on the platform, in the service, is, of course, very attractive. Another very important thing that I mean, looking at the strategy that Helena was presenting, of course, the ability or the opportunity to write audio original stories, this also could bring them possible new revenue streams that also, of course, is attractive.
Mm-hmm. Then how, in turn, do the publishing houses help the streaming side of things?
First, I would like to give you two examples, actually, on what we can do together. Looking at IJustWantToBeCool, these are three super popular young guys in that we can recognize in Sweden. They Storytel was able to pick them up and do original audio stories. Of course, looking at that, it also became our children youth imprint in Sweden. Rabén & Sjögren was also able, due to that, to write a new series of printed and digital books that so far have sold in about 100,000 units. I mean, the last book has just been released, so this is just one example of how we can gain from a collaboration together.
Another example that we have here is David Lagercrantz. He's our best-selling author in Sweden, and when he launched the last book in the Millennium series, The Girl Who Lived Twice, Storytel in Sweden, as the only streaming service, was able to have the book exclusive for three months. Storytel also made extensive marketing campaigns, with exclusive materials, so.
Great example of.
Yeah, yeah.
collaborative work there. What is the state, then, of the publishing business today? What are some of the challenges that you are facing?
We are facing a lot of challenges, as in all industries. Of course, as the producing unit, we do see, of course, the inflation affects us with general cost increases, but also increased costs when it comes to the energy crisis. Of course, the printing costs are increasing. The paper costs are increasing from the paper mills. We see a stronger or bigger competition for talent. Of course, we see in, especially in the Nordic markets where we are present, we see, of course, the small publishing houses are really struggling in this tough market situation, so there is also a consolidation ongoing. Of course, this is also very high technology-driven industry from, with everything from AI to the growth of revenue, the digital revenue.
These are all things that affect the publishing business.
A lot of challenges then, and how is Storytel going to face those challenges?
Well, as I see it, our publishing houses are standing on a good and strong platform here. We are gaining from the collaboration with the Streaming business. That helps us develop the digital formats and also, of course, bring in new hours of consumptions and the number of new listeners. Also, being in a group with other publishers also makes it possible for us, for example, to jointly procure printing services and paper. That also, of course, reduces the gross or the cost and increase the gross margins and the profitability.
Mm-hmm. What will you focus on, then, in the coming years, would you say?
Yes. We are actually very focused on attracting, acquiring, and retaining the most attractive talents in each market, as we have done for 200 years. We will continue doing that. We will achieve reasonable top-line growth and market and EBITDA optimization, being the market leading, and realize the synergies that we have within the group, together with the Streaming business. That's what we're going to aim for.
It does seem that the Group is convinced that owning publishing houses does make a lot of sense?
Yeah, we do. Storytel is a strong believer that it would make sense to acquire publishing houses.
Does that mean there will be more acquisitions shortly?
Looking at the Nordic market, it's been a success, so I would say that we are open to looking into new opportunities of large publishing houses in our key Core markets.
Okay. Thank you so much, Linda, for your input here.
Thank you.
Now we'll just have a very short Q&A before we break for coffee. I will ask Helena, please, to join us. If anyone had any questions... Yes, please go ahead. Don't forget to say your name and company, please, again.
Yes, thank you. Derek, from ABG again. I was wondering, it sounds really interesting with this initiative in Podbook, et cetera. What would you say about sort of the competition from other media formats in general, perhaps namely podcasting? I mean, it's always a competition for eyeballs, et cetera, we only have 24 hours a day, now you've enabled us to consume books more efficiently. Still, it seems at least the younger generation is consuming shorter formats, et cetera. What are your thoughts about that?
First of all, I think to some extent, it's the same target audience. I mean, the ones who listen to audiobooks also listens to podcasts, also listens to other things. First of all, we could see our addition of a shorter format as a service to our customer and to ensure that we engage them more and keep them longer in the service. Yes, we also do believe that we might go the other way around, which is being able to attract new listeners that probably would start with podcast and then move into audiobooks. That's why we think it's a way to grow our service.
All right. Exciting.
Mm-hmm. Thanks. Over here. Thank you.
Thank you. Joachim Gunell from DNB Markets again. There have obviously been some inroads from larger global technology giants looking at the audiobook space. To what extent? Because as an author, I would assume that I want to get as broad exposure as possible. To what extent do you think that you, I mean, in the Nordics, I mean, you won't be putting your content perhaps on those types of platforms, but how defensible do you think that the, what is the reluctance from an author and publisher point of view to put their content on those types of platforms?
Well, as an author, I would say that, as we talked about before, we want to reach as wide audience as possible, and of course, an author is always open to sell its books on any channel possible. I mean, it needs to be a fair and sustainable conversation, a remuneration. That's, of course, in our primary interest when we look at other platforms. We sell our books to many retailers besides Storytel, of course, but it needs to be a good conversation. If we get an attractive proposition from a new platform, of course, we're open to looking into it.
Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, go ahead.
Stefan Wård, Pareto Securities. I would like to ask you a question on the production of audiobooks, how it has developed, say, over the past, maybe since the last CMD. Like the average cost per production, and if it's becoming more efficient or at lower cost, and also today's announcement with using AI in the production of audiobooks, how that could impact the cost of production, please?
I think, first of all, I just want to point out that I think AI could be a very important tool for us in the production, not just for audio, but also in the editorial process and in other areas of the book production process. I wouldn't say that the cost of a produced hour in the audio format has gone down since the last CMD, but I think that we will see with the AI coming in several ways of actually make it more efficient.
Good. Did we have one last question? Go ahead.
Okay. My name is [Hanna Debus] . I don't know if I understood you correctly. Did you say that you were going to renegotiate content costs?
What we are saying is that we are on a constantly basis, looking into all the agreements that we have. Most of the agreements we have a start point and an end date. That's an ongoing business for us. We haven't probably taken advantage of our size earlier, which I think we can do in a much better manner right now.
Yeah, because the debate around the authors and their remuneration has been quite heavy. I just wanted to know whether I understood correctly, and if I did, how much would this mean, and what are the likelihood of pushing down the costs?
What you're asking is, if we are going to push down the remuneration for the author?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is that what you meant?
No, that was not what we meant.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Okay, good. Thank you very much for your questions, and thank you so much. I think it's now time for a little coffee break. There's some coffee and refreshments just up the stairs, and if we could all be back here, in 20 minutes, please. Thank you so much. For our next exciting half of the program, we're going to focus on Storytel's streaming strategy, including some deep dives into user experience, marketing, and localization. At the end of this whole section, we're going to have a Q&A session. We're gonna start with Storytel's President of Streaming, Luis Duran. A little background on Luis. He recently joined Storytel in this position. Luis is a streaming veteran, having launched iflix in Asia, and then serving as Chief Commercial Officer of Shahid in the Middle East.
Luis was president of HBO Max Latin America, where he was responsible for the successful launch and rapid growth of the service across the region. With that, Luis, take it away. There you go.
Thank you, Emily.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. On behalf of the streaming team, I'm very happy to be talking today here about our streaming strategy. It's been almost one hour since Johannes walked us through the goals. I wanna start there and quickly introduce what we're trying to accomplish, a little bit on the how, then we have three of our executives today that will be talking about some of the interesting topics as well. As a reminder, during the next three years, we want to deliver consistent revenue growth of 15% year-on-year. Through double-digit revenue growth across all our regions, we want all our regions to be growing at double digit at a minimum. If we do that, we will deliver a 75% uplift to our current revenues. I think there was a question earlier about subscribers.
Our aim is to deliver profitable growth through healthy subscriber acquisition and healthy subscriber growth, it's not that same 15%. There is a little bit of, let's say, ARPU growth built into our plans as well, for a total, by 2026, of 3.2 million subscribers. Our second objective is to do that in a profitable way by increasing our EBITDA margin through margin expansion over the next few years, ultimately making all our top 10 markets profitable at an EBITDA level. We're enthusiastic and confident about these goals. They're ambitious, but very importantly, we believe that we sit in a very strong foundation right now, and great plans can only deliver great results when they sit up on top of that strong foundation, which we believe we have.
