As always, this will be a 30-minute presentation. We should have a few minutes at the end for Q&A. Questions are always welcome, so if you have a question, just type it into that box at the bottom of your screen. That out of the way, it's all yours, Ned and James.
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jim. So welcome, everybody. Excited to be here. I think we'll just jump to introducing some of the executive team here. So our chairman and founder, Jirka Rysavy, has been in the industry for a number of years. Corporate Express was one of his startups, which grew to 25,000 employees, $4.2 billion pre-internet. Then Wild Oats, which became Whole Foods, then Real Goods Solar IPO. Kiersten Medvedich, I passed the CEO role over to her so I could focus on some outsized licensing and other opportunities for 2026 and beyond. Just in the middle of this year, she is now, I think, 10 years at the company. Ex-Sony Pictures and a fantastic teammate alongside the two of us.
Myself here, came to the company by way of acquisition in 2019, became the second largest internal shareholder, and have had a number of positions since then, from board to audit to CEO and now BizDev. And my offsider here, Ned, I'll let him introduce himself.
Yeah, hey, everybody. Ned Preston, coming up on three years here at Gaia. And prior to that, I was from Colorado, but spent about 10-plus years in the San Francisco Bay Area, 10 years in Chicago, and the last 12 years in Boston. So making my way back to Colorado, but as you can see from the slide, worked at a lot of high-tech companies. And now I find myself here at Gaia, and we look forward to telling you more about it.
A much more impressive set of logos there, Ned, than me.
I've been around the block.
So at the core of Gaia's business is a subscription video on demand channel serving an aggregate niche of content around personal growth and transformation, ancient wisdom, and unexplained mysteries, wellness, yoga, and meditation. Some of our members call us spiritual Netflix or conscious Netflix. And I think pre-COVID, these categories of content in the media space were somewhat unknown. And now we call it the “Joe Rogan effect.” They've become much more popular in terms of the mainstream, and we are riding the wave of that growth and popularity as the business continues to expand and grow. So we have a monthly and annual membership tier for our core members. And then we have a Gaia Plus premium membership tier at $299 a year, which includes live broadcasts. We have a live events center on our headquarters here at Gaia. We do seven events a year.
These are deep-dive content experiences based on our best-performing shows and talent, but we have about 300 people in person at around $600 a ticket, and then we live stream and replay that on the platform as well. In terms of our core demographic, we skew older, female, highly educated, high-disposable household income. We call her Celeste, and a lot of our asset managers are familiar with this archetype. Many of our long-term holding investors, actually, their wives are subscribers. If you look here, I mean, this first or sort of second slide here explaining the business shows one of our core sort of areas of expertise and also gives us an enormous opportunity to leverage value in the company.
As AI is starting to or continuing to expand, one of the things that is most valuable is an exclusive content library and an exclusive and unique and highly valuable and niche data set, and we've spent the last decade building this up, and we have had a moat around our content. We have never, ever, ever gone to market with our content, so we have a huge asset sitting on our balance sheet, which we are looking to leverage into 2026, which I'll explain further. In terms of the content, we have 90% exclusivity over our 10,000 titles across four languages, and we have a very low cost of production. That top right photo is a photo from one of our studios at our headquarters here in Boulder, Colorado, which is on our balance sheet. It's a 13-acre campus, 150,000 sq ft facility. We fly talent in.
We're 30 minutes from DIA. We produce on-site, and that gives us a very low cost of production, and you can compare the content efficiency multiple based on our gross profit to the amortized value of content on our balance sheet, and you see the Netflix there. We are almost like a 4x more efficient. On the finance side, we have been positive Free Cash Flow for the last seven quarters, so Ned and I joined mid-2023 as executives. Since that time, we've been generating positive Free Cash Flow while growing top line in the double digits, 86% gross margin and 93% cash contribution, and also this accelerating CAC to LTV. Our CAC has remained relatively stable over the past six years, and yet our LTV has doubled, more than doubled.
And so especially in our core markets of U.S., Canada, and some European markets where we have very high LTV. And so stable CAC with expanding LTV is really starting to show up in the business now. In terms of addressable market, we see a five million subscriber target for Gaia. Obviously, global SVOD households is continuing to expand quite rapidly with 1.8 billion by 2029. And so we think a five million subscriber target is within range, especially as this sort of aggregate of niches that we serve continues to become more "mainstream." And we are the preeminent player in that category.
So in terms of 2026, I think what's very interesting for us is Ned and I joined 2023, and we spent the last two years just focusing on continued top line growth in the low double digits and also incremental improvements in free cash flow and EPS and EBITDA. Now we are adding in new growth opportunities, which we've been laying the groundwork for this year, which will have a full year of impact in 2026. And this will be on top of the core business growth. So AI and content licensing right up top here. So we've spent 10 years producing this exclusive content library that we have never, ever, ever licensed out. So there's two ways that we're looking to monetize content library in 2026. The first is around AI training data. So licensing our video training data only.
