A streaming service. Our overarching theme is creating transformational network to empower a global conscious community. Just by way of brief background, we're a premium SVOD channel. We just did a price increase, which I'll touch on a little bit later, where we raised from $13.99 per month to $15.99. We also have an annual subscription that we just raised from $119- 139.99. Again, this is ad-free, which is unique in our niche market and amongst the other streaming services. We also have a Gaia+ , which is $299 per year, and that's premium live broadcasts.
For example, we just had an immersion conference here on our campus this past weekend on Saturday and Sunday, which we had a lot of our talent, the people that are in our shows come in and present. That represented over 300 people in person. Then we had over 1,000 people that actually paid for a service to come in and watch that live. Of course, our Gaia+ people were able to watch it as well. It was very well attended this past weekend. Our content categories include. A lot of times people think of us as, like, a yoga mats company. Gaia actually started as Gaiam back in early 2000s and then expanded into more of initially DVDs with the Gaia yoga mats.
We became a streaming company back in 2015 and became Gaia instead of Gaiam. Interesting, as I talk to a lot of new people, yoga and meditation really only represents about 15%-20% of our viewership. We've really expanded our shows to be more around overall wellness, ancient wisdom and unexplained mysteries. Our ancient civilizations has very high viewership. Our highest area of watching is personal growth and transformation. I think that surprises some people. Kind of transitioning over in our core demographics, this helps, you know, kind of make a little more sense of that. 65% of our members are female. Our kind of sweet spot is kind of that 45-65 years old people.
Although we are starting to go downstream on that as we start leveraging new product innovations with AI and community. Again, I'll touch on that later, down in this presentation. Yeah, one of the biggest secret sauces or claims to fame for our company is our improving LTV to CAC efficiency ratio. Over the past five years, you can see that that has been improving. We actually just celebrate our eighth consecutive quarter of positive free cash flow. I'll show you in a minute on our annual P&L that we actually finished last year right at $5 million of free cash flow for the year, but it's been the last eight quarters that we've been positive free cash flow.
Very high margins, 87% gross margins, 94% cash contribution margin. Great business model when you have a recurring revenue stream. We have this accelerating CAC to LTV growth efficiency that I described earlier. Our market is quite large. You know, if you look across, we're just over 900,000 members at the end of December 2025. We think that our realistic market is 5 million. A lot of times people ask me, "You know, can you grow internationally faster than you can domestically?" The answer is we can. We have been growing internationally, but we've been growing domestically as well because we really feel as though there's a lot of untouched market potential here in the United States. Although that's changing.
I really do think a lot of the content we have is becoming more mainstream. You're starting to hear a lot more of things. Three years ago, I was living in Boston, and people didn't know what Gaia was. Now when I'm out there in the Northeast, a lot of people have heard of Gaia, which was just great to hear. Our annual revenue has grown over the last five years from just under $67 million. We finished last year at $99 million. We will flash members, you know, just a couple last times here. We did announce on our last earnings call that going forward, we will not share members, and I can explain why in just a moment.
We did finish it at an all-time high of over 903,000 members at the end of 2025. Really from a members reporting standpoint, it's something that a lot of the other streaming companies gave up on reporting members over the last couple years, the Netflixes, Paramounts, Disneys of the world. It's something that we know is important. Obviously, it drives our revenue, but we really have been striving and concentrating more on revenue and ARPU. Really from a member standpoint, we could easily drive this number up over million if we got into markets like India or other places in Asia. Although the ARPU and really the LTV and overall profitability of those members is not what we're looking for.
We will report on other KPIs, you know, such as ARPU, other cohorts of our direct and indirect member base, but it's not something that we will be reporting members going forward. I think it's the right time for that. A lot of covering agencies have stopped even reporting on it. Looking at our ARPU, our average revenue per member, that has been a great story for us. The obvious jump from 2024 of $106- $113 is we did a price increase back in October 2024. That was a 17% price increase at that time. We are putting a new price increase into play as we speak, March first.