In fact, if this was a Formula One race, we'll be sitting at the pole position. We truly believe that. First, I'll talk a little bit about this solid starting point. First, because Storytel has a diversified footprint that gives us access to a large addressable market across 28 countries. That gives us reach to more than 20 million paying subscribers on the audiobook space today. That's 10x our current size, so it's a large number that we can go and get because we have presence in most of those markets. This footprint allows us to compete in different ways and across multiple realities. First, of course, the Nordics, where everything started, our home, and where we continue to lead after 20 years or almost 20 years of operations.
We have the U.S., where we acquired the Audiobooks company or the Audiobooks brand, I think it was late 2021, formalized in early 2022, and we remain highly committed to our business there. Third, what we call our Growth markets: the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, and Bulgaria. These four markets are our most consolidated success stories outside the Nordics and the U.S. They, of course, have lower penetration on the audiobook space, but they're less competitive, they're growing fast, and we strongly believe they have a very clear path towards profitable growth and profitable EBITDA in the short term. These three regions make up for our top 10 markets, what we call our Core markets. We have our expansion region. For Storytel, these are still relatively new and small markets.
Each one has its own challenges and opportunities, but some of them do present very clear upside in the short term. We've done our own evaluation through the last few months, and of course, there's a lot of them there. There's 18 markets, as I said. We believe clearly that 3-5 of them have high potential, and we, therefore, need to commit and stay focused. That's because they first show clear potential, not in terms of size only, but in terms of growth. Secondly, we as Storytel, based on the assets we have and the way we compete, we have a clear path towards being successful in those markets. I had an old boss that told me that strategy is the art of exclusion.
We cannot do everything, and we need to be clear about what we do, but we need to be as clear about what we don't do. In that context, and through the same prioritization process, we have identified a few markets where, in the short term, we do not want to invest heavily. We may be even freezing some of our investments, or we're definitely throttling down and reducing some of our investments. That's the list for now, but we will be ready to adjust if the markets change and if we see a clear path towards profitable growth. Our Chief Marketing Officer, Oleg, will later talk about some of the specifics there and how that's influencing the way we allocate our budgets, particularly on the marketing side. These regions complement each other in the context of our broader goals.
The ones on the left will help us drive profitability, and the ones to the right will help us grow rapidly and build scale rapidly just because they provide that acceleration. As you can see, we're trying to grow around 10% in the Nordics, 20% in our Growth markets, and 30% in our Expansion markets. In all our Core markets, we're either clear leaders or strong challengers today, particularly in the Nordics. You heard about that. We are strong leaders today with around 50% value share, and we see similar levels of leadership in our Growth markets that currently sit on around 40%. Why are we so strong in those markets? Well, I think it all comes down to our value proposition, which is highly differentiated even today.
On the content side, Helena talked about the fact that we have the larges t catalog and also the broadest catalog. That's because we work with a lot of partners out there, 1,500, at least, worldwide. That's also because we have our own publishing assets, which we obviously leverage as we go. As an example, just this year, we plan to publish 300 new Originals. That's more than any other player in any other market we compete. Over the years, we've also built a very strong user experience, which we believe is already superior to most of our competitors. Our Chief Product Officer, Johan, will later talk about the opportunities and the challenges that we see, and has some very interesting things to say. In the meantime, we're happy.
Our technology and the product that we put in the hands of subscribers is good, and that you can see with our ratings. They do show that our experience today is very positive and is actually increasing and getting even better in the last few months. Finally, on the offering side, we're also very happy with our starting point. Our current offer structure does provide an edge already. First, because of our unlimited model, the all-you-can-eat model. No one else has been able to replicate this successfully, and it's clearly our strongest USP as we go to market. We've got our tiered approach, the tiered offering that we recently introduced, which is also something that gives us an edge in the markets we compete.
We will continue to roll it out, but in the meantime, it's helping our subscribers, particularly in the Nordics, choose a plan based on their behaviors and ultimately getting the best value for money they can get. It's also very positive for us because it's helping us manage our revenue, our ARPU, and our margins. As you can see on the screen, each market provides, and each product type provides different levels of ARPU and different levels of profitability. We, through our marketing and life cycle and acquisition practices, and Oleg will speak about this, we can influence where subscribers go, and therefore, we have something to say when it comes to margin and driving ARPU uplift.
Altogether, the value proposition that we offer has never been stronger, and we know that because our subscribers are more engaged than ever, and that's ultimately the thing you want to see. 70% of our subscriber base today is using the service on a weekly basis. That's a lot for the standards of the streaming industry. They do that for at least 11 hours every week. If you think in terms of TV, that's literally like watching one series every week. That's a lot. In the terms of books and listening, that's more or less the equivalent of a book, which is also very strong. They listen throughout the entire day. It's not a morning thing or a night thing. This is basically the entire day because there's always a good time to press play.
In a direct-to-consumer business like ours, high engagement is what ultimately drives loyalty. We know that, from our own personal experiences, when you're happy with a subscription, you don't cancel it, and when you're not happy, sometimes you do. In that sense, we believe that this strong loyalty is definitely reflecting on our churn. As Johannes explained, with our churn sitting at a 6% all-time low, this is a very healthy churn. You have to factor as well that we operate in many emerging markets, obviously not a huge part of our base, but even Poland, Bulgaria, these are markets that do take a big part of our base, and that's factored into this blended churn. I give extra credit to that 6% when we think about that.
Our churn over the last couple of years, as you can see, but this is really a historical trend, has been coming down, and it sits at the lowest point today, which is, I think, particularly important in the current context, macroeconomic context that we described earlier. Our engagement metrics are stronger than ever. It shows that subscribers are ultimately very happy. These critical consumer metrics are also reflected when we think of our acquisition. When you see subscribers coming in, they're coming at a 25-month average lifetime, and they produce around SEK 3,000. That's very healthy acquisition economics. Oleg will talk a bit more about that later on, but you can see it's pretty strong already from the get-go. As we lean into the future, we believe that this solid foundation has put our business in the right trajectory.
As you can see to my right, the revenue trajectory is very positive. Actually, historically, if you look at the last four or five years, organically, we have already delivered that 15% revenue CAGR that we want to deliver in the future. We just need to continue doing as well, and we'll get to the goals that we're describing today on the top line. As you're looking to my left, on the EBITDA side, you can also see that the trajectory is very positive through margin expansion as we win scale and also as we manage our cost. Today, this is a business that is already profitable and is also heading in the right trajectory. Our differentiated value proposition, we combined with a healthy subscriber metrics and consumer metrics that we just described. is ultimately helping us be profitable.
As you know, there's not many listed S treaming businesses out there that can say are profitable. Before we shift into our strategy, final word, I know many are watching, I want to talk about our team. Without doubt, our most valuable asset in the business today. A team that gives us physical presence in all our key markets, and that has been assembled over the years, the good years and the bad years, the growth years, and the transformation years. All those learnings are reflected today in the organization and going forward as we try to deliver on the next chapter. It's also an organization that is now being modernized, strengthened, globalized, with more talent from other great companies that you can see on the screen, and that is highly motivated to take us to the next journey.
This slide might be familiar because Johannes used it earlier, and he, Helena, and also Linda, they spoke about a lot of the things that are basically in our overarching and content strategy. I wanna now go a little bit deeper into our go-to market through some members of my team. First, Johan will be talking about how we plan to take the user experience to the next level, one that honors storytellers, and one that delights our users. Second, Oleg, our Chief Marketing Officer, will be talking about our clear and precise focus on high profitable growth, high quality growth, because that's what delivers the balance that we're trying to accomplish between subscriber growth, revenue growth, and EBITDA enhancements.
Finally, Åse, she'll be describing how we plan to go to market in an increasingly localized way, with a local value proposition, doing the right things for the consumers in that particular market, and how we plan to execute on our go-to market also in a more localized way. Now, first, Johan, our Chief Product Officer, is gonna go for the first section. Prior to Storytel, Johan was at McKinsey, and before that, he was a successful entrepreneur in the region. He partners on a daily basis with Mark Pasternak, our Chief Technology Officer, who's sitting there. Together with his team, a large group, actually, of engineers, they turn Johan dreams into reality. Over to you.
