Next up is Gaia. With us, we have the CEO, James Colquhoun, and the CFO, Ned Preston. As always, this will be a 30-minute presentation. There should be some time at the end for a Q&A, so if you do have a question, you can type it into that Q&A tab at the bottom of your screen. With that out of the way, James, it's all yours.
Thank you, Jim. Pleasure to be here, and I appreciate your coverage of the company. I'm going to start with some details about Gaia and the business and where we're at, and Ned will follow me with some financials, and we'll kick off thereafter with some Q&A. At its core, Gaia runs a streaming video on demand service, which is a subscription business service. Ned, if you're able to jump forward there, here we go. We serve content across an aggregate of generally underserved niches, and we have two different membership tiers on the standard side, which is $13.99 a month and $119 a year. We have our Gaia Plus Premium tier, which includes live broadcasts and workshops, which stream from our headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. We have content across three core categories. The first is personal growth and transformation.
The second is ancient wisdom and unexplained mysteries. Then we have wellness, yoga, and meditation. This category of yoga and meditation is synonymous with the brand. The previous incarnation of Gaia was Gaiam, which was a yoga products company which sold off in 2016. We used the capital from the proceeds of that sale to buy back stock and invest in the digital-only business. Our core demographic is female, older, 45 to 65, highly educated, with high disposable household income. We like to call her Celeste. She's a huge fan of the brand and of a lot of the talent that we have on the site. Next here shows a little bit on the finance highlights. We've seen a lot of investors come back to the stock over the past 12 months. Ned and I joined as executives around the same time, around two years ago.
I've been involved with the founder for almost 10 years, sold the business into Gaia in 2019, and have been an active board member since that time and joined as an executive nearly two years ago now. What we see in the business is that we have transitioned to positive free cash flow operations. For Q4 in the full year 2024, we were positive free cash flow, enormous margins with an 86% gross margin and 93% cash contribution. We also have something very interesting happening inside the business, so that we have this accelerating CAC to LTV ratio in terms of the growth efficiency. Pre-COVID, we were acquiring customers with a 2.8-3 times acquisition cost to LTV. If the LTV was, say, $280, the acquisition cost was $100. Now that's changed dramatically, where the acquisition cost has remained relatively stable, slight increase.
However, LTV has expanded dramatically given the health and the tenure of the member base. Now that's over 6x on the efficiency cycle, which is fantastic for the stabilization of the business. Here is our total addressable market. We do this research based on global SVOD households, which this is the estimated number by 2029. Obviously, there's been a huge shift, a seismic shift in the way that people consume content and the familiarity with having a streaming platform or many to consume content, either on mobile devices or on connected TV devices. In terms of Gaia content, we take this TAM down to our total addressable market size of 26 million and a 5 million subscriber target.
On the revenue and members here, you can see the revenue step-ups, $42 million in 2018, up to just north of $90 million for 2024, which is our recently published numbers. Additionally, on the member count, you see the member increases there over time, and we closed last year at 856,000 members for 2024. This is where it gets really interesting on the ARPU slide and GP per employee to prove out not only the incremental improvements in return on our member base on a per-unit basis, but also the gross profit per employee to prove out the leverage in the model. You see here ARPU being reported here on an annualized basis is at $107 for 2024. We see that continuing to accelerate. We rolled out a price increase for new and for the first time in the company's history, existing members in Q4 of 2024.
The full impact of that will really hit in 2025. We had great results with the price increase on an average of an 18% increase. We saw a churn impact on that specific cohort of 6.3% by the end of 2024, which means that we're making 10-11% or more of the, so definitely making the delta on that price increase. We also have another planned price increase scheduled for Q1 of 2026. Based on the results that we have here, we see that having a great incremental flow through to gross profit. On the right-hand slide here, we have gross profit per employee. This jumped up to $730,000 for 2024. In Q4, it was actually above $800,000. We see that the business has the capacity to go north of $1 million on gross profit per employee, even up to $1.5 million.
As we add revenue, subscribers, top line, it's only incremental increases we need to make to headcount in order to sustain that revenue. Next here, we have content. 88% of our content is exclusive. We have our own in-house production capacity, which means we have no dependence on outside studios. Additionally, the way that members consume Gaia content is unique compared to most streamers. A lot of streamers, they amortize their content over seven years. However, most of the, or in general, most of the consumption happens in the first 6 to 12 months. We see a lot more of a long-tail effect in our content. One example of this is that $2 million of content produced in 2014 has returned $23 million in lifetime gross profit.