We actually announced it back in early February. We went out to all of our existing customers, new potential customers, explained the value proposition of new capabilities in our AI product, as well as community, as well as a lot more content, new content. Those price increases have gone well and have not had the headwinds that some may have anticipated. We actually have exceeded expectations around lower churn on both of those price increases. Gross profit per employee. This is one that I think people marvel at. I tell people I came here three years ago, and we had just over 100 employees, and we were at about $80 million in revenue.
Here I am three years later, and I think we're at a whopping, you know, 109 employees, and we're almost at $100 million in revenue. That obviously translates to this great productivity factor of gross profit per employee, $817,000 in gross profit per employee. This is growing and something that we track regularly. It's another one of these KPIs. We look forward to this exceeding $1 million in the next year or so. All right. Another one of our kind of secret sauces, if you will, is how we produce our original content. I'm sitting here just outside of Boulder, Colorado, on a 13-acre, 150,000 sq ft campus. We have our own studios. We fly in a lot of our talent into DIA.
It's a 30-minute drive in here. We employ all of our editors, producers and film people right here on site, and we have our own studios. We're able to produce these shows at much lower prices than other streaming services. We have this exceptional gross profit to content efficiency multiple. Gaia has gross profit on its content is at a 2.2x, whereas large companies like Netflix are under one. This is a true competitive advantage for us. Looking at international expansion, we do own the rights for 98% of our content library. We're expanding into other foreign operations. We're already translated into Spanish, German, and French.
We're looking at things like Portuguese 'cause we think that the Brazilian market is quite intriguing. That's sped up over the last several years. We're able, using AI, to translate our content more quickly and much less expensive. That continues to accelerate. We have international members in 40%. You know, our members are 40% now, and we plan for that to expand to 50% within three years because like I said earlier, we feel as though we still have a large market to address here in the United States. Then we're present in over 185 countries. Looking at our kind of distribution channels, you really can find us on the major channels.
You know, I know a lot of people find us through Apple or Roku, Android, Fire TV. You can see that the ratings and reviews there is once they find us, they really have an easy time working with us. Also from a third-party standpoint, we work with Amazon very closely. Again, that Amazon Appstore, very high ratings on the experience with Gaia on Amazon. Taking a peek at some of the future growth opportunities, I've touched on these a little bit, but we started talking about just over a year ago, the company raised some money to get out in front of artificial intelligence, as well as opportunity we saw in the community space.
What we were able to do, and a lot of you have probably seen this, with AI, is it just moves so quickly. It accelerated throughout 2025 so quickly that we brought that forward, and actually launched a Gaia's AI agent, back in November of last year. Really, that was more than just Gaia using AI internally and Gaia using AI to as a marketing tool, but it was an actual product. When people came into our site historically, it was kind of, you know, maybe we used some AI to, you know, if you like this show, perhaps you'll like this other show. Really now it's a destination. People can come into Gaia, they can watch the shows as they have in the past, or they could start asking our AI agent, Sage, questions.
You know, instead of maybe watching a 50 minute show on the pyramids in Egypt, they can ask our AI agent questions specifically about those pyramids, and we can show clips, five, you know, 10-minute clips, or answer specific questions. We just announced a couple months ago, those results were pretty crazy. In the first two months, we had over two million queries. And it shows us that we are hitting the mark, that it truly is something that's being perceived or used as a new product. That goes hand in hand back to what I mentioned earlier around a price increase. When we did our price increase here over the last month, we point to the fact that we have new content, new shows, as well as new products and capabilities around our AI agents.
Looking to the future, I've mentioned community a couple of times now. Community will be something that we launch later this year. We're already doing some beta testings. As I said, we had some people in here this past weekend that were starting to test these communities where people with like-minded ideas or interests can go and talk to each other, talk to some of the talent that we have on our platform. It also connects into our marketplace. We do sell experiences or trips, where talent will go on trips to Peru and Egypt or other places.
This community, we think, will expand not only our members from a retention standpoint, but it'll help us word of mouth find new members, but then help our members, if you will, talk to each other, collaborate, and lead to just further growth. One area that we end up talking a lot about is Igniton. So Igniton is this quantum wellness. It currently, it's supplements. We have a cognition and a longevity supplement that we sell. Now Gaia owns 65% of Igniton. Igniton is a subsidiary of Gaia. We've had some good early success in raising money for Igniton. We just finished a second round raise for Igniton at a $100 million pre-money valuation.
