Quick presentation here, and then towards the end I'm going to bring my off-sider here, Ned Preston, CFO, for some finance slides. At Gaia here, the core of our product is a subscription video on-demand service that speaks to a growing global niche audience. We have a monthly and annual membership tier, and then we have a premium tier which includes live broadcast. The content categories we speak to are categories that are very much outside of the mainstream streaming industry. We're much more on what's sort of called the edutainment side of the category, which is educating, entertaining content, typically documentaries, series, and also practice content. The content categories we appeal to, and these are all available under the one membership, are personal growth, transformation, ancient wisdom and unexplained mysteries, wellness, yoga, and meditation.
The demographic we speak to excludes female, it excludes older, highly educated, high disposable income, and a lot of spare time. What I find by speaking with the Gaia members is that a lot of people come to our platform after going through a life crisis, typically death of a loved one, chronic illness, diagnosis, midlife crisis, of which it used to be one back in our days. When I was growing up, you'd have one midlife crisis; now people are having multiple midlife crises. This crisis of meaning and purpose, what does it mean to be human? A lot of the experts we have on our platform have series and content related to this primary question.
We have experts on here like Deepak Chopra, Greg Braden, Bruce Lipton, Joe Dispenza, people you may or may not have heard of, but our demographic and our core avatar, we call her Celeste. She's an early 50s woman, and you might know some of them, mid 50s, and she loves Gaia, she loves our content, and she's a core subscriber. If we look here at some of the finance highlights, we have an enormous amount of leverage in the business. For 2024, we're a free cash flow positive for the full year and for Q4. We operate on an 86% gross margin and a 93% cash contribution. Ned and I like to call ourselves fierce defenders of gross margin, so you will not see us booking any vanity sales in our business. We also have an accelerating acquisition cost to LTV growth efficiency.
In 2018, let's say we're acquiring customers at around $100 a customer, the lifetime value was about $280, 2.8 times the acquisition cost to LTV. That's now accelerated to over 6X acquisition cost to LTV, so we're getting the same efficiency in terms of customer acquisition, but a lot higher return on the customer lifetime value. In terms of total addressable market, we like to see it as a function of growing SVOD households globally, of which many people have two or three services. We have subscribers willing to pay a subscription and interested in at least one Gaia topic. Some of the streamers will touch on some of the topics we have, whether it's ancient civilizations, psychedelics, spiritual growth, self-healing, transformation. They'll do one show out of the thousands of items they have.
That only helps us grow because they eventually find Gaia, and it's the home of this content. We have a huge library. Then we have a 26 million total TAM with a 5 million subscriber target. In terms of current subscribers and revenue, on the left-hand side is our revenue step up here, and on the right-hand side is our members. We closed last year at 856,000 active paying members. In terms of sustainable growth transition, our ARPU continues to trend upwards. This is a function of price increases, growing our premium membership tier, and also a new initiative we have called Gaia Marketplace, which I'll speak to a little later. We also have growing gross profit per employee.
I think what's fascinating about this model is that we're able to scale top-line growth with very small incremental investments in payroll and related costs, and you can see that in the GP per employee. Also, fourth quarter was over $800,000. We anticipate this going north of $1 million and then north of $1.5 million as the business continues to expand. Welcome. Next, we have original content here. Some of the secret sauce of Gaia is that we produce our own content. A lot of studios and mainstream streamers outsource their production to third-party production houses. I have an entrepreneur and production background. My first two projects went to Netflix. I've done five feature films and documentaries. My most recent one was executive produced by Joaquin Phoenix. I am familiar with this space.
When you're a streamer and you outsource your production to mainstream production houses, you pay a margin on that. Our hourly cost per production is about $35,000 an hour. Major streamers can be north of $10 million an hour. The reason we're able to achieve that efficiency is we have a full in-house production capability on our campus. In Boulder, Colorado, we have a 13-acre, 150,000 sq ft campus. It's on our balance sheet. This campus has one of the biggest studio facilities in Colorado. We fly our talent into DIA . It's about 30 minutes from the airport. We pull them straight into a studio, which you can see a quick snapshot on the top right there. We build a set. We do an original series in two or three days.