Thank you, Luis. Let's spend a few minutes listening to my dreams. Thank you. I'm here on behalf of our great product teams, and we consist of 130 people that from design, engineering, data, and product. You have my co-pilot, Mark, here in the audience as well. Today, I will go through how the role the product plays and how we can continue to help Storytel accelerate our business, and also drive further differentiation in our market. Our product strategy is built on four pillars.
By expanding our content offering, as we've been discussing today, we don't only enhance our value proposition to existing customers, it also gives us the ability to attract customers that are not used to audiobooks yet, to lure them into our fantastic world of stories. Our ultimate goal is to introduce the amazing world of audio stories to a global audience to drive further adoption. We do acknowledge the initial apprehension towards long-format audiobooks, especially for customers who have not tried out the format before. To mitigate this, we constantly innovate around our onboarding experience and refine the playbook to drive further adoption of our service. We have seen considerable improvements in our onboarding conversions.
If you look at our Growth markets, our in-app customers have seen an increase in three months retention with over 20 percentage points the last two years. Our strategy, Always in a Story, aims at maximizing engagement while balancing sustainable content economics. We know when users experience a gap in between the story, the risk of churn increases. The longer the gap, the higher the risk for churn. To further improve early retention, but also churn, we continue to invest in delivering a delightful and engaging, personalized discovery experience, as well as a delightful listening experience. In a highly competitive landscape, delivering excellent value for money is paramount in our business. Together with our marketing teams, we actively work to improve customer lifetime value by ensuring that our customers are on the right subscription product, matching their consumption behavior.
Today, I will explore some specific parts of our experience and give you a glimpse of the future. Of course, I can't disclose all our strategic initiatives, but I want to take you on a part of the journey of what we're working on. As part of our strategy to bring the best stories under one roof, we are complementing our core audiobook service with short-format audio stories. Short-format audio stories have shown very promising results for us through several successful pilot programs, as well as many of our serialized Storytel Original releases. Our goal with this format is to increase the time users spend in our service and balance content economics. High-quality stories, including podcasts, have truly proven to complement our audiobooks rather than competing with them, and we do see an overall increase in user engagement.
Helena explained before, we're also tipping our toes into further verticals, such as Podbook and quality journalism, where we will experiment on different markets, tying into the local preferences. We are proud to bring our users fantastic content from our publishing houses and their authors. However, we've also identified that our customers are not always making the connection between our great content and Storytel as a service. As a result, customers don't always perceive us as the home of unique content. To create a stronger connection to our publishing houses in our service, we will further evolve our co-branding. These specific moves aim to increase the perception that Storytel is not only the home of fantastic stories, but also with a strong catalog coming from our group.
Going forward, we will start working more with co-branding our content from our publishing houses and making it more prominent what a fantastic inventory we have. We've developed a product that beautifully showcases content and putting it at the center of the user experience. Throughout the years, we've successfully introduced several immersive formats, and these formats have shown up to 2x in engagement in how we can drive our content. Behind me, you see two examples coming from Storytel Books. Along the way, as we do constantly experiment and innovate on our experience, we get valuable insights. Allow me to share some of the exciting features we're currently testing to improve personalized discovery, helping our customers find the right next story. We're introducing a new hero banner that merges video and audio to elevate our content merchandising efforts.
We're providing instant access to our customers to get back to their ongoing book or their next podcast episode. We're activating users to engaging rich media trailers or author announcements. We're offering a well-balanced mix of editorial and personalized recommendations, driven by personal preferences or cultural events. We're introducing a fresh mix of short format series that our user instantly can play or save for later. Strengthening the connection between our users and the authors and their loved book series, which is a very strong tool to boost new releases or to reactivate the backlist. Our new home helps our users discover the next book in a personalized and in a very immersive way, and we will continue to roll out this update throughout the fall for selected markets. A beautiful interface only serves as the gateway for users to start a new book.
We do also acknowledge that each customer has a unique taste and unique preferences, so the art of matching the right book with the right customer lies at the heart of what we do here at Storytel. Personalized discovery plays an even increasingly role for our customers, now standing for up to 75% of new content discovery, and that's up from 50% in 2020. As customers rely more and more on our content recommendations over time, we also do seize the opportunity to skew our recommendations to optimize for customer lifetime value and content economics. We never compromise on the customer experience, constantly evaluating the preferences of recommendations, as well as book completion rates. To further customize the experience, we apply machine learning to identify specific user segments and their specific consumption behaviors.
Our data teams, they predict the lifetime value of any given segment, gives us valuable insights to drive further loyalty. This is an area where we do see great potential in, and where we continue to invest in our data team. To make every moment a Storytel moment, we align our product offerings with the consumer behaviors, integrating story into our customers' daily routines. You see a few examples behind me here, but commuter, a typical example when you use our product. Now, weekly, we have over 100,000 customers consuming Storytel through our automotive apps. Parents, as myself, who read for or with their kids, show significant loyalty in our service, and for them, we've created Kids Mode, a safe space to explore children's literature.
When you do your daily households, leave the phone behind and just consume Storytel through your smartwatch. Going forward, we also see a lot of opportunities to optimize the content mix to for the specific behaviors and the intent of the customers, balancing short format and long format stories. For a long time, we've used speech-to-text mapping to enable customers to seamlessly jump for an audiobook and an e-book. We're now taking this technology to the next level by utilizing OpenAI latest iterations, launching simultaneous listening and reading. Users can now quickly skim through the text if you get lost in the story, which is the number one customer problem we hear about, or just choose to read along with the narrator. For language learners, listening to the actual pronunciation while reading text can improve language comprehension and acquisition.
For individuals with visual impairments or dyslexia, having the audio synchronized with the text can significantly enhance the accessibility of our content. New technology, it also helps us drive efficiencies. Some of these examples have 98% lower running costs than earlier iterations in the technology stack. Expect part of our player to be upgraded during the fall. Now, shifting our focus to the delight for listening experience, we are a service that our distinct and cost-efficient listening experience at scale. We see great potential presented by the advancements in generative AI and synthetic voices, where synthetic voices will enable us to our customers to truly personalize their experience in ways that hasn't been achievable before.
I want to take this opportunity to talk a bit more of our Voice Switcher that's already gotten some attention by showing this video.
Imagine if you could choose the perfect voice for you to tell your favorite story.
What if you could personalize your listening experience to match your every mood?
Whether you are looking for a soothing voice to lull you to sleep.
An energetic one for your morning commute.
Experience the magic of our AI-powered Voice Switcher and transform your audiobook adventures like never before.
Don't open the door," a warning voice resounded in her head. Intuition? This was so much-
Stronger than mere intuition. Could she trust the vision?
To Henry and tell him the pilots were dead without first.
Opening the door to check? Could she trust her conviction?
What if she was wrong? What if the pilots were alive and needed her help?
Hey, quite neat. It's actually quite hard to figure out which is the synthetic ones and which one was the original one. That was our new AI-powered Voice Switcher, actually, all of the voices you heard in this film were AI-generated. The clones that you heard later, those are actually clones of voices of employees within Storytel, that now acts as avatar that our customers can listen to. In the future, you can expect some exciting but also unexpected voices to turn up as new additions of avatars in our products. We're now making this feature available by launching a pilot within English for a few selected titles.
We will continue to tweak it and learn and listen to the customer feedback, and we will add support for Swedish and Danish voices before Christmas, and then expand to more markets as we go. To bring this vision to life, we have entered a strategic partnership with ElevenLabs, one of the leading AI speech software providers. Throughout the year, we've done quite comprehensive market analysis, and we quickly came to the conclusion that ElevenLabs was by far the best. Running laps around Google, if I may say so. We've been following them since the start. Today, we're super happy that we landed in an exclusive collaboration that entails joint development of AI voices specifically tailored for our Core markets, Sweden and Denmark.