Interestingly enough, this is on really just $3 million in revenue thus far. We have the science is published in some peer review journals. We've gone out to some biohacking conferences in Texas last May. We'll be there again this May, and we'll be introducing two additional supplements, sleep and some peptides in that timeframe. In the first really just six, seven months, we were able to drive some very good early results on just the cognition and the longevity supplements, and we look forward to that continuing into 2026 and beyond. An exciting area.
Some people might say, "You know, what are the synergies between that and Gaia?" There are synergies obviously with our wellness and other focus areas, but really it's enabling us to. You have an interested body of members that are interested in trying this, and now it's getting it out through word of mouth. We'll be releasing some press releases about some pretty cool results of athletes using Igniton, as well as getting out and doing podcasts and continuing to get out to distribution physician conferences, as we've been doing in the last couple months, and we'll be doing that every quarter this year. Okay, quick peek at my favorite slide as the finance guy is our revenue benchmark scenario.
Until now, that first column used to just say $100 million, and the good news is we're knocking on the door of $100 million. We finished at just under $99 million for last year, for 2025. I think people were pretty encouraged to see that. That used to say at $100 million, you'll have right around $5 million in free cash flow, which we accomplished last year. Really, the reason for this is to show the power of our, you know, our capabilities of moving forward. We have a lot of leverage in our business model 'cause we really don't have to pay a lot or grow our G&A or fixed OpEx.
We really would continue to pay, spend, you know, around 40%, maybe less in the future on marketing, you know, around 15% on content, as we get into some new areas around AI. Our operating expenses don't have to grow anywhere close to as fast as our revenue and gross profit. Really looking out, you know, two years from now, approximately at $150, you really see a lot of free cash flow drop into the bottom line and probably four or five years down the line at $200 million, you know, that free cash flow margin quadruples. This is a slide I think that gets a lot of attention, and we're proving this metric.
Again, I started showing it 2-3 years ago, and I think people really, some of them didn't believe we would hit the $5 million in free cash flow at a $100 million, which we were able to accomplish. From a balance sheet standpoint, very strong balance sheet. We are up over $13.5 million in cash. That does not include ability or access to a $10 million-$15 million line of credit, which we have not had to lean on in the last 12 quarters. Really our deferred revenue is a good story as well at $58.5 million down in the liabilities. It's really been something that's grown because we have this recurring revenue stream.
We sell annual memberships. It helps me forecast revenue and financials quarter in and quarter out. Interestingly, what's not on our balance sheet is off to the right there under the estimate. We estimate that our media library is worth $150 million. Our member base of over 900,000 members is over $300 million. We have some NOLs at just over $20 million. Our Igniton valuation, based on our 65% share of Igniton, we value it at $45 million. I know a lot of people look at not just the P&L, but we feel very good about our balance sheet and the downstream potential.
One thing I will point out, and I 'cause I called it out in the 10-K, is the long-term debt and lease liability. That's really just on our campus. We just renewed another five-year mortgage here, and that's really only debt that we have. With that, Jim, I'm gonna turn it over to you for questions, and we'll take it from there.
Perfect. Thanks for the update. You know, let's start with the price increase. You know, you put one, the first one in effect I think was the end of 2024 and early 2025, and that was a first time you'd raised prices across the board. Historically, you'd only raised prices for new subscribers. Are you happy with the way that went? Was the churn level acceptable?
Yeah. We were expecting a larger churn event than we actually realized back in October of 2024. We had not done ever a price increase for existing members, so we had cohorts of people still at, you know, $7.99 or $9.99. So of course, you wanna make sure that you're not disrupting a lot of those old-time members, and we didn't. We really kind of embraced them. A lot of people, especially our direct members, once they've been with us for a year, they really are sticky and will hang around. That was. We did some testing before we did that price increase, and the churn event, as I said, was not as much of a headwind in 2025 as we thought it might be.
