With free cash flow, positive double-digit growth. I'm going to go through some slides here in a minute to explain more about the business, and then Ned Preston, my side here and CFO, is going to join me to talk about the financials. And we can do a little Q&A. So here we go. So this is our mission statement here, essentially, is to create a transformational network that empowers a global conscious community. I'm not going to read this. Okay. So essentially, at the core of our business, we have a subscription model and a membership model. So we have a monthly and annual membership model. And we have a premium tier, which is $299 a year. And we have content across three main categories. The first, we sort of lump into this wellness, yoga, and meditation, which we were very early to this story.
Some of you may remember the previous incarnation of this brand, Gaiam. Is anyone familiar with this? Yeah, you've probably seen the yoga mats in the hotel you're staying in. That was a business we sold off in 2016 to a private equity firm that did a roll-up of Martha Stewart's brands. We used that cash to go into more of a digital pure-play high-margin business, which is Gaia, which actually means Mother Earth in ancient Greek. The center sort of category here is personal development, spiritual growth, and transformation. So if you're familiar with names like Joe Dispenza or Bruce Lipton or Gregg Braden or Deepak Chopra, these are some of our key talent. And then we have a category here, ancient history, supernatural, and the unexplained, which used to be a little out there until Joe Rogan started talking about it every other week.
Now it's a lot more popular. Our demographic, we skew more female, and we skew slightly older. We have an avatar we call Celeste. She's the core of our brand. She's mid-50s, highly educated, controls household spending. We have live events at our headquarters. We've had a sold-out event the other weekend called Channeling. You see Celeste in the audience. She's a great community member. We're very proud to serve her. This is a little bit of the history of the company. If you look at the very bottom, you see the yoga mat there. That's where I explained the sell-off for that division. Here is where we've scaled out. In 2020, 728,000 members. We're over 800,000 members now in 170 different countries around the world. We serve this sort of aggregate of niches that are individually underserved and collectively underserved.
We have over 10,000 original titles across English, Spanish, French, and German. 85% of our content is exclusive, and we have 98% worldwide rights, so it's very easy for us to continue to expand internationally, and like I mentioned up top, enormous leverage in the model, 93% cash contribution, and 85% gross margin. In terms of TAM, this is something investors ask a lot, and we think that the top of funnel for this not only is growing in terms of total connected households in the SVOD landscape, but also that the people interested in our Gaia topics is expanding. I believe there's a meta trend happening.
In the previous businesses I've set up, one of which I sold to Gaia, which was a streaming health and wellness Netflix play, I saw a relatively unknown category of nut milks and juicing and organics go from a whisper to Whole Foods being sold to Amazon, and now you go to a cafe in the Midwest, you can get six different types of nut milk. This is unheard of 15 years ago. Right now, I believe we're witnessing a meta trend of people paying a lot more attention to conscious media. What is going into their mind? How are they being programmed? How is their meditation practice, their breath work practice, the mind-body connection, energy healing, frequency, vibration? This is a huge meta trend that's happening. Psychedelics even. We're going to hear more and more about it, and we're at the fulcrum of this movement.
In terms of members here, you see we did have a peak during COVID. It came down. A lot of streamers lost about 50% of their COVID cohort. We lost about 30%, so more stable there. Additionally, in 2019, we did pull back from 60%-80% of revenue spend on marketing down to 40% so that we could transition to EBITDA-positive operations and also start to generate cash. Here is our revenue here. And you can see the last few years, around $80 million. This year we'll be closing north of $90 million. And we're projecting double-digit growth from here on in, mid-teens even. Here is ARPU per member and GP per employee, just to prove the leverage we have. And on the ARPU side, in August this year, we launched a marketplace initiative as well, which is like a conscious Costco model for our members.
So if you're a member and you like one of our hit series show called Ancient Civilizations, and you want to travel to Egypt with one of these experts, you can save 10% off that tour. So we launched this in August. It's starting to roll out. So this will be an ARPU maximizer for the business. This is some information I find quite interesting around our content library. So this is the estimated replacement cost of our content library, $150 million. But what's most interesting down the bottom here, we measure the gross profit return on our content library. And there is a cohort of content. Very early on, we produced some content in 2014 in this category. That content cost us $2.2 million to produce. And over the lifetime of that content, it's returned us over $20 million in gross profit.