Markets that today lack good support for AI voices, Storytel will hold an exclusive right to utilize these voices for two years. Furthermore, we will also produce AI-narrated book together with Helena and her teams across all our markets. Leveraging synthetic voices enables remarkable cost reductions in the production with up to 95%. This enables us to expand our catalog in completely different ways in an exceptional, cost-efficient manner. On top of this, Storytel has also committed to a small strategic investment in ElevenLabs in their ongoing financing round, More on the investment will come from ElevenLabs later this week or maybe next. It's super exciting times to be in tech and especially in the world of Storytel. Now, Luis, it's time to get back to you.
Thank you, Johan. A lot of dreaming in there. Good luck, Mark. All right, let's move to the next one. No doubt, Storytel is powered by content creators and authors. They trust us with their work, their precious work, and we give them a platform to reach a large audience that appreciates what they do. As part of our partnership, we share a very meaningful part of our revenue. We made a reference earlier, to this date, we've shared a whopping SEK 6 billion of our revenue with content creators. While we love the role that we play in the ecosystem, and we cherish our contribution, we need to recognize that this puts a lot of pressure on our margins and basically forces us to be ultra-efficient on the way we spend.
We believe this efficiency is about staying focused, building scale, and having a lot of cost discipline. There's a lot more than we can do operationally to deliver that efficiency. To talk more about this topic, I would like now to introduce Oleg, our Chief Marketing Officer. Oleg is a true Growth marketing expert. He's been working on the streaming industry for many, many years, successfully. He's now with us, taking care of our broader marketing practice. You want me to introduce you? Go ahead. Over to you, Oleg.
Thank you, Luis. As Johannes said earlier, we're ambitious company with a long history of the international expansion and growth. That, combined with our love for storytelling, drives the fundamental aspiration to be everywhere, to reach everyone, and to always win where we compete. We're also committed to the set of efficiency goals that requires us to balance growth and profitability. That means we can't do everything, and we cannot be everywhere, and cannot compete everywhere. We believe that means that we need to consistently prioritize our high quality growth. That guides our daily agenda as a marketing team. What does it mean? For starters, we should invest where we see the highest returns. Like Johannes explained before, In the past, we were, we had overextended by the entering too many markets and made it too quickly.
One of the lessons we learned, as we deploy investment, we should monitor our returns and adjust our plans on ongoing basis. Let me elaborate. Today, our CLV to SAC ratio is around 3. In simple terms, that mean that for every dollar we spend to acquire a new subscriber, we get $3 in return during its subscriber lifetime. This is not the case everywhere. When we analyze our markets individually, the returns are very different across our footprint. In this context, we will continue to put our resources to work where they drive the highest return. Accordingly, we plan to double down in our high return markets. These are usually markets with a higher pool, healthy margins, and very strong subscriber lifetime. On the flip side, we plan to rationalize our spending elsewhere.
This doesn't mean we will completely stop. That's why I use the word rationalize. There are still some markets that we have a significant ambitions, there is still room for healthy investments. We believe there are opportunities to enhance certain elements in our formula, like our value proposition or distribution models. While we do so, certain our investment will make it more efficient. We believe that our new approach provide a real and meaningful opportunity to improve our top line, EBITDA grows through the higher marketing efficiency. By paying attention to returns, we get across those markets. By continuously recalibrating our allocations, we will be able to secure high returns as we deploy our investments. Investing in the right place will ultimately lead to the stronger economics on aggregated level. Let's talk about our second shift.
As a premium service, our high quality first approach means that we will focus all our efforts and investment on attracting the right subscribers, profitable subscribers. We compete in markets with a different realities, different acquisition costs and unit economics. Subscribers we bring in have different listening behaviors, that ultimately produce different level of profitability for us. As we go to the market, we see very aggressive offers from some of our competitors. Some of these offerers, like very long trials, not only dilute the perceived value of the content and deprive authors of fair compensation for their work, they also deliver losses and put pressure on our bottom line. Let me elaborate here. When we analyze our existing base, we see different realities that playing out there.
We know that healthy behaviors generate meaningful margins across all of our plans, and this is the case for majority of our subscribers. Aggressive commercial practices, like the ones that we described before, are ultimately stimulating certain behaviors that in our industry generates loss-making subscribers. We acknowledge that. In the past, we have reacted more than we should, and this put the pressure on our bottom line. If we remove the losses from our non-profitable subscribers, our EBITDA would improve by several percentage points, which shows the kind of opportunity we have in front of us. In this context, we believe that it's critical that we keep margins and the lifetime value in the front of all of our marketing decisions. As we move forward, we want to sell subscriptions because we have the greatest product, not because we have the best offer.
While we'll continue to do our significant investment to drive adoption, we want to rationalize when we're competing for users who understand our service and appreciate it. This means we will make an effort to provide new journeys with affordable access to the service so they can try it. Without on, without over-investing in the free trials or promoting, you know, on doing the offers on our premium plans. We want to do this in a more differentiated way, which we believe can be more efficient and as effective. As we do our best to put subscribers in the right plans, to better adjust to their behaviors, and this will increase our upselling and CRM activities. Our tier subscription offering with the differentiated plans is the key enabler for this.
I want to spend a couple minutes explaining how we're working on lifting up our Growth marketing capabilities. The marketing funnel represents the subscriber journey, from the hearing about to retail, to the all the way to renewing to the every subscription cycle. By optimizing every step of this funnel, we will unlock profitable growth. There are a lot of marketing elements in this funnel that ultimately will drive the ability to convert across the journey. We believe we are far from being reach excellence in many of them. This is the good news, because it means we have incremental opportunity for us as we continue to enhance our marketing practices. I will just give you a small example. Even small gains across the funnel will have a snowball effect on our business.
For example, improving efficiency on a few steps of the funnel by only 10% yields to the 33% improvement in our customer lifetime value, which would be a game changer for our CLV to SAC ratio, unlocking a lot of value for our business. We understand we are going to be busy throughout this process. We are excited and encouraged that there are upside that lays in front of us. Now to, back to Luis.
Thank you, Oleg. To enable this quality and value-centric approach, we're already taking certain steps. Let me give you a couple of examples. First of all, we're expanding our data and insights team. We already have built a very strong team on the engineering side, on the data engineering side, and there's been a lot of progress over the last few months. We're now expanding and replicating that on the commercial side, and we're in the process of building that team as well. We have a lot of exciting things to announce, including the new leadership that we're bringing on board, and we'll do that in the coming weeks. We've also strengthened our distribution through our partnerships, and we do want to build a team there as well, and we're in the process of doing that. For starters, we recently brought Anna Julia.
She's there, sitting next to the camera. She's on a dual role that is really exciting. She joins as the head of partnerships, and at the same time, she's also gonna be leading our Expansion markets as the GM. We believe there's a strong synergy there, because a lot of what we want to accomplish on the expansion side is gonna be banking on partnerships, and therefore, that dual role is gonna work very well for us. AJ is Brazilian. She comes with a lot of experience on emerging markets, on streaming as well, and that's all very relevant in the context of her mission here, because she's also done a lot of partnerships work in her previous life.
She and her team will help us build distribution power on a lot of markets where that's gonna be critical, we expect that distribution power to effectively reduce the cost of our acquisition on the direct-to-consumer side. We're already seeing some very positive developments there. Let me give you a couple of examples. First of all, we recently announced a partnership with A1 in Bulgaria. It's a leading telco there. Very early on into that process, as they just start to ramp up the go-to-market efforts, we're already seeing our acquisition costs decreasing by 25% in the market. AJ and her team are also managing Apple and Google as the relationship we have. First, 98% of our consumption is on those platforms, so critical partners for us.
In the past, we really didn't leverage them on the in-app side, on their, on the in-app subscription side, and that's because we know there's a significant constraint on the revenue share there. We now have excellent terms with Google. We're starting to embrace that even further. It's mostly already embraced across our international markets. We're in the process of ramping up in the Nordics as well. As one example, we recently, just a few days ago, enabled Google in Sweden. We're already seeing a 10% uplift, purely organically, into our acquisition in the market. We're very excited about what's coming, including our launch for Google in the U.S. that is coming in the next few months. Let's move on into the third deep dive for streaming. We're getting there to the end.