We pay them an upfront fee, 90%+ of the time without an ongoing royalty. We own the content in perpetuity worldwide. We produce that with staff, so we're not paying that loading rate. We're not beholden to any of the writer's strikes or any of the sort of challenges that can sometimes happen in the entertainment industry. The net result of this from an investor perspective is that we're able to spend a lot less as a percentage of revenue on content and still provide a deep library to our members. It's exclusive. Additionally, the second bullet point here shows that we have a lot of viewership on legacy content. Where a lot of streamers will have to have a hit, like Apple has Severance right now, they're getting a lot of growth because of that hit.
Subscribers come in and watch content from 2016, and they're like, "Wow, look at this. This is new to them." $2 million of content that we produced in 2014, the year that the channel was born, we've returned $23 million in gross profit off that cohort of content. We calculate that on a royalty pool deal with a dollar per minute attribution. Additionally, you can see the efficiency we have on our content. Obviously, comparing to Netflix is somewhat a fool's errand, but on the content side, we can do that. Our gross profit from the full year of 2024 there, compared—sorry, this is annualized from Q3 numbers, I believe. It's not updated. You have the amortized value of the—sorry, no, that is our gross profit, full year 2024.
Gross profit for both of the businesses, and then the amortized value of the content on the balance sheet, and then the multiple there. Netflix has a 0.6% multiple. We have a 2X multiple, just showing the efficiency in our content production. In terms of international expansion, we own 98% of the rights globally to our content library. It is very efficient for us to expand internationally without adding a team locally. I spoke to some investors this morning about this very topic. We have French, Spanish, and German language versions of the site and content, so fully dubbed and localized versions of the site in those territories. We are expanding very quickly in the DACH region, in particular in Europe, French-speaking Europe, and the world. We see languages more than territories. We see French-speaking, German-speaking, English-speaking, and Spanish-speaking, and less territory-based.
All of those language teams are based in our head office campus in Boulder, Colorado. It is a little bit of the United Nations at our headquarters. We are able to expand additional languages without having to have local operations in those territories. We build the language leads and teams in our office. Currently, we are 44% international members. We will be over 50% within three years. We have members in 185 different countries around the world. In terms of distribution, we have what is called direct and then third-party. Third-party distribution you see up on the top right there, that is YouTube, Amazon, Fire, Six Minutes, and Comcast. If you are a subscriber to any one of those platforms, you can one-click add the channel. If you are on Prime Video, for instance, we are part of the Prime Video channel infrastructure.
We're one of Amazon's fastest-growing channels in North America, especially in the niche channel business. We have apps across all of the major platforms: iPhone, Android, iPad, Roku, Fire TV, and Apple TV. You can also see the ratings there. You probably can't read it that well, but bottom right is 4.8 out of 5 on 128,000 ratings on the App Store. This is an enormous amount of social proof in the brand and shows that we have a raving fan database. If any of you have an iPhone right now, if you go to the iOS app, we'll have 17,000 ratings, 4.8 star as well. Enormous social proof. Amazon there, nearly 15,000 ratings, 4.1. Trustpilot, which is a third-party customer satisfaction platform, has 4.3 on 10,000 reviews. It's not just me blowing smoke up here.
There's a lot of people that love this brand. In terms of future growth, ARPU and retention drivers, we have a number of irons in the fire, as my off-sider Ned would say here. Gaia Marketplace, we launched at the end of last year. This is essentially our conscious Costco model for our community. We offer retreats, tours, travel, courses and training programs, and physical products at a 10% discount to our members. We've essentially curated these and put them onto this new site. We launched in Q3 last year. The average order volume for a new purchase on our marketplace was $1,100. We're taking someone paying $119 a year who has high disposable income, a lot of spare time on their hands, loves this content category.
We're saying, "Do you want to go to Egypt or Peru on a tour with one of the talent from our shows? Do you want to go to Costa Rica for a transformation event? Do you want to study a certificate in yoga or meditation or transformation?" Average $1,100 purchase, step up from $119 a year. There is an enormous amount of value extraction that can take place in this new business unit. We are early with rolling this out, and we continue to expand this as we grow. One of the things that we love about Marketplace is, as I mentioned before, Ned and I are fierce defenders of gross margin. If we book a member on an $11,000 tour to Egypt with one of the talent from our shows, we give them a 10% discount, so it's $10,000.