A lot of the viewership on this cohort of titles from 2014 has happened in the last two to three years. There is more of a timeless effect to the content that we produce. Additionally, here, we ran this new table just to prove the efficiency of our production engine. Because of the in-house staff, we're not paying margins to our outside production studios. I come from a film production background. My first two documentaries went to Netflix. I've done five feature documentaries and series. I know that engine and the way that we're able to produce in-house is extremely efficient. One way to measure this is you take the gross profit of Gaia and Netflix annualized from Q4 filings last year. You divide that into the amortized value of the content on the balance sheet. You can see here the content efficiency multiples.
Netflix is 0.6, and we are 2.0. Next, I'll make sure we got time for Ned to jump in here in a minute. On the international side, we have 98% worldwide rights for our content library. We've been very efficient, not only on the production side where we own all of our rights, but also for the small amount of content that we license from third-party producers and distributors. We ensure that we do have worldwide rights for that library. It's very efficient for us to expand into other languages without the need for foreign operations. We're currently live in Spanish, German, and French with fully dubbed versions of the site and content in those languages with team in-house in our Boulder, Colorado campus that manage those languages.
We can add future languages with the team internally at our Boulder campus and go into those markets without having to have overseas offices or representation in country. Currently, we're 44% international members. We see that growing north of 50% within three years. We have members in over 185 countries. In terms of distribution, we are on all the major app platforms: iPhone, Android, iPad, Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV. We also have third-party distribution on YouTube and Amazon, where we are one of Amazon US's Prime Video channel partners, fastest growing channels in the US. They have an interest in these niche specialty channels, and it's a good barometer for us in terms of the growing niche that we're a part of. We also have Fios, Xfinity, and Comcast. Down at the bottom of this slide, I find this very interesting.
You can see the social proof that we have in the market. On the iOS App Store, we have 128,000 ratings from members of 4.8 out of 5, which is an incredible rating. On Amazon, 15,000 ratings, 4.1, and Trustpilot, 10,000 ratings, 4.3. Ranking very high there on these not so much Net Promoter Scores, but certainly social proof in the app infrastructure. Next, these are just some future growth and ARPU and retention drivers that I think are noteworthy. Then Ned's going to jump into the finances. We launched Marketplace Q3 of 2024. This includes retreats, courses, and physical products that we offer to our members at a 10% discount. We call it like a conscious Costco model. You can tour Egypt with one of the talent from our show. It would normally cost you $11,000.
Gaia members get a 10% discount, which makes it $10,000. We keep about 20% of the transaction on average. The remainder goes to the tour operator. We book that 20% as a 100% gross margin. This is not about booking vanity sales. This is about continuing to add high gross margin revenue to the top line. You will see potentially in some of the projections that Jim has out there, our gross margin is stepping up from 86% incrementally slightly for 2025 and beyond. As I mentioned earlier, we have a price increase slated in March of 2026 with the AI and community rollout. We recently did a capital raise with Roth, and Ned can speak about their coverage shortly. We raised money for AI and community, which we intend to roll out also in Q1 of 2026.
These two product updates, and AI is almost table stakes. We need to do it. Instead of licensing our content to these mega LLMs, we're going to keep our content, train our own model on it, and launch that for our members as sort of a research assistant and tool within the app. On the community side, we're building a Reddit meets Meetup.com, meets Facebook groups, and even WhatsApp so our members can connect together, chat on these topics, and eventually have in-person meetups all around the world. This will be the key differentiator that we have as a brand that separates us from other mainstream streamers. Ned, over to you, and I'll jump back on for Q&A.
Yeah, thank you, James.
Yeah, so just to pick up a little bit on those last two points around our AI and community strategic initiatives, we did have a raise back in early February. The reason we were able to do that in such an efficient fashion is we had a very strong 2024 in Q4 specifically. Taking a look at our P&L from last year, we surpassed the $90 million revenue mark, which represented 13, sorry, 12% growth on revenue. We continued to improve our gross margins. That moved up a point from 85% to 86%. Then our very strong cash contribution margin at 93%. You can kind of see what we're spending on expenses. I'll elaborate about the scale of our business in just a minute here. If you go all the way to the bottom, it's free cash flow.
We finished 2024 at over $2.7 million in free cash flow. We've been free cash flow positive for the last seven quarters running. Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, Jim and the other analysts that are covering us have us continuing to grow the top line. We'll be accelerating our revenue growth from 12-13 or 14% next year to over $101 million. Our free cash flow will also be doubling from that $2.7 million to approximately $5.7 million in 2025. I wanted to kind of share that with you. Some people asked, "Why did you need to raise money? Why did you need to raise the money?" It was really to accelerate AI and the community opportunity immediately.