While the profitability equation is about margins, scale, and operational excellence, there's a lot more that we can do on the revenue side, which is really a different type of game. It's really an art. It's about building a relevant value proposition that works in the particular market, it's also about building the right go-to market and our distribution that works in that particular market, in that particular reality. In this context, having local presence in some of our markets is giving us a unique edge that we need to bank on. I would like now to introduce Åse, our general manager for the Nordics. She can describe that a little bit more in detail. Åse has held several management roles previously to Storytel, since she joined four years ago. Most recently as head of marketing and sales at Nova Media in Sweden.
Åse is our board member at Norstedts Publishing Group, and she's also has a background as executive producer on the TV world. Åse, over to you.
Hi, everyone, and thank you, Luis. As I know, we've talked about our, all of our global efforts and priorities, but I'm glad to be here to represent the four general managers leading our regions across the world, together, of course, with our very dedicated local teams. I will talk briefly about how the local initiatives will help to generate growth and value for the business. We go to market across very different regions with different opportunities and different challenges. There are different opportunities and challenges across key different key dimensions, such as penetration, competitive landscape, and of course, disposable income or marketing channels. We also compete in very different publishing environments with different assets and different advantages, and we target subscribers with different content needs.
One size does not fit all, and this is why we're in the process of further localizing our value proposition and our commercial execution by creating regional and local initiatives around the specific realities in the different markets around the world. We do believe that these highly localized formulas will deliver superior results. The Nordic markets, the ones under my management, they represent our most mature markets, with a high willingness to try and to pay for audiobooks and audio stories. There are several strategic factors that have contributed to this successful journey, including expanding catalog, offering sub, flexible subscription plans, and introducing original content, all under the umbrella of a very attractive brand. Combined, all of these factors have collectively fueled the adaptation and the popularity of audiobooks. There are numerous indicators that suggest that the growth will continue.
Some examples: in Sweden, for the first time ever, people spend more time on audio media than on visual media per day. In the meantime, monthly household expenditure on audio media is increasing. As of now, we have not yet seen the effects of interest rates, inflation, it's rather the contrary, actually. We do see increasing ARPU, and we have not seen a spike in churn. In fact, churn is trending downwards. In the publishing industry, we still see that digital streaming accounts for approximately 30% of the total Swedish book sales. All of these figures combined reflect a very thriving moment for our business in the region. However, the Nordic market is getting increasingly crowded. As mentioned, we believe that there is still reasonable market growth, particularly in Norway and Denmark, as we move ahead.
We have a plan that will allow us to sustain or even grow our share as the market continues to grow. In our view, the key success factors in the Nordics will be to further expand our content differentiation, original and exclusive audio stories that are crafted by local storytellers. This will be driven by our ability to integrate our two business units, the streaming unit and the content unit. As Storytel Group, we believe that we are uniquely positioned to do just that. In the context of the content strategy presented earlier, we will also investigate to realign and modernize our brand, to better showcase our U.S. team and our superior value propositions.
A revitalized brand to introduce the category to younger target segments that have not yet maybe tried audiobooks, but other audio media, so we become more relevant for these segments because they are driving most of the penetration growth. Now to our other markets. Ian, in the U.S., this is our most recent acquisition, a little bit over a year ago. It's a small business in the context of the North American market, but it's a large and highly profitable business in the Storytel context. As we move forward, we maintain a steadfast commitment to the U.S. market, we intend to continue growing on the back of multiple organic initiatives, and some of them are already released and tested. In the U.S., we have a different model.
We have a credit-based model, and we believe that there's a clear opportunity to expand the credit model and the success of the credit model to other markets, where it could be a good fit for commercial or content-related reasons. We even hope to launch the next credit model later on this year. In the context of this recent acquisition, there are still content and marketing synergies to monetize on. Our Growth markets. We've had a great start in our four Growth markets, Poland, Netherlands, Turkey, and Bulgaria, that Claus leads. They are less penetrated, but there's strong traction. Therefore, our strategy involves to expand the audiobook category and to find new individuals who have not yet tried audiobooks.
We will also further develop and, or reduce, I mean, entry-level barriers for those individuals who want to try, but might not have as of yet. In the meantime, we will seek to maximize the output of our internal publisher, Storyside, to ensure that we have a steady flow of fresh and unique content that is locally relevant and have strong economics. Finally, the Expansion markets that are managed by AJ. The mission in this region is to identify and develop markets with high potential so that they will ultimately become our next Growth markets. In this context, we will do opportunistic and strategic investments, as we believe that there is a potential path to find some new markets that could become strong investment cases for us.
We believe that one potential path is to develop strategic partnerships with big local players in media, distribution, or publishing. As we execute on the local and regional strategies, the rest of the team will be working on many other central efforts presented and discussed earlier on today. To enable this shift towards increased localization, we have redesigned our operating model by creating a market, a matrix organization around our go-to-market. We will elevate the roles of the country managers to set local plans and requirements. To capture and prioritize off of those requirements, we will build strong bridges to the teams that we will continue to run centrally, such as product and tech, operations, life cycle, and acquisition. As we progress, we aim for our organization to become one of our strongest competitive advantages at Storytel. Back to Luis.
Thank you, Åse. Well, this concludes the session on the streaming strategy. We heard about our goals first. We then recap on what we think is a fundamental success factor for us, which is our solid starting point as we look at the business today. Finally, we got to hear it from some of our great executives about some of our priorities and plans that we're doing in the short term and in the midterm as well. I think I speak on behalf of the team when I say that we're excited about the future and that we believe we have a strong sense of being successful. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Could I ask Johan and Oleg to join for a brief Q&A. I will quickly grab the iPad. Just a reminder for those watching online, you can send in your questions on the question field to the right of the screen there. If we had any questions in the room, please do raise your hand. The usual suspects. There you go.
Thank you very much.
Thank you .
Derek from ABG. I think for Luis or Oleg, perhaps, on the partnership strategy, if you could elaborate a bit on that, what percentage would that take of the targeted subscriber growth? What are the typical ARPU implication? Is it 70% as opposed to 100% you would keep, or?
Yeah. I can take that. Thank you, Derek. I think that the role of partnerships is gonna be very dependent on each market. Generally, we do believe they have a role to play. We haven't really quantified how much of the growth is gonna come from that particular area. As we look into the world at the 28 markets, we are definitely setting certain priorities for some particular markets where we believe the partnership model can work better. That goes at two levels. You could talk about joint ventures, you could talk about the strategic level, and you can also talk about pure distribution. Depending on the market, depending on the ARPU and our margins, we can be more or less aggressive, and we can expect partnerships to play a different role.
We haven't, to your earlier question, we haven't really quantified how much it plays, but we do know it's gonna be critical, particularly on expansion. We're also very bullish about growth, where we can see that it's playing a good effect on reducing our acquisition cost.
Great, thanks for the flavor.
Mm-hmm. We have another question. Yes?
Thank you. Coming back to the, I call it, 15% target here on the CAGR for the Streaming business as such, we talked about some of the drivers to get to that, and I think Johannes emphasized that the targets are really attainable, so to say. Can you comment a bit on what you see as the largest risk to not achieve this? And also perhaps some commentary on the 14, 15 markets that are not prioritized, and if there are any ways to extract values out of them at this stage.
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for the question. I think the 15%, it really depends on who you ask. Johannes is particularly bullish on it and believes it's a very attainable goal, even if it's slightly ambitious. I think the team in general feels very optimistic, and one of the key reasons for that, I would say, is because we do feel we have a hedge. We operate in many markets. They are at different stages, they show different realities. As a result, we believe we can expect some of them to play a bigger role. You saw that we expect 30% growth on expansion, 20% growth on growth, and 10% growth in our Nordics and the US markets. We can play and expect different upsides in different places as we go.