We pay roughly $8,000 to the tour provider, but we collect all the cash upfront until the tour happens or shortly before. We only book the $2,000 margin on that at 100% gross margin. You will see in some of the performance slides that Ned will be presenting shortly that our gross margin will actually continue up north of 86% as we grow. We recently did a price increase at the end of last year. It was 18% for US, a little more for GBP and Euro. That was very successful. We more than made the delta on that price increase when we look at any churn impact from that member cohort. We are planning another price increase in March 2026. That will be about every year and a half cycle. Prior to that, it was about every four years.
Now, we are lagging Netflix's tier by about $4, so we still have headroom there, we believe. We recently did a capital raise a few months ago for AI expansion and Gaia community. One of the things that we noticed from our research is that when people interact with the product, they retain at a higher rate. We are wanting to build two other interaction possibilities within the product on top of our content. First is AI. One of our board members, Keor Patel, he was early in building Amazon. He got 5% for about $500,000, which you can imagine how much that's worth today. He was an early investor in OpenAI. He was an early investor in Anthropic. He built the test platform for Netflix. He still gets invited to their board meetings.
He suggested that we build our own AI platform and not to license our content library to any of these major LLM players. We are using part of the proceeds from the capital raise to build our own AI wrapper that we will have agnostically wired up to multiple LLMs that we can launch inside our platform. As people are watching content, they'll be able to right there and then inside the platform, query this AI, have a chat with it, discover more content on this topic, and increase stickiness within the product experience. This will launch around the same time as the price increase, 2026. Additionally, at the core of what we do, we see ourselves more of a community company than anything else.
I'm sure that many of you have subscriptions to Paramount or maybe Netflix or Disney, yet you don't feel that any of those brands are a community. They're more a streaming platform, and it's like Internet 1.0. Here is information. Internet 2.0 is that here is a community connecting together, which is social media. Internet 3.0 is tokenization and digital value exchange. We are a Web 2.0 company where we have a deep connection with our member base. On our campus in Colorado, we have a live event center, which is part of our premium tier. Our Gaia members come to that center in Boulder from India, from Australia, which is my native country, if you haven't told by my accent just yet. If you were guessing in British, you were wrong.
From Canada, from within the continental U.S., from the United Kingdom, we have members from all over the world come to events at our headquarters. This is a rich community. They love connecting with each other. We are building out a deeper community technology platform where members will be able to meet in person in local groups all around the world. They will be able to interact with other members. They will be able to chat on certain topics. As we deepen this community connection, not only will it be another engagement point in the brand, we also believe it will lead to further retention and increasing LTV. Given our efficiency on the acquisition side, we will be able to leverage that into further top-line growth and flow through to the bottom line.
Speaking of that, I'm going to pass over to Ned, and I'll be back for a Q&A.
Hello, everybody. My name is Ned Preston. I'm the CFO, and I'm, of course, going to cover numbers with you here. Taking a quick peek back at 2024, it was a very successful year. We finished just over $90 million in revenue. That was 12% growth from our previous year. To elaborate a little bit on some comments that James made around our high margins is a big reason why I came to Gaia, actually. I've been at this for 30 years working for a lot of high-tech companies, most recently with Akamai and PTC up in Boston. Before that, Cisco Systems and Oracle. When I came to Gaia, I was like, "Wait a minute. We have a 93% cash contribution margin and 86% gross margin. We have a growing recurring revenue base of members, and our deferred revenue is going up.
We should be considered almost like a SaaS company. With SaaS companies, a key benchmark in that space is something called the Rule of 40, which is simply your EBITDA margin, which you can see at 17%, and your percent growth on revenue. As that closes on 40%, that just means you're growing at a very profitable rate. We finished last year at 29%, but we do have, within our viewpoint, trying to get to Rule of 40 on a quarterly basis by the end of 2025 and on an annual basis in 2026, which is also the year we plan to become break-even. We put this benchmark scenario in here. Just to remind people of numbers, we were at $90 million last year. That left-hand column is just a bit underneath. I think our consensus is about $102 million or 13-14% growth.