We have a very strong board, and they had said, "You really need to run, not walk when it comes to AI." We needed to invest the money now, and we're building that team. We've built part of the team and are continuing to build it so that those AI and community opportunities come to fruition here in 2025 and are ready to go in Q1 of next year when we intend to raise prices, as James just covered. Here is a revenue benchmark scenario, just kind of taking a look at what we see in the future. That first column is really approximately what the consensus is for Gaia for 2025. We'll be just over $100 million in revenue and driving to over $5.5 million in free cash flow. What is really impressive about our model is the scale.
Because as we grow to 150 million and beyond, you'll see that our marketing expense continues to be around that 40-42% of revenue. That's our sales engine, our customer acquisition engine. Really, our operating expenses and other portions of the business don't have to go anywhere close to the rate of our revenue. That falls to the bottom line. You'll see our gross margins will continue to improve to kind of 87-88%. Cash contribution margin kind of that 93-94%. When you look at our adjusted EBITDA margin, that jumps from 17% this year to mid-20s and 30% out at $200 million in revenue. Our free cash flow more than doubles from 6% this year to when we reach these other levels, we'll be at 15% and 22%.
One of the things that I've been sharing with people, I'll elaborate on my background in just a minute here, but I come from the SaaS high-tech industry. I really think about Gaia as a SaaS company, as a spiritual or content SaaS company. With our high margins at 93% cash contribution and high gross margin, a recurring revenue stream that's growing and a deferred revenue that's improving. There is something called a Rule of 40, which is a best-in-class benchmark that we use in the SaaS world. We will be closing in on that Rule of 40, which is growing your revenue percentage along with your EBITDA percentage, the combination of those two at 40% and above. As we get to high teens on revenue growth and mid-20s on EBITDA, we'll surpass that 40%.
All it really means is that you're a fast-growth at high-profitability levels business, and that's what we strive to be. Quick look at the balance sheet, very strong balance sheet as we close out 2024, just under $6 million in cash that will obviously grow this year, not only with the infusion on the raise, but also in the free cash flow we'll generate throughout the year. One of the things we always like to share is some things that are not on our balance sheet. Some companies might have the member base that they include in the balance sheet, but we don't do that for a number of reasons. We off-balance sheet have about $180 million of value around our 850-plus thousand members. Our media library, I'm sorry, the member base is worth almost $300 million at 296.
Our media library has been valued at $180 million. We have net operating losses of almost $19 million. I guess the point here is that in addition to a strong balance sheet, these off-balance sheet items really put in perspective how strong the business is. If we were ever had to, I'm not saying we anticipate we ever would, but have to go and sell this business, it would be worth on paper over $20 per share and even in a fire sale kind of mid-teens. I think that helps put in perspective the value of our stock price. Lastly, here's just a quick view of our management team. In addition to myself, I've been at this for quite a long time. A lot of high-tech companies like Cisco Systems and Oracle and Akamai out there on the East Coast.
You've heard from James, and he sold his company, Food Matters, and started FMTV. A lot of people are aware of our founder, Jirka Rysavy, who started these very successful companies here in the Boulder, Colorado area back in the 1990s, namely Corporate Express, which became Staples Advantage, as well as Wild Oats, a health food company or store that he sold to Whole Foods. Since we became Gaia, or previously known as Gaiam, we've been on the Nasdaq since 1999. That is 25 years as a publicly traded company. Jirka has been very successful at incubating companies such as Real Goods Solar, which he then sold off in around the 2007 timeframe. We have since had some subsidiaries that were in the process of incubating and rolling out later this year.
With that, I think I'm going to turn it back over to Jim, or we can just open it up for questions. James and I would love to hear from you.
Great. Yeah. A couple of questions from the audience, some from myself. The price increase that you put in effect last year, what percentage of your membership now is paying the higher price, and how much is left to go?
Sure. We did increase prices for new members around Q2 and Q3, depending on the country and the currency. We're currently in USD, CAD, MXN, GBP, EUR, AUD, and NZD. In LATAM, we moved away from local currencies there just because of the instability, and we have a LATAM USD pricing. We increased for new members in those territories Q2 and Q3.