I think in general, we feel it's a healthy market to have. As I said, it's a combination of subscriber growth, where we believe we'll see, you know, that 3.2, if you do the maths, is somewhere like a 10%-12% CAGR, and then a little bit of upside on the ARPU side, which we believe we still have in many of the markets where we compete.
Was there a follow-up?
Yeah.
If you could just wait for the microphone so the audience can hear online. Thank you.
With regards to the second part of the question: so what is your strategy to a certain extent, recoup some of the value and the investments made into the 14 or so markets that are not getting as much attention today? Are those in hibernation mode expected to be quite-
Well, each market has a very different reality as well. Oleg show that in some markets, our economics are very positive, in some others, they are not as much. We believe that in the short term, we need to be, you know, quite firm on expecting a certain return on investment, because we always have the alternative investment in a different market, right? So when we put money in a particular market, it needs to bring that kind of three level on the ratio that we see between the money we put and the money we get back, no? There's a discipline in there. When you look at the markets, as I showed earlier, we use the framework that looks into the potential of each one of them, but also looks at our competitive edge in those markets.
In some, we own rights, in some, we own clear relationships on the publishing side. That's an edge that we can play with. When you look at the totality of the 18 markets, I believe you can clearly segment five, where... We're gonna do that progressively as we see the success kicking in.
Thank you.
Thank you. I'm just gonna take a couple of online questions that are related to expansion. One is: How much of growth is expected to come from Expansion markets through to 2026? Also, is there any market from the Balkans, like Ex-EU market, Greece, et cetera, besides Bulgaria, that is a target for expansion in the long term?
Okay, I can start with the first one.
Mm-hmm.
For the Expansion markets, we aim to grow at a CAGR of 30% a year, and that translates into moving from 5% to 10% out of the total revenue throughout 2026. On the markets, I leave to Luis .
Mm-hmm.
I think on the second question, we have enough to manage right now. In the short term, we're not looking at new markets. We're looking at the 18 outside our core, and we're playing in that space. I think as the markets develop and as we develop as well as a company, we may do go and explore new markets, but that's not the plan in the short term.
Okay, thank you. We're going to get to the remaining questions at the end. We've got one quick wrap-up with for the day, and then we'll come back to another Q&A at the end, if that's okay with everyone. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Now I would just like to take a few minutes for you all to get to know our CFO, our new CFO, Peter Messner, who will be starting at Storytel next week. Peter, could you come and join me just for a couple of minutes here? Thank you. Welcome.
Thank you. Thank you for being here.
Great. First of all, Peter, I'll start by asking, what were the main elements for attracting you to Storytel?
Well, first of all, before I answer that, what a fantastic Capital Markets Day, and what an inspiring presentation lineup of the executive management team.
Mm-hmm.
I think that is already part of the answer why I'm about to join here in a week's time, on Monday next week. When I followed Storytel, which was, of course, a few years as I've worked in the media industry for quite a while, I think last year was quite a transformative year, and that could have been observed. When I started talking to Johannes, our CEO, it became very clear to me that this is really an exciting opportunity. There is a lot of positive change. There has been an EBITDA positive development over several quarters. It was very convincing for me that this is really an exciting time to join that company. The media industry as such, and I've spent quite a while in that, is exciting. I love working in that environment.
There's a lot of passion, there's a lot of innovativeness. We heard about the art of doing business in the Nordic regions. We heard about dreams of the teams, and this is not just for smiling. I think this is really the reality of what it is. There are consumer products, you can play around with that, and there are interesting economics that are paired with that.
Mm-hmm.
This is really exciting.
You spoke about media and your background. Maybe tell us a little more about your background and what particular experience you bring to Storytel?
Background, 47 years ago, is that I was born in Austria, like our CEO, which is really a coincidence and nothing else. He has been born a little bit earlier than I did. Other than that, I think I spent probably the last 17 or so years in the entertainment and media industry, in all kinds of setups, of B2B products, of B2C products, of subscription models, of scaling challenges, of cost transformation challenges, of capital structure and financing challenges. It is that and transactions, M&A experience. It is. I would be very humble. I'm not the superstar CFO.
I think I bring probably what the company would need at this point in time, from my own assessment, of a very broad experience in that industry, a very stable leadership to help the executives team, the board, Johannes, our CEO, to really deliver on what we heard today, which is a very ambitious but a very attainable strategy.
Mm-hmm. From what you did hear today, what opportunities or challenges, well, are you most excited about, inspire you from what you've been hearing through the day?
Well, clearly, and this may be unlikely as a CFO to say, the opportunities that the product, the user experience, and maybe the addition of artificial intelligence can actually add to the lineup of our products and services. I think this is still at the surface of what we may see in the coming years when Johan and the product teams really take a closer look into and play around what can be achieved. Of course, it is the scalability of the business model. That is exciting to see that we are at that very inflection point of really being able to deliver that in the next years, and there's a lot of potential in that company as well. The content side, I think, is very interesting as well.
The audiobooks is, of course, as has been presented, at the core of everything. There are so many adjacent possibilities that translate to that, and that could be the Podbook, that could be other audio stories. It could be even something else that is to be seen, but there is a lot of potential in that, and I think that goes through my thinking of the business a lot, the potentials that this business has that are partly still untapped.
Okay, last question is, what are you most looking forward to when you start next week? Your first step.
It's not mid-summer by the end of the week, but it's actually really starting. I've been waiting for different reasons to really be able to start, so I'm really looking forward to start on Monday next week. I already had the chance to interact a little bit with the senior management team, and of course, with certain board members and with Johannes, but I'm really looking forward to meet the entire team and the fantastic talent at the company.
Thank you so much, Peter.
Thank you very much.
Been a pleasure to get to know you a little bit.
Thank you.
Yes, thank you. With that, I'd like to invite Johannes Larcher back up to stage for final comments.
Thank you, Emily. I appreciate it, and thank you to all the presenters, Luis, his team, Helena, Linda, and a warm welcome to Peter. Excited to have you here. I also wanna thank someone who has made very, very important contributions to Storytel over the last 18 months, and that is Susanne Ekblom, our interim CFO, who will be transitioning over to Peter when Peter starts next week. Thank you, Susanne, for everything you've done for us. To the audience here in Stockholm and online, I wanna say that my hope is that this Capital Markets Day has been helpful to you, that it has increased transparency and has created better understanding of our company and of our business model, and that it has given you lots of incentives to follow us closely going forward.
I want to sum up the time together today in a few minutes by first recapping our 2023 short-term priorities and by providing some additional and more detailed perspective on our mid-range financial targets. Short term, this year, our focus is on four key priorities, which are well aligned with the overarching longer-term strategy. First, offer great content to our listeners and readers with improved content economics in our Streaming business. Second, significantly improve how we take our Streaming business to market. Third, focus our efforts and investments on our 10 Core markets in a smart way that localizes our strategy according to the situation on the ground, country by country, everywhere we are present. Fourth, complete the transformation of our company into a more efficient organization with the right people and the right culture in place.
Based on what I consider a well-thought-through strategy for the company, we have today reiterated our 2023 guidance, which you can see on the left. We have also presented ambitious targets for our financial performance from 2023 to 2026. Our midterm targets are an average annual organic streaming growth rate of 15%, group revenue of over SEK 5 billion by 2026, an EBITDA margin of 12% in 2026, with even higher potential over time. A CapEx investment of roughly 5% of group revenue, equaling an operational intent to do. Yes, these numbers are, as we said, ambitious. They represent a SEK 2 billion plus increase in revenue from 2022 to 2026. They also represent a 5x increase in our EBITDA margin. They are attainable, and they are based on a self-finance journey.
Importantly, any strategic transactions and opportunities would be icing on the cake. We haven't counted on M&A as a prerequisite for delivering these results. Perhaps most importantly, my team and I are committed to deliver in line with these midterm targets. Our commitment and excitement about this path is grounded in part on a rich set of opportunities we see to drive growth and increase profitability. To drive growth, we see four major levers. One, we operate, as we've shown, in a fast-growing market, and as a market leader with proven experience in content and distribution, we are well-positioned to take advantage of that underlying market growth. Two, we also believe that our increasingly differentiated content offer will contribute to strong growth of high-quality revenue that over-indexes versus the market.