Fast-forward to 18 months later, that's typically how the larger streaming companies do it is price increases anywhere from every 12-18 months. With this price increase, we even reached out to our existing member base even more. We reached out to them just to ensure that they realized or appreciated the value proposition of Gaia with a lot of new content, with the AI agents, with the forthcoming of community. That was just announced back in early February. It went into effect with existing and new members March 1. So far so good. We're seeing, you know, a little bit less than we were expecting around churn event. We'll know.
We'll see. Have to kind of play through this over the next nine, 10, 11 months on all of our annual members because their renewals won't come up until then. So far so good. I think people appreciate the further focus on new content, the fact that our product has improved, the product experience and new products around AI and community, and the fact that you know, we're reaching out and into some new areas and bringing new members in. Pretty good. The testing so far has panned out as we had thought or slightly better.
With regards to community, how should we think about that? Is that something that'll actually generate revenue, or is that something that's you're doing just to improve the subscriber loyalty and help support future price increases?
Yeah, no, I think it'll initially be more of retention. I think it will lead to new members, and let me explain. I remember probably some of you I've talked to over the years, and when I first started explaining community, I would be talking about it, and people would give me a look, and I would say, "Think of it, like, as a dating site for guys, people with like-minded and they wanna find other like-minded people to talk and collaborate with." What this has turned into is much more than that. I mean, in this day and age around AI and people using collaboration tools, we do think that initially it will allow people to appreciate their existing members.
Through word of mouth, they might say, "Hey, look, you're a friend of mine. Are you a Gaia member?" "No, I'm not." "Well, you should check this out. I just was, you know, part of this, communications or collaboration team on Gaia's community, and they're talking about some cool stuff.
You can watch some shows from some of this talent or people out there, and they're going on a trip to Peru to go on these cool hikes. We do think the community will be a stabilization tool, first and foremost around retention, but will lead in time to more new members, and it will kind of help out our marketplace in selling some of these experiences, trips and a small amount of physical products we have on there.
That's where I was gonna go. Will you have merchandise you can sell to kinda help people identify with community, with the Gaia community?
Absolutely. We have simple stuff like Gaia hats and stuff. People here in the office like to laugh at me because I'm the least Gaia person, although in the last three years I've become quite Gaia, and as if you can't tell, I always say I'm the least flexible person in this office. I was wearing a Gaia backpack in the DIA airport, and someone on the train was asking me about the aliens or people under the terminals, right? People identify with Gaia. People have some fun with it. We have simple stuff like that in our marketplace. We got cool stuff like personal saunas and grounding blankets and stuff that people might pick up and see on our shows.
Really, the most prominent thing in our marketplace are the trips. People can go on some really, you know, four-star trips to see some very unique sites, get access to areas that others can't and actually have tour guides that know a lot about it. They find them and watch their shows, and then they'll say, "Oh, by the way, I'm taking a group of people to Egypt." We actually have a trip going later this month, this week or next, and it's, you know, full up, I think. Quite exciting. I think that community will really help the marketplace take off even more so.
With regards to Igniton, you know, it's a real market. We had a company presenting earlier today that is in that market that's, you know, forecasting hundreds of millions of dollars of supplement sales. You know, what's your plan for Igniton? Is it to focus on your existing customer base, or at some point, do you expect to expand to the general public for those products?
Yeah, we're really doing that right now. Like, we launched it, like I said, last summer. We were shocked. We were down at this biohacking conference, and Gaia or Jirka Rysavy, our founder, presented, and next thing you know it, like, the line was out the door, and we sold out of, like, over 2,000 bottles in less than four hours. We opened up selling it online just through our Igniton site the second half of last year, and we were meeting and exceeding expectations there. We will continue that here through the first half. As I said, we're gonna launch a couple of new SKUs around sleep and peptides here at the next biohacking conference at the end of May. Really think of Igniton as twofold.
It's not just Gaia able to consolidate the financials and get a little more revenue. It's not material to our approximately $100 million in revenue, but really for Gaia owning over 50% of that, the plan is for Igniton in time to go out and be sold or go public. When that happens, going back to my slide around balance sheet and what's not on balance sheet, Gaia stands to benefit greatly when that happens, as do a lot of our initial Igniton investors. It's really twofold. It's operational here in the short term, midterm, and then mid to longer term, it's really an equity play for Gaia.