And there was actually more viewership on that content cohort in 2023 than there was in 2014. We are the antithesis of mainstream media, where people come and they watch shows that are legacy content. They don't come and they cycle through the latest show, come for the hit show. Some people do, but there's a proven data set of people consuming legacy content on the platform, which makes us a lot more immune to having to have that next hit, having to have that next big show. We have this legacy viewing over the database. And if members come to our platform today and they're new, there is such a vast library that they can explore so they feel this, which results in ultimately lower churn and high retention. Up front, I mentioned we have international rights for 98% of our content.
We've expanded into other languages, and it's very easy for us to do that now, and obviously even more low cost with the advent of AI. So we have dubbed versions of our content library in Spanish, German, and French, and we're looking to expand into other territories. Right now, we're about 35% international, and we anticipate that we'll be over 50% within five years. We're in over 185 different countries. For us, if you try to comp us to some other companies in the space, a lot of media companies, especially that are entertainment companies as opposed to education or edutainment in a way, have to spend an enormous amount of their percentage of revenue on content.
A lot of the companies that did this during ZIRP and low cost of capital spend an enormous amount of money, and subscribers churn in and out of the business depending on what hit show they have. We have a 150,000-sq ft campus in Colorado, which has its onsite studios. You can see a photo up top there of it. We fly our talent in, and we produce in-house. About 60-65 of our team of 105 FTEs are on the production side. We're able to produce content on a per-hour basis of around $35,000 an hour compared to some of the major streamers, which are north of $10 million.
With this unique leverage that we have, we are able to spend a much lower percentage of our revenue on content, which keeps us, gives us the capacity to generate cash and grow, which I think is a very unique thing. And so right now, we spend about 12%-13% of our revenue on content. We do want that to expand a little further, but 15%-17%, nowhere near 60% or 80%. We have distribution across what we call third party, and then second party, and then direct first party. So third party is Amazon. So if you go into Prime Video, you can one-click at the channel there. YouTube as well. And we have apps on Roku, Apple, iOS, Android, then Xfinity, Comcast, and Verizon. And now I'm going to hand off to Ned. Be kind to him.
Now, my only job here during the quiet period, we announce earnings on Monday, to make sure that James here doesn't say anything that he's not supposed to. Just kidding. But in the Q&A, I'll be watching all of you. Yeah. So at any rate, all these slides will be updated in a week from now when we announce on Monday. Just a couple of three financial slides, and we'll take your questions. So just to double down on some comments that James made around our financials, you can see over the last eight years or so, our revenues grew quite quickly. Then the pandemic hit, and it was relatively flat as you think back to the graph that James showed earlier. So we finished last year just over $80 million. We're already on the record with the forecast north of $90 million.
So we'll grow north of 12% this year in 2024. Our gross margins will continue to improve back to the 86% level. That's another thing that we've gone public with. And then we'll continue to spend on our customer acquisition, our marketing, between 40% and 42%, which I'll elaborate on in just a minute. And then our EBITDA the past two years has been stable, around $13 million. We'll finish higher than that. And then EBITDA margin, which I'll comment on here in just a minute, at a solid 16%. That will continue to grow. Now, we've talked about leverage a couple of times here with the business. And James and I have both been here for about 15 months. And I think similar things brought us to the company.
When we came in last summer, we both saw a company that was undervalued, so we thought, and we've seen that improve over the last 15 months. But also a company that, as I kind of put it simply, was like ready to explode. I come from a long time of supporting high-tech software as a service companies. And I saw a company that had a growing deferred revenue, annual recurring revenue stream on a stable base, and an opportunity out there. And so one of the things that I kind of learned from my high-tech days was this kind of Rule of 40. And I thought at the time, James, we could really drive Gaia to be growing between revenue and our EBITDA margin over 40%, which is a best-in-class benchmark.
W hile this year that number will be closer to high 20s, around 30%, we do see a path of getting to this rule of 40, growing revenue mid-teens and our EBITDA margin mid-20s to get to this 40% metric by the end of 2025. Here, if you look at this is purely a pro forma benchmark. When we arrive at $100 million in revenue, you see that our gross margin, cash contribution margin remains stable. We continue to spend about 40%-42% on marketing. And we push to EBITDA about 22%, and then 6% to the bottom line free cash flow. So about $6 million in free cash flow. Going back to what James was talking about, though, our sights are much larger than just 100 million. We are looking out over the next three to five years at 150 and 200 million.