So not our transcripts, not our exclusive content in terms of the data, but only the video pixels on screen data. So the large AI companies are looking for video data to train on. This will be a new revenue stream for us in 2026. Content licensing as well. So instead of doing an ad-supported platform, having some linear programming licensing opportunities, FAST and satellite, for instance, in 2026, which will give us an additional revenue stream on our content library. AI Chat, we launched this about a month ago officially. Now we've just surpassed one million prompts with the AI Chat. So this is trained exclusively on our content. And it gives our users the ability to interact with the product while they're watching content, going deeper on some content verticals. And we're very excited with the engagement thus far.
And we do believe that this will lead to further retention and potentially new member acquisition channels in 2026 as people are looking for alternate chat experiences. Gaia Marketplace, we did launch at the end of 2024 and 2025. We've been starting to sort of lean into that further. And 2026, we have an enormous amount of inventory. If you go to marketplace.gaia.com, you'll see that. We just had 60 people return from a trip to Peru with one of the talent from our shows. They paid around $9,000 per person to go to that, of which we keep around 20% as a 100% gross margin. So Marketplace is starting to hit its stride, and we see a full year 2026 impact there. Igniton, we recently raised $6 million at a $106 million post-money valuation in this privately owned subsidiary, which we consolidate.
We own 67% of this entity, and we've just started selling to our members. And I think Ned was on the call saying that we'll be at about a $3 million run rate in this business by the end of the year, which we wish to continue to expand upon in 2026. We have a price increase in April next year based upon the data that we have from our previous price increase. And then a Gaia community technology stack in 2026. So many irons in the fire, a lot of ways to win. And we're very excited about the full year of 2026 and its impact on Gaia 2.0. Here's a quick slide on the Igniton business. So Jirka, as you saw from the top of the deck here, is a seasoned entrepreneur. And his vision with this company has been in place for some time.
And we've just recently started scaling investment and go-to-market here. And we see the synergy with this business is that we can sell this quantum-enhanced supplement to our member base and then to partners and affiliates in the space and practitioner distribution. Essentially, how is this different to other supplements out there? Well, it's charged with a quantum technology. It's embedded with a quantum technology that we have proprietary exclusive license for. It was technology that came out of a privately funded lab in CERN in Switzerland. And the results are exceptional. If you go to Igniton.com, I-G-N-I-T-O-N.com, and you click on the Cognition product, we've only been selling a few months to our member base. And take a minute to read some of the testimonials. This is what I believe to be one of the most powerful Cognition supplements ever.
And this new category that we're creating here, this quantum energy-enhanced supplement, is something that is very cutting edge, very exciting. And we're looking forward to how this will continue to contribute to Gaia as a company. This is revenue and members. You see them stepping up here, 24 or just over 90. 25, I think consensus is around 99. Members here, 856, 880 for third quarter. And then on the ARPU slide next, we have, I think, about 107 for the year, which will kick up again in 2025. We report this annually because of the price increase. And then in 2026, it should accelerate further as we add in these additional revenue streams.
And then GP per employee, I think just going back to 2018- 2024, and then third quarter 2025, I think the sort of pattern that this represents is that we're able to expand top line revenue and gross profit while maintaining a far reduced incremental upstep in expenditure on the SG and A side, in particular payroll related. So we have about 105 FTEs generating about $100 million of revenue this year and about $86.860 million in GP. So we see this number going north of a million, and we'll continue to expand as the company grows. International-wise, we have international rights for 98% of our content library. We are currently live in Spanish, German, and French with localized native language titles. And we also have our language leads and foreign language team in our office here at our headquarters in Colorado.
So this 150,000 sq ft, 13-acre campus and studio facilities so that we have the capacity to expand into other territories and markets without having to have overseas operations. So it gives us a global hub in order to be able to do that. And with AI, we'll be able to expand into other languages more efficiently in the future when we choose to do so. In terms of distribution, we have web direct. Then we have all of the app platforms here. And if any of you are on an iPhone or Android or App Store, you can look into the App Store now. On the core App Store, I just looked the other day. I think it's 132,000 ratings now, 4.8 stars, so an enormous amount of social proof. Then Amazon and Trustpilot here, which are all third-party reviews.
And then we have our third-party distribution on the top right here, which is YouTube, Amazon, and Comcast, Xfinity. And so you can one-click add this subscription through those platforms, which we call third-party. We do limit the revenue attribution to circa 20% of our revenue from those third parties because we believe that owning the conscious lifecycle of the customer from integrating with interacting with our content to attending a live event to going on a tour to Peru to buying an Igniton supplement is so much more valuable in the long run. So we keep around 80% of our revenue from these direct sources. Okay, I'm going to just transition into a couple of three financial slides, and then we want to make sure we leave enough time for Jim to ask questions and field any others.