Yeah, you anticipated my next question. That is something that you could theoretically spin out over the next few years.
Correct. That is the plan. We're only really just over a year into that, and we're on course.
You know, on the chart you showed, you know, projected free cash flow when you get to $150 million- $200 million, I don't wanna hold you to it, but, you know, it sounded like you expect to get to $250 million sooner rather than later. You know, is that organic, or will you need to do an acquisition again?
Well, it's really twofold. Yeah, I mean, again, when I got here three years ago, we were really just a one-trick pony. We were really just streaming service, and we've added these new revenue streams with things like Igniton and Marketplace and AI and some other things. Organically, we you know really would like to start getting to mid-high teen growth based on just our core business with these revenue streams. Yeah, I don't wanna get out of my skis. It's funny you say you won't hold me to it. I know you will hold me to it because I know you well enough and your models. No, we feel good about it.
I mean, I think back sometimes and be like, we have grown 20% in the since 2023 when I arrived and to generate free cash flow, be growing top-line revenue at low double digits. We're in Q4 of this year. We went out on an earnings announcement. I know you picked up on this in your analyst report. We are going to break P&L. We will be P&L positive. We will be EPS positive by Q4 of this year, and our goal will be for the full year in 2027 to be P&L positive. Yeah, things are heading the right direction.
As we all know, all boats rise with revenue, but we have great margin profiles and business model to support that success to the bottom line in an accelerating fashion.
What's the plan to do with that new cash, you know, that when you start generating that level of cash? Is it acquisitions?
We look at things like acquisitions, potential buybacks of our stock. I mean, anything can happen. You know, we did a small tuck-in acquisition back in Q3 of last year for more of a content play. Really, if we ever see something that's a good deal to have that's not gonna be disruptive.
Sure.
That can help accelerate our growth, top-line revenue. We could use some of that cash flow around acquisitions. That's always a possibility. Again, I feel as though we've been pretty cutting edge on trying to kind of capture the wave on things like AI. We'll continue to look for opportunities to do that as well.
Then you know we'll just wrap up with you know if you look at the share price it has pulled back after we reported a pretty good quarter for December and gave some pretty healthy guidance for 2025. I know you did have some management transitions. I don't know if people got spooked by that but are you seeing any fundamental weakness in the business right now or do you view this as an opportunity?
Yeah. No, we do. We see it as an opportunity. Yeah, we did have some transitions. I know a lot of the investors out there knew our former CEO and talked to James, and he's moved on. He's still a big-time guy and a large shareholder. No plans to sell stock anytime soon. He is really kind of going back to his roots as an entrepreneur and as a producer. He most likely will show back up again on Gaia as producing some sort of show or movie. He had some movies that were co-produced with some Hollywood movie stars that are on our site. He's still very much a part of our family.
What's great is our CEO, Kiersten Medvedich, she's been with us for 10 years, and she comes from Sony and a content background, and she is the face of our company. She's been in place for over eight, nine months at this point. We made that transition last summer. I think people are feeling good about our leadership. We always have Jirka, but really Kiersten and myself, and we have a new COO named Ned Preston. We're gonna be hitting the road. We might be bumping into some of you at some upcoming conferences or virtually. I'm always very open if people wanna talk to me or meet Kiersten and Ned, we're happy to do so. I don't think that's as much of an issue.
Yeah, thank you for the call-out on Q4. We were extremely happy with our Q4 and 2025 performance. To get to over $5 million or right at $5 million in free cash flow, slightly exceed our revenue expectations, it was a great finish to the year. Exceed 900,000 in members. It was a very strong finish to a good year. Now we're just trying to capture that momentum, accelerate it, execute on our numbers quarter in and quarter out here for 2026 and beyond.
Great. Well, we are at time, but I just wanna say thank you. I know you gave up some time yesterday, today as well with the investor meeting, so we appreciate that. Wanna thank the investors who tuned in today for their time, and well, I'll be talking to you, I assume, sometime in the next few weeks, as we always seem to be right around the end of a quarter.
That's right. No, Jim, thank you so much, and thanks everybody for giving us a little bit of time here today. Appreciate it.
Thank you.