We did a test in the U.K. in Q3 with raising the prices for existing members because over the lifecycle of the business, as we've increased prices historically, we've "grandfathered" people on legacy pricing, and that could be $7.99 from a company we acquired or $9.99 from old Gaia pricing, and then we moved from $11.99 to $13.99. At this $13.99 price point for existing members starting in Q4, we increased the prices for all of those people on legacy pricing. For most of them, they jumped up 18% from $11.99 to $13.99. Some of them moved up from $9.99 to $13.99, which is a much bigger jump, closer to 40%.
Given that this price increase for existing members included a lot of people on legacy pricing that could have been a much larger price increase, we're very happy with the result in terms of the sort of net churn impact from that specific cohort. Like I mentioned, we have a 6.3% churn impact from that price increase, which is at least 18%. The delta on that we're making is 10-11, even 12%. We're very happy with those results. As we sit here now, we probably have still of the 856,000 members on our total member base, around 80,000-100,000 that are still outstanding because of the annual membership tier. The annual members where the price increase was notified at the end of last year, their price increase anniversaries roll out throughout the next 12 months.
We will see those price increases still flow through until October for the annual members.
With the investment in AI, one of the ways you will be using, plan to use it is your Gaia community. Now, can you just talk a little bit more about that? Is that something you can monetize, or will that just help improve retention rates for further price increases?
With AI and community, these capital investments, first of all, they are capitalized, so will not hit the P&L until we launch them in March of 2026. The way that we see it in terms of driving improvements in the business, on the AI front, first of all, it is table stakes. Every company needs to be somewhat AI-enabled.
Instead of us licensing out our content library to third party, we're choosing to maintain control over that exclusive content, which is a huge benefit to us as a business in terms of media replacement costs as well. It's over $150 million, which we don't include on the balance sheet. That will drive, we believe, retention improvements in the product experience because people will be able to have a richer experience engaging with the product as a research assistant, chatting with "experts" or querying certain topics in platform. That's a retention metric. On the community side, we see it as retention and growth. On the retention side, as people store more personalized data inside the platform, there's a high propensity for people to stick.
For instance, those who have a streaming service like Spotify tend to keep the subscription because they've got their playlist, their summer playlist, and it's got the personalized data in there. It starts to become more sticky. We believe as our members engage more with the platform, make connections with other members in person and digitally, that will drive retention and also network effect from the flywheel effect of referrals. Engaging that community to refer friends and members to either earn points or discounts off Marketplace and so forth will help us either maintain marketing spend and grow faster or reduce our paid marketing spend and supplement and offset that with more member-driven growth.
When you talked about the content, you said there was a long tail on the content.
I mean, is there a shelf life for your programs, or do you think 10 years from now, people will still be watching some of the programs that you have out?
I mean, a lot of our content is timeless per se because it's more about the topic and less about the production quality, although the quality is still very good of everything that we produce. Some of the documentaries that we license, which is a small percentage of our content library, are a little more dated because documentaries somewhat have a point in time where they seem more relevant. For our original programming, we see a lot of legacy viewing. For some shows, most of the viewing happens two, three years into the series being produced. It is a very obscure thing that happens to us compared to most streamers.
However, it's great for our brand because it's much more stable in terms of consumption. Right. One of the questions from the audience basically says, "You'd be able to attract more investors when you start to show positive net income." Based on, I think, one of the tables Ned produced, it sounds like you're not that far from that at this point. Do you have any guidance when you think you start to report a positive EPS?
Yeah. I mean, yeah, Jim, thanks. We've had this question come up before. Ideally, we would see that in 2026. We really need to concentrate here in 2025 executing on all these new strategic investments. By 2026, assuming we continue to execute, we would get there on a quarterly basis in the second half, and we're striving to get it on a full year. That might go into 2027.
Again, we're trying to grow as fast as we can with some of these new products and use the cash in an efficient manner. Certainly by 2027, but ideally, we're shooting to try to make that happen in 2026.
Yeah. It sounds like in terms of free cash flow, though, you expect that to be positive.
Correct. We'll continue to provide positive free cash flow quarterly.
I would point to the revenue performer because what happens with this style of business is that as we continue to grow topline, the incremental improvements in cash flow and EPS become more dramatic in a positive way. We are patiently here executing on topline revenue growth with improvements in free cash flow, and we know the P&L will come. When it does, it will be great.
We will probably see a lot more retail interest in the stock at that point and a much different valuation than we have today.
Great. All right. We are just about out of time, but I just want to say thank you both, Ned and James, for participating today in the presentation. I know we kept you busy as well with meetings the past couple of days. I appreciate that. We are just around the corner from another earnings call, so we will be talking to you in a few weeks.
That's right. We appreciate your coverage, Jim. Thank you.
All right. Thank you.