If you look at it, this goes back to the comment James had earlier about leverage. If you look at that left-hand column and directionally call that 2025, we'll finish just over $100 million. We still have the very high margins, and we're generating over $5.5 million in free cash flow, and that's 6% free cash flow margin. As we grow and double that, which we see on the horizon in the next three to four years, that free cash flow will more than triple. Doubling our revenues to $200 million, we can sustain the marketing as a percent of revenue around 40-42%, but we already have everything built into our business model so that you're not having to scale out very much. Another point that I think is extremely valid, especially this week around tariffs and whatnot, is that our product is insulated.
We're not going to realize any sort of price hikes or anything of the sort with what's going on in the current macroeconomic environment. Lastly, taking a peek at our balance sheet, we finished December just under $6 million. That total is now up around $13 million. We raised $7 million back in early February, again, to aim and accelerate in our AI and community initiatives that James just covered. We have a strong balance sheet overall as we close out the year, and it's only getting stronger with some of these elements. One of the things that's not on our balance sheet, you see to the right there in the estimated column, is our media library, our member base, and some NOLs that we have on record.
Our media library is valued at just over $180 million, member base just under $300 million, and the NOLs. This is just another way of kind of showing not only is our balance sheet strong, but if we were to ever, and there's no plans to do so, but if we were ever to try to sell or spin off this business, there's just a lot of value that's included in here. I'll just finish up. This slide presentation, by the way, is on our IR site on the Gaia website. Just a little bit of background on our founder, Jirka Rysavy. A lot of people at these conferences seem to remember him from his Corporate Express days and Wild Oats. He was on the board at Whole Foods and started Gaia. Actually, we have been 25 years on the Nasdaq.
You can see a little bit of background on James and myself. Let me finish there. I see the yellow light. I think we have about five minutes for Q&A. Thanks, by the way. I see a lot of familiar faces out there. There is Henry. Good to see you all. Thanks for checking in with us.
Any questions?
A little bit more about the premium subscription tier and how do you market that to your customer base?
Sure, Eric. In our premium tier, as part of our headquarters, we have this live event center, which can hold about 300 people in person. Plus, we live produce content and live stream content to our premium membership tier. Typically, what we do is we track top-performing talent from our subscription video service and then invite them either on their own or as part of a conference set up with multiple speakers to one of six events that we currently run on an annual basis at our headquarters. These events then live stream to the premium membership tier at $299 a year, which is roughly 3X our annual membership price. They are live dubbed in Spanish currently. We have small translation booths off to the side where we live dub into Spanish.
We do not yet live dub into French and German, which we will do in the future as those languages expand for us. The premium membership tier will also get access to the replays. All in all, we have done about 22 events at our headquarters now, which are all available for replay. We have like a three-day Becoming Supernatural event with Joe Dispenza. It is like about $600 to attend in person, $300 a year for the platform. These events, if you go to one of Joe's events now, are like $1,500 a weekend. We have individual events. The group events we have are based on top-performing content. We have our transformation event in March called Immersion. We have our ancient civilization conference around August. We have a channeling conference in September.
The best thing to do, we've had multiple investors come to these events because they're like, "Is this brand real? What's going on here?" As they come there and they see a room full of people, and at one of the events, like I said, there were people from India, the United Kingdom, Australia that flew in for the weekend for this event. We have a unique, sticky group of members that are willing to do that. It just shows that there's a strength in our community, and there's many ways that we continue to expand and monetize this. We're seeing that membership tier grow at 3X our current total membership growth right now. It's in the high 20s in terms of growth, and we're very excited about that, continuing to drive incremental improvements in ARPU. Thank you. Any further questions? Yes.
Will your events be at other locations?
Will the events be at other locations? Not at this stage. Typically, because we do partner with other events where they're running an event in our sort of category, and they're filming it, and we will do an agreement with them saying, "Yeah, we will license the content and publish it on our site." Typically, we don't introduce that to our premium tier because the quality of the production is not the same. Like here, this is an event. There's one AS7, I think it is, Sony camera out there filming me. Our event has six camera operators. We have a live switching room. We do live color, live audio, live dubbing. It's a 12-person show, and you get essentially what you would get from the Oprah Network or something, a perfectly produced live event.
Most of these conferences, it's a black curtain and something like this. We have like set, it looks totally different. Yes, we do partner with events, but we don't run our own branded events globally simply because we are very cost-efficient as a business, and we want to make sure we don't blow out costs with production unnecessarily. Six seconds to go. Thank you very much. Appreciate your attention. Okay, thank you.