And you see the leverage in our plan where we would jump quite drastically at 150 up to a bottom line of $25 million in free cash flow and 17%, and then beyond at 200 million, which is in our sights. Besides our streaming service, you've heard us recently talk about new routes to market or new revenue streams with our marketplace, Gaia Community. And then, of course, we are looking at opportunities from artificial intelligence in the years ahead. So we think this is quite obtainable. And then lastly, from a balance sheet standpoint, this is another reason why I wanted to come to the company. We have about just over $5 million in cash, again, as of the end of Q2 back in June 30th. And that doesn't include a $10 million line of credit. We're not leaning on our line of credit.
So we have access to an additional $10 million. Our total assets have been growing up to $142 million. And then down under liabilities, our deferred revenue has been growing to the tune of about $1 million to $2 million per quarter. So up over $18 million or close to $18 million at the end of Q2. That's quite exciting for me coming from my software and SaaS background.
And then one thing that's not included on the balance sheet, and we always want to point this out to people, is the fact that our media library has been valued over the years between $150 million and $200 million. We have over 10,000 shows that are in our library and accessible to our customers, but we've made even more than that. And I would say 150 is probably at the low end of estimates. But then our member base, it's kind of mid-800s.
We also forecast to be just under $300 million in estimated value, and then we have NOLs to the tune of about $18 million, so all said and done, a lot of people ask me when they see this, like, are you ever concerned with getting purchased or if you guys ever wanted to just go out and bleed off things? That is definitely not our intention, but it certainly is a strong balance sheet, to say the least, so with that, I'm going to ask James to come on back up here, and we'll answer your questions.
Yes, Dan.
You guys were saying that you're having some really fantastic returns. As part of that, we see companies normally doing some sort of buyback program. Is that something that you guys are anticipating as you move forward?
I wouldn't say initially. I think we would find maybe more interesting uses for capital rather than a buyback. We are working on, as Ned mentioned, an AI initiative, which we're investing in and still doing that within our cash flow generation capacity, and so we're looking to roll that out next year, and we also have a community initiative that we're looking to build and roll out start of 2026. So we start build Q3, Q4 in 2025. So these initiatives, I think we'd probably use the capital and any extra free cash flow generation to do that. Additionally, to move up on our content spend so that we can continue to stay relevant. It's not been an issue, but we want to just keep moving that up.
I've got a question. One of the things that you guys showed in your pro formas is the expectation of going to about $150 million. Those seem to be a very large jump in your spend for your operating costs and other costs. I don't like to write the numbers down. How are you anticipating doing that without a significant increase in that investment?
I'll answer part of it, and maybe Ned can fill in some color. I would say the biggest levers that help us to grow are really content and marketing. And they're not super dependent on headcount, per se. So if we keep headcount relatively stable, maybe nominal growth, I think next year we have in the budget eight or eight heads, people, souls for 2025. So that's not a meaningful uplift in the payroll and related. So it's more on marketing and content. And with marketing, like Ned said, at around 40%-43%, we can be growing mid-teens. That's healthy growth for us. We can accelerate it further, but we'd like to keep the cash flow generation positive and move that to content. Any further comments there?
Yeah, no, it's a big reason why we put this slide in the presentation, and it's on our website as well. We only have 100. That was another big reason I came here. We only have 105 employees driving north of $90 million in revenue. And so that's why historically we used to talk about it more as this gross profit per employee. We're extremely, it's just a productivity factor. We'll be over 700,000 here shortly and then get up over 800,000. We don't need to hire a lot of people. And as I call it, it's our secret sauce. We can keep marketing at around 40% of revenue and our content development around 10%-12%. And so it's realistic. Actually, we've seen it in the last couple of years.
We have the ability to kind of pull levers where needed to spend less or more in certain areas. We feel confident about that spend profile.
Yes.
What is your process for deciding what content you're going to develop?
So I think we have a trifecta of ways that we consider content. Our founder is a math prodigy and a very successful entrepreneur. He's built multiple different companies from Corporate Express, which became Staples Advantage, to that was like 35,000 employees by the time he exited that. Then he was a roll-up that became Whole Foods, and he was on the board for a number of years. Then a solo company that IPO'd and a number of other businesses. He is a math prodigy. So in his mind, data is the only way to decide what content gets made next. And then we have a creative process where our President and Head of Content, Kiersten Medvedich, she's ex-Sony Television, and she's much more creative in her approach to deciding which talent and which categories to invest in.
On top of that, on the data and creative, we also think about marketing, like who has the biggest pool in terms of audience. We see different talent that work well for us from a marketing and acquisition perspective. We use those three sort of inputs to decide on content. Then once we produce in English, we sort of sub and dub into the foreign languages and distribute it into those markets. Yeah, it's a fun part. I come from a production background. My first two films went to Netflix. My most recent project, my fifth project, had Joaquin Phoenix as executive producer, which is called Love Over Money. That's on the Gaia platform as well. I love content, but as CEO, I'm much more in the numbers now with Ned. We love making great movies and great series and great content.