Third, Storytel has significant opportunities to optimize the performance of our marketing function and subscription funnel that will yield higher efficiency for every marketing dollar invested. Four, we see that a better mix and alignment of products, pricing, and smarter promotions can unlock meaningful growth. In terms of profitability, we also see multiple levers to improve on the status quo. By further reducing churn, improving ARPU, and more efficiently managing our SAC, we will improve our LTV:SAC ratio over time. We have identified clear steps to improve content economics, thus lowering our cost of goods sold as percent of revenue ratio. Third, we are going to be focused on efficiency with regards to personnel and other overhead costs. We see significant leverage there in this area as we grow revenue much faster than overhead costs.
Let me illustrate in a bit more detail how we go from 3% EBITDA margin in 2022 to over 12% or higher EBITDA margin in 2026. Reductions in content costs and increased marketing efficiency play a big role in achieving those objectives. Also, reducing costs in our central services organization, finance, legal, HR, general administrative expenses, contribute to higher EBITDA. The most meaningful contribution to EBITDA improvement comes from scale effects. As we grow our subscriber base and revenue base, largely fixed costs, for example, investments in technology and product, as well as some personnel costs, become significantly more efficient. Our platform today is significantly more scalable than was the case just a few years ago, thanks to higher degrees of automation, centralization, and very limited headcount growth.
It's important to point out that growth and profitability are intimately linked. No growth, no scale effects. No scale effects, more limited opportunities for margin expansion. Growth thus becomes a decisive factor in delivering in line with the targets we communicated, and we are well aware that with regards to growth, there are some external factors that require us to stay very close to each market, so we can assure that our subscription base and streaming revenue development, develop in line with our business plan quarter by quarter. Twelve percent is a healthy EBITDA margin, but keep in mind that in 2026, we will still be at the tail end of an investment phase in top-line growth and aren't fully optimizing for profitability yet.
When we think about steady-state unit economics in this business, we believe Storytel will be able to generate north of 15% EBITDA margins based on additional margin expansion, thanks to further scale effects and efficiencies in content, marketing, and personnel costs. Of course, our journey is subject to external risks and execution risks. While we can't control every risk in this business, I would like to point out that we do have one strong competitive advantage in the form of our very flexible cost structure. Many of our costs, for example, most of the content costs Helena is responsible for, are variable in nature, and they go up or down with our revenue. This provides big upside compared to other players in the Media Streaming business. Let's take a look now at what the next few years will mean for profitability, region by region.
What you see here in our Growth and Expansion streaming markets, our Books business, and in our Nordics and U.S. streaming markets. Local EBITDA margin excludes product, tech, and certain overhead costs. Our two largest areas, the Nordics and the U.S., which make up the significant majority of group revenue, are already delivering very strong profitability. The areas of Growth and Expansion are, as you know, markets where we have only recently, relatively recently, established ourselves and have not yet reached the scale required to be profitable on an EBITDA basis. When we now look at 2026, you can see from the movement of the circle and the size of the circles, that we achieve growth with increased profitability going forward in all regions.
The Nordics and the U.S. become even bigger and even more profitable, but so do our markets under Growth and Expansion, driven by strong performance in the Netherlands, Poland, Bulgaria, and Turkey. I want to point out that Books will deliver growth with increased profitability, even if the growth here is more modest than in our more dynamic, faster-developing Streaming business. Regarding CapEx, as we said, we estimate that 5% of the group's revenue annually will go towards CapEx, with little variation quarter-over-quarter. The investments consist partly of investments in tech and product, and partly of costs of audiobook production within our Storyside and Storytel Books units.
I want to point out, the content we invest in is very cost-efficient to produce already, certainly compared to the TV business where I come from, and these costs may decrease further and significantly based on some of the advancements in AI that Johan talked about earlier today. It is also content that is almost completely evergreen in nature, meaning that it has extended shelf life, and the content we invest in will get consumed by consumers for many, many years to come. As we emphasized earlier, it is crucial that we allocate resources to the areas with the highest returns so that we can stay on the right growth track. Therefore, we've established structured processes inside the company with clear internal hurdles and processes, and have also implemented follow-up mechanisms that measure the outcome of our investment decisions on a continuous basis.
We've given you a lot of detailed information to digest, and I really hope you found spending time together valuable. I'd like to share some personal thoughts, perhaps, with you, on explain why I and others on my management team have recently made significant personal investments into the company. I believe that Storytel is in an incredibly interesting position and offers opportunity for significant growth and for success over the coming years. Here's why: we operate in a market that is experiencing rapid growth. We are the number one independent player in the audiobook streaming market, and we have proven that we can build a profitable business when we achieve scale. We've also shown that we can replicate the success we've had in the Nordics outside our home market successfully. We offer a unique combination.
We talked about this, a Streaming business and a Content business. We are starting to see how these two businesses can elevate each other and create something that is bigger than the sum of its parts. By going beyond our traditional core of audiobooks, we are putting ourselves in a position to benefit from an ever larger, increasing customer base over time. Our financial profile, I believe, is attractive. We feature a strong balance sheet, and we are self-sufficient from a cash standpoint. Lastly, as you have hopefully seen, we have assembled, and will complete assembling, a team that is world-class and can deliver on this plan. That's how we're gonna do it. I believe in this company. I hope you do, too. With that, I want to open up for a larger, longer Q&A session. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Johannes, and I'd like to invite, Luis, Helena, and Linda up for our last Q&A session. We're a little over time, but hopefully we can take 15 minutes with you now for your final questions. We saw that there were quite a number left. A reminder online, if you would like to send in a question, please do that via the online text field. Yes, question here in the front. Thank you.
Someone new.
Thank you. Alexander Lindholm, Private Investor. On the content cost, your largest cost, you said it's variable. How does it work? Is it a part of revenue, or does it depend on what the user actually listen to, et cetera?
Helena, do you want to answer that, perhaps?
Yes, I can take that. We pay for every minute consumed in the service, but we have different contracts with different content providers, so that's why the content cost sometimes differs.
That would mean that if a customer uses the service more, it would actually reduce the gross profits, I would say.
On the other hand, we also implement different products and different tiers now, so we can make the consumption cost more efficient, depending on what customers we have in different tiers.
Okay.
Yes, go ahead.
Joachim Gunell, DNB again. Just a final one from me. Since this is a business model that's benefiting from flywheel dynamics, where would you say that you are in relation to that flywheel dynamics in terms of reaching sufficient, enough scale to truly benefit from that?
Luis?
You go. You go.
Me?
Yeah, you go.
All right, damn. Hot potatoes.
The difficult ones are for you.
Yeah, look, I truly believe that we are in the early stages of creating the ultimate scale this business can achieve. It's a big driver of when I came in, I made a big push for becoming more content centric because I think what will unlock further scale in this business, above anything else, is to offer content that is more widely accessible to larger audiences, and that gets consumers beyond the perception of audiobooks being something for people who cannot read or who are very intellectual. We need to get away from that. We need to open up and provide content that caters to everyone in the audience and brings in younger audience segments that are non-traditional audiobook segments. I think that is very, very important in increasing the scale. You're absolutely right.
We are a scale-based business. A lot of our costs, as we just said, scale, are fixed, and will scale much better and become more efficient as we get to larger size. We're doing everything we can to get to bigger scale. The 3.2 million subscribers we talked about is a significant increase over where we are today. Are we satisfied with that? Do we wanna go further? Absolutely. We are also cognizant that you all, as investors, have sent us a very clear message that the overexuberance, in terms of speed of execution and expansion, is not welcome. We need to prove a lot of things along the way and develop quarter by quarter, step by step, and prove that what we're saying is true and that we can deliver against this.
3.2 million, hopefully, 10, 12 years from now, will be a substantially larger number.