So last year, our full year, 2024, again, was just over $90 million in revenue. You can see our very high cash contribution margin at 93% and gross margin. Those of you who have maybe heard me talk before, it's a major reason why I came to Gaia, just with my background in high tech and specifically SaaS. When I came in here, I was like, we're looking at now a $100 million recurring revenue stream at very high margins. This is a very enticing business model. And so we'll continue to grow that, which I'll just show in a minute. But we finished last year just over $15 million in EBITDA, or 17%, and with a free cash flow of $2.7 million or 3%.
How that looks going forward, just from a pro forma revenues benchmarks standpoint, is this year will, for a full year, just be under $100 million. But you can kind of see how this scales our business model. Because at $100 million, we would still have about 17% or $17 million in adjusted EBITDA and generate free cash flow. As James said earlier, we're seven quarters in a row looking to make our Q4, eight quarters in a row of positive free cash flow. But just look at how this scales out to $150 million and $200 million, is that we really don't have to continue to invest a whole lot more in SG&A. We're extremely efficient. And at $200 million, that free cash flow almost quadruples from a free cash flow margin standpoint. So a very good and solid, efficient business model.
And then lastly, from a balance sheet standpoint, a very strong balance sheet finishing Q3 back at the end of September with over $14 million in cash. That does not include a $10 million line of credit, which we have not had to lean into at the end of any quarter since we've been here. And then in the assets or in the liability standpoint, deferred revenue continues to grow, just south of $20 million at $19.3 million at the close of Q3. That is another good SaaS indicator that if you have a high deferred revenue balance, it helps you call numbers and look ahead to the future. What's not on our balance sheet is things like our media library replacement costs of over $180 million, our member base of 883,000 members, conservatively valued at $306 million, and then an NOL of almost $19 million.
And then from a liability standpoint, we do from an Igniton valuation standpoint, again, to highlight something James mentioned earlier, we own two-thirds of a $106 million post-money valuation for that subsidiary. So with that, Jim, I'm going to turn it back over to you, and we'll take your questions.
Great. Great. Thank you. Here we go. All right. I have a couple of my own, and then we have a few coming from the audience as well. But start out with price increases. The company on Netflix and the other big streamers, they've been pretty religious about putting in price increases every year. I know my bills double what it was when I first started. You guys just put in one so far. Can you just talk about how that went and what your plans are for future price increases?
So you're right.
I mean, the streaming industry has been steadily increasing prices. It's affectionately known as streamflation, and at the end of 2024, as a team, we sat down and decided to do a test project in the United Kingdom. We had, up until that date, grandfathered all existing members on previous pricing tiers and never forced an upgrade to previous members, and so we did a test in the U.K., which, with currency at the time, I think it was around a 30% increase, and we saw the delta from that increase was very significantly weighted in the favor of Gaia, and it gave us a test case to show that the market was becoming much more familiar with price increases from a streaming perspective, and so that encouraged us to roll out a company-wide price increase for about 93% of our direct member base globally. There's consent and non-consent countries.
And we increased the price $2 from $11.99 to $13.99 at a minimum because some were on lower prices. And on that 18% price increase, we had a total churn impact of around 7 to mid-7%, so a 10%- 11% delta on that price increase. And that put us at around $2 under Netflix's standard pricing tier, which we believe is a price where members are not going to overtly question the value. And that's sort of a price point that's set in the marketplace. Netflix has further gone on and increased their prices. And so we want to follow that with a $2 price increase in Q2 of next year, which will take us to $15.99.
And we believe that we'll be able to also make the delta on that price increase and have that flow through to the bottom line next year, along with adding some of these additional revenue streams into the business.
All right. And that was my next question is one of those additional revenue streams, the Igniton product. You've got a little under 900,000 members that you're selling to. And I assume that the marketing costs are relatively low. I mean, it's a pretty captive audience that you're selling to.
I mean, it's the cost of sending an email or a notification. So very low. So essentially, with Igniton, we are staging the rollout based on lowest cost, highest synergy channels first, so to our direct member base, then to partners and affiliates who promote to their communities, and then practitioner distribution, and then paid advertising and infomercials, digital DTC, etc.
So as we start with these first channels, we see very low-cost go-to-market there with the existing member base. And we're continuing to find and explore new ways to reach our members with this offer. Marketplace is the best sort of channel for that right now, which, like Ned mentioned on the previous call, I think we'll exit this year at around a $3 million run rate in that business, and we'll look to continue to expand upon that.
But that is a huge market. We had a company present earlier today who's selling supplements. I mean, it's billions of dollars, that market. Huge. Yeah, huge. So do you think, or do you have plans? Once the initial launch to your customer base, to your subscriber base is complete, do you have plans to expand to the broader market?