We were excited about investing more in that as we move forward.
Acquisitions. Have you made acquisitions, or do you have any plans, or are you happy with your kind of internal system? Is there anybody out there that makes sense or that is a suboptimal content operator that maybe still wants their company to interact?
Yeah, so great question. I'm myself somewhat of an acqui-hire. So I sold into Gaia in 2019, became the second largest internal shareholder. I was on the board. I'm on the board for the last three years and joined, as Ned said, I think 15 months ago. Jirka, our founder, he has the world record for number of acquisitions in one year, 103. The closest was, I think, 68. So he's a voracious buyer of companies. We have our sights on some companies. We always do. We always get approached by companies. I think, and he's the lead on this. So really, it's a matter of, is it accretive in value from a content perspective? Is it accretive in value from a community and revenue perspective? And then finally, is it going to not disrupt the core? And I think that those are very noble considerations.
We have looked at some companies in my tenure here. None have lined up perfectly yet, but we have a list that we're watching, and we would love to supplement it with acquisition, but it's not something that we're immediately looking at.
A couple of questions on the production side. First, you mentioned that you guys were doing all of your production in-house in Colorado. I'm not sure of the tax benefits that you guys are getting from those. Have you guys looked at expanding your production footprint to a place like Atlanta, Ireland, or New Mexico where there are significant tax benefits available to you?
Yeah, I think, Dan, one of the things about it is that our content team are also on staff, and so because they're not unionized, it's a lot cheaper for us, and then we are outside a lot of these issues, like the labor issues, et cetera, that we've seen in Hollywood. When you go offsite and produce, you can take your staff, but often you're beholden to local producers and line directors and APs, et cetera, and so then your costs go up quite a bit, so I just don't know that the offset would work for us in terms of expenditure. Plus, on an 11-12% spend, we're looking at $10-$11 million a year.
When you take English programming out of it, and then yoga and meditation programming, and then you go into foreign language, subbing and dubbing, we'd need to be expanding the content budget more significantly to start to consider some of those savings. But it's not something we would not do. It's just that we still have a lot more to do internally and space and capacity, so.
And then the next kind of follow-up question. How are you guys differing or doing your talent deals similar to Netflix as they've gone from the large upfront spend to the talent deal upfront? Are you guys revenuing that, or are you doing different things with the deal? And how is that affecting your bottom line?
The interesting thing about Gaia is that I see some of the people here nodding in the room that know the brand. There is a natural pool for talent to want to be on Gaia. So most of my inbox is people saying, "Can I be on Gaia? Can I get on the show? Can I have my own show? Can I have this?" So inbound is not an issue for us. So in terms of those deal terms, it is very favorable for the company because people get more if they sell more books. They get more popularity by being on our network. Attracting higher quality talent, and we make a lot of talent. So they come to us. We do a hit show, and then we spend millions of dollars advertising them in these territories. And then they go to Germany, and they are selling out these arenas.
Then they get more expensive over time. But commensurate to the return, it's still very affordable for us. And so we have quite a strong position in terms of negotiating talent contracts.
We have time for one more. I see Thierry back here, so.
You mentioned AI. I was curious if you could discuss what aspects of your business would benefit from AI?
Yeah, so James touched on it earlier. So there's obvious things like converting from English to French and Spanish and German. That is already taking hold using AI. However, from a content standpoint, when people come into Gaia, we just had a board meeting last week, for example, and we're starting to demo the opportunity for people to come on the site and not only connect the dots like you all see when you go into Apple TV or Netflix of, "If you like this show, you might perhaps like that show." But much more deep, using AI to actually guide people that are new to kind of the holistic Gaia site where they might be interested in yoga or meditation, and we might guide them over into other things like spiritual healing or holistic medicine. And so there's a lot of opportunity.
I would say, Thierry, it's not only for new customers, but to retain our existing customers, right? Because if you think about it, one of the nice things when my wife and I go in on Saturday night and say, "All right, we want to watch The Old Man or something," and we finish that series, we say, "Oh, they're guiding us that we might like this show." On Gaia, we want that, but it's just a good feeling from a retention standpoint. AI will help us retain, not only grow our customer base. Does that make sense?
Thank you.
Actually, yeah, that's all the time we have for today.
Thank you.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much.