... Thank you for today.
You're welcome.
I'm gonna just take a quick question from the online, which is, your new growth targets mean increased growth. How will this affect your marketing costs going forward?
Yeah, I'll take this one. An easy one. I would say that I think in the short term, our key priority is that we can deliver more with the same marketing money. I think Oleg spoke about how there's, you know, buckets of value and efficiency at reach for us on the marketing side, which will allow us to get more on the back of the dollars that we're already investing. I think that's our top priority now, and it has to do with a lot of the technicalities of how you run your marketing efforts. I would say midterm, we can expect our marketing spending to stay relatively flat relative to revenue.
In the long term, as you look into 2025, 2026, 2027, I think the range is gonna be somewhere between 10% and 15% of our revenue being what we actually invest on marketing.
Okay. Thank you. Yes, there are a couple of questions back here. Yes, go ahead.
Okay, first, a clarification on the EBITDA margin guidance. You have a guidance of at least 15% long term. You mentioned the local EBITDA margins. Is the long term? What is included in the long term?
The long term is a group-wide EBITDA margin.
Including-
From 10, 2026 or later.
Yeah.
Group wide.
It includes all OpEx?
It includes everything. Group wide, both our Content business, our Streaming business, our Core markets, our Growth m arkets, and our Expansion markets, everything.
Okay, thank you very much. On the churn data, 6% is surprisingly low. Is that a Q2 data point, or is it at the end of Q1?
Yeah, the 6% is end of Q1.
End of Q1?
Yes. It's actually the average of the first quarter of the year.
Yeah. Can you comment anything on how churn has developed in the second quarter?
It continues to show that historical trend of decline. As you hear on the Q2 earnings call, I think we can openly talk about it, but I think right now what we see is the same trend, and we're very happy with what we're seeing.
Okay. Then a question relating to Johan's presentation on onboarding conversion, improved by about 20%?
No, retention.
Retention. Onboarding, what does that mean?
We measure.
Can you take the microphone? Sorry. Thank you.
We, of course, measure the full funnel performance from, you know, across the funnel. So the conversion rates, we see an improvement. I can't share the actual details, but in our Growth markets, as we follow closely, and as they are more immature, we're working actively to close the gap as well towards the more mature Nordic markets. In the Growth markets, we have seen the last two years, the 3-month retention, so the users stay three months or not, improvement with 20 percentage points.
Okay.
Quite a significant improvement.
Yeah. Thank you. That's all for me. Thanks a lot.
Thank you, sir.
Very informative.
Thank you.
Thanks.
We have a question in the back, please?
Thank you. Hi, guys, Ramil Koria from SEB. Just wanted to poke around a bit in the competitive environment. You had a chart of ongoing campaigns from competitor of yours, and we know that with interest rates coming up, PC funding, et cetera, has become more scarce, call it. Do you see, you know, if you compare that campaign chart to what we saw three years ago, how different is the competitive environment for those of you who were at Storytel three years ago?
Wanna take that one?
Could you take the microphone before you answer? Yeah, so the online audience can hear you as well. Thanks.
I would say if we go back three years ago, the main competition was merely around 14 days of free trial or 30 days of free trial. I'm speaking mainly for the Nordic market, because that's where we have the most competitors at that time. What we've seen increasingly over the years is that it has become a race of more and more. Recently, we've seen some competitors going on 60 days and going on 90 days, even though they cap the consumption of maybe 30 hours. What we have done lately is to take a different stance because we want to show that books have an actual value. We are reducing the trial days as most of our competitors are increasing the free trial days.
Because we believe that there's value, and we believe that if you at least pay something for what you're getting, then you're more eager to try to start and testing and using that service, and that we also have clear data on to show that engagement and trial to pay has increased with that method. Mm. Is that the answer to your question?
It is. May I ask?
Yeah.
Thank you. You know, coming from a financial markets background, our job is almost to falsify and work ourselves backwards. I'm just thinking, you know, if 2% of consumption is exclusive content, you're in this environment where competitors are becoming fiercer and fiercer, you know, just reading between the lines of that answer, which I appreciate, you know, how is actually the competitive environment? I mean, can you really drive exclusive content? You know, if you look into 2026, how much of consumption is gonna be pure exclusive content on your, on your platform? I know it's a very hard question, but just high level.
Yeah, I mean, I'll speak to the general belief without going into the specifics. Thank you for the question. Look, I think the competitive environment, some of our competitors are increasingly desperate, are doing everything they can to continue show, at least, if not share of value growth, then subscriber growth. That's what's behind this. We are happy for customers who are opportunistic, who are seeking bargains, and who are ultimately loss-making to go to our competitors and be happy there and consume content for free. We are, you know, when we had a slight decrease in our subscriber numbers in Q1, there were some questions about that. We do not see cause for alarm. It's not a general increase in churn, it's more a question of focusing on value creation.
To your question about content, that's the whole deal. I mean, this is where competition and differentiation will need to happen, is around content. If you have great content that is only available on Storytel or on a competitor, I think that is what will set the services apart, and that will ultimately lead to consumers deciding which service to go for. It will never be the TV business, right? The TV business Luis and I come from, obviously, catalogs are 100% different between an HBO Max and a Netflix, and that's for a good reason. We will never be that in the audiobook streaming service, but there will be a tier of content, and it's gonna grow beyond 1%, that will drive increasingly large numbers of consumption and will increasingly be responsible for more and more acquisition of subscribers to the service.
We have a firmly held belief that this is the right strategy. We are taking great steps under Helena and Linda's leadership to enable that strategy. I think we'll be very curious to see how it plays out.
Thank you. I think we had one more question here. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Derek from ABG. The long term certainly looks very attractive, especially after today. If we go back into the very short term, I mean, you lost some subscribers in the Nordics, I believe, in Q1, I think you would require a fairly big subscriber pickup in subsequent quarters this year to achieve your targets. What gives you sort of conviction that you will reach the 2023 growth target at this point?
Because I have access to data that you don't. I think we should talk again on August 1st.
All right. That's fair. Okay, one follow-up here then. I mean, do you see any additional revenue streams that could potentially complement what you've talked about today to reach the targets? I'm thinking perhaps with like ad-based funnel, such as Storytel's or Spotify's version, so free version be an idea or something?
No, it's certainly something we have debated, right, as a team. Is there an ad-free tier that could generate additional revenue? Look, the reality is this: we are a small audience, even with two million paid subscribers. Even in Sweden, our largest market, we are a small audience. For us to be truly interesting to advertisers, we would need more significant scale, and we would also need to build the capability of actually monetizing that scale through product and technology and the sales organization and ad operations. This is probably not the best way for bringing additional users into our service. We think that with the introduction of our basic tier, we have created a great product that puts the service in reach of more and more consumers.
I wouldn't count on us being very bullish on an advertising-supported tier of Storytel. Look, I think we're very happy with the access to revenue potential we have in the business model that we're currently in. As Luis mentioned, there are, and Åse did as well, we are exploring opportunities for being a little bit less dogmatic when it comes to our business model. Historically, Storytel has been very focused on the all-you-can-eat unlimited model. We believe that is the best model for all market participants, for the publishers, the authors, for Storytel, and for the consumer. We also know that the reality is that not every market is made like the next.
We believe, for example, that taking what Ian does in the United States with Audiobooks.com on a credit-based model and using those capabilities and that product in some of our international Expansion markets, could be very interesting in creating new revenue streams in a multi-tier model, as well as higher margins, potentially. That's all I'll say about that. I think we gave indication to believe that later this year, we may be doing something in that direction. We'll have to stay tuned for that. We are certainly actively looking at that.
Great. Thank you.
With that, I think we will wrap up our Q&A. Thank you very much, that also wraps up our Capital Markets Day. We thank you all here in Stockholm for joining us, and also our audience online as well. Please note that this whole program has been recorded and will be available online on the investor page at storytel.com. For those in Stockholm here, you are welcome for some refreshments afterwards and a chance to talk further with the management team. With that, though, to everyone, thanks again, and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you very much.