Of course.
We want to step into the different channels, taking the learnings from the previous channel into the next channel so that as we get into the higher-cost channels of infomercials, paid advertising, etc., we have as much data as possible so that we create the least negative impact from a P&L perspective from that entity on the group. And of course, the category is very large, and we are creating a brand new category within this of these quantum energy-enhanced supplements, which has never existed before. The technology has been in development for at least 10 years. And we're very excited to be the proprietary global exclusive license holders to that technology and be able to bring this to market. And we're very excited about that.
Obviously, we're public in having raised $6 million at a $106 million post-money valuation, of which we own two-thirds of, which is privately held and separately funded and has their own balance sheet. We're very excited about the prospects there.
Jim, a key differentiator is that we're not just another supplements company. It's really a technology play. Whereas we're starting with cognition and longevity, which are very popular areas right now, longevity on 60 Minutes a couple of three weeks ago, cognition is an area that is constantly in the news. A lot of these supplements companies are concentrating on those areas. We can use this technology on other attributes like peptides, topical face creams, things like sleep. We have some other SKUs which we'll introduce to the Igniton brand in the months and years ahead.
All right.
And the other investor buzzword this month is AI, and you guys are part of that. Can you just give a little more color on where you're using AI and how you think that helps increase the revenue per subscriber?
`Yeah, so multiple ways that we're using AI. First, enhancing performance internally across our engineering, marketing, and production teams. Secondarily, by introducing this AI chat experience to our Gaia community, so we've trained our AI chat on our exclusive content library, and it gives our members an ability to dive deeper into our content and also have this so-called AI spiritual guide, which provides a very different type of answer than your mainstream models and something much more empathetic to our community.
And within the first month of officially launching this, we have surpassed 1 million prompts in this technology platform to our members, which gives us a very strong signal that this enhanced engagement, typically we see result in further retention. And for next year, we'll have a full year impact of having this product enhancement integrated into the experience for our direct members, which we see as a very, very positive sign that we are on the bow wave of the AI movement. And the capital that we raised earlier this year. We fast-tracked investment into building out this technology. And it's been the beginning of it. It is very promising. And then on the other end of the AI spectrum is unlocking the value of our library to AI hyperscalers and other AI companies that are acquiring training data sets in order to train their model on.
So excluding our exclusive content, the transcriptions and the audio, just the video only, we can license that to these training data companies and then create further returns on our exclusive content library. And so these three ways that we are utilizing AI and leveraging into the business have really just come online in the past few months. And so we'll have a full year impact of that in 2026, which will add to the core business.
All right. One of the questions from the audience is basically asked, what differentiates you from some of the other streamers that are out there? And why do you resonate so strongly with your customers, your subscribers?
So I'll answer this by way of a story. Ned was on the train at DIA, how you go from terminal A to B to C. And he was flying out to the East Coast.
There were two people on the train having a conversation. They turned around and said, "You should speak to that guy," because Ned had a Gaia backpack on. He said, "You should speak to that guy because he's a Gaia subscriber." So what this told me is that Gaia members are very fanatical. They're very devoted to this story of Gaia, to this idea of leveling up human consciousness, frequency, and vibration through different types of content, through different experts that we feature on the platform. If you're on a train at DIA, you don't point to somebody and say, "That's a Netflix subscriber. We're friends." This type of connection happens only in highly, highly niche market segments. We are an aggregate niche player from yoga and meditation to spiritual growth and transformation to metaphysics and ancient civilizations and ancient technology, all under one umbrella.
And so this story, to me, tells the story that Gaia members are so much more identity attached to the brand and willing to stick around and come to our live events. We just had 60 people go to Peru with one of the teachers of our show. Imagine paying $119 a year for a service, Jim, and then shelling out $9,000 to go on a trip with one of the talent from the show. This is the sort of power that the brand has. And for the first time ever in the company's history, in 2026, we'll be adding on these sort of ARPU accelerators into the business, not only from a company perspective on the licensing side, but also full year impact of doing this on the consumer side.
So really owning this conscious lifecycle of the customer and enhancing the community with a technology build-out, which we've slated as launching mid-next year, which will help connect our members even further.
And we were really ahead of the curve. I mean, all those elements that James just went through are becoming more mainstream. I'm sure a lot of people on the call today, and when we talk to investors two or three years ago, when we'd go talk to people, they'd be like, "What are you talking about?" And now, between Joe Rogan podcasts and any sort of podcasts I listen to while I travel or on the weekends or news articles and whatnot, a lot of these areas are becoming more mainstream. So our 900,000 members we anticipate will grow just because of a better product, but also just a general awareness to the customer bases.
Well, that's great. We are at time. I just want to say thank you again, Ned and James, for presenting. And I know you have a busy couple of days of meetings. We appreciate that as well.
Thank you, Jim. Take care.
Thank you.