Good afternoon everyone and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Gaia Inc.'s financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2023. Joining us today are Gaia's CEO, Jirka Rysavy, COO, James Colquhoun, and CFO, Ned Preston. Following some prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Before we get started, however, I would like to take a minute to read the Safe Harbor language. The following constitutes the Safe Harbor statement under Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The matters discussed today include forward-looking statements that involve numerous assumptions, risks, and uncertainties.
These include but are not limited to, our ability to attract new members and retain existing members, our ability to compete effectively, including for customer engagement with different modes of entertainment, maintenance, and expansion of device platforms for streaming, fluctuation in customer usage of our service, fluctuations in quarterly operating results, service disruptions, production risks, general economic conditions, future losses, loss of key personnel, price changes, brand reputations, acquisitions, new initiatives we undertake, security and information systems, legal liability for website content.
Failure of third parties to provide adequate service, future internet-related taxes, our founders' control of us, litigation, consumer trends, the effect of government regulation and programs, the impact of public health threats, including the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and our response to it, and other risks and uncertainties detailed from time to time in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q.
Gaia assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Gaia CEO, Jirka Rysavy. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. I'm glad again, we can continue reporting positive results. Revenue for the third quarter increased to $20.2 million, sequentially, up from $19.8 million and from last year of $19.9 million. During the quarter, our member growth doubled sequentially to about 16,000, ending with 798,500 members, which is above 776,000 we reported last year. So we more than recovered the 2022 losses which were caused by the industry-wide post-COVID subscriber contraction. Virtually all the growth in this quarter is coming from our direct members. Our ARPU continuing to grow steady, as it did over the last five years, and shall be further supplemented by our recent launch of Gaia Marketplace.
We have rolled our Marketplace in September to less than 5% our members and generated over 100,000 sales in the first 20 days without virtually any marketing cost. Annualized gross profit per employee improved again during the third quarter to our new all-time high of over $650,000, reflecting our increased efficiencies. Our loss improved to $600,000 or $0.03 per share, down from $2.4 million or $0.11 per share, and EBITDA increased to $3.9 million from $1.8 million during the quarter of last year. We continue to generate positive free cash flow with the cash on September 30 growing to $11.2 million from $10.9 million at the end of the last quarter.
Now, James will cover the Marketplace and some other new marketing initiatives, and then Ned will speak more about financial results. James?
Thank you, Jirka. So we rolled out a beta version of Marketplace in September, initially targeting less than 5% of our members, and the results have been truly exciting. Within the first 20 days, we were able to generate over $100,000 in sales, and all of this was achieved with zero paid marketing costs. This achievement is testament to the strong connection we have with our members and the appeal of the Marketplace's offerings. It also demonstrates the significant potential for growth that lies ahead of us as we expand our offering into 2024. The launch of Gaia Marketplace is a significant step forward for us.
It's not just the new feature, it represents strategic expansion of our platform, and it allows us to diversify our offerings and support the conscious life cycle of our members in a more meaningful way, while also improving ARPU, which is a key metric for us to focus on as we move forward. Marketplace will include a carefully curated selection of experiences, retreats, courses, and products that resonate with our audience, which will be offered to members at a discount to the market, to help us create a thriving ecosystem that benefits both our members and Gaia. A key passion and focus for me is improving our marketing efficiency, and I believe there to be a lot of untapped opportunities for us, especially with our direct-to-consumer marketing campaigns and digital events.
Marketplace will play a critical role in this, as it will contribute to free cash flow, which we will use to accelerate our growth initiatives as we focus on scaling to 900,000 subscribers as quickly as possible, while maintaining positive cash flow. Now, Ned will talk more on our financial results.
Great. Thank you, James. Revenues for the third quarter were $20.2 million, a sequential increase for the third consecutive quarter, continuing the return to growth in our member base during the first three quarters of 2023. Compared to the year ago quarter, revenues grew by 2% as the company recovered from the post-COVID subscriber contraction, experienced industry-wide during 2022. In the quarter, we continued to invest in and release new content, particularly to support our language expansion efforts. As a result of these strategic growth investments, gross margins were 85.2% during the third quarter of 2023, and we expect them to remain at this level for the near term as we expand our language offerings and tactically support the growth of the business.
Total member acquisition costs during the quarter were $8.4 million, or 41% of revenues, aligned to our second quarter costs. In the third quarter, we experienced growth in our direct member base, which is a continuation from the first and second quarters. Selling and operating expenses, excluding marketing and member acquisitions costs in the third quarter, were $7.9 million or 39% of revenues, which was a $0.7 million or 8% improvement from the prior year period. This decrease is due to cost reductions completed earlier in the year and employee retention tax credits filed during the quarter. Corporate and G&A expenses in the third quarter were $1.4 million, down 29% from the prior year period, due to the cost improvements in the first half and the aforementioned payroll tax credit.
During the third quarter of 2023, we recorded a loss of $0.6 million, or -$0.03 per share, compared to loss of $2.4 million in the year-ago period. The improvement was primarily driven by expense reductions and an increase in revenues between periods. EBITDA was $3.9 million or 19% of revenues in the quarter, and we generated free cash. Our deferred revenues for the third quarter were $15.3 million, an increase of $0.8 million from the year-ago period. We expect to continue to benefit from the inherent negative working capital cycle in our business model as we continue to grow our member base and revenues.
In addition, we expect to be in a position to continue generating cash flows from operations in excess of the cash flows we will invest back into our content library and product enhancements going forward. Due to our in-house production capabilities and absence of contractual commitments tied to our content production, we have significant discretion in the amount and timing of our investments. This flexibility allows us to adjust our investment levels as needed to withstand a downturn in the macroeconomic environment, if necessary. Through the company's focus on accelerating growth and a return to positive operating margins, we have made tremendous progress over the past few quarters on numerous key areas of improvement for the business. With continued disciplined execution and the launch of the Gaia Marketplace, we are well positioned to continue growing revenues and to remain cash flow positive going forward.
With that, I will hand it back to Jirka for some closing remarks.
Yeah, we expect our member growth to further increase in 2024, with continuing growth of ARPU. For 2024, we are targeting about 15% growth in revenues, with about 10% growth in our members, with the strong growth of ARPU which should be helped by our planned price increase for the new members in the second part of next year. We also expect to continue to increase our gross profit per employee benchmark. And I personally believe that Gaia is in the best place since we started our streaming business. Our goal is now simple: to grow fast to 900,000 members while continuing to generate a positive free cash flow. I encourage you to visit ir.gaia.com and download the investor presentation to see our pro forma, how company can look at 900,000 members of annual average.
That means 900,000 in the middle of the year. We would update this probably within an hour. Over the next few months, I also plan to promote, subject to our board approval, our CEO and CMO, James here, to CEO position. And I know James for seven years. We merged his SVOD business, FMTV, into Gaia in 2019, and FMTV had the same mission as Gaia, and it grew to over 600,000 subscribers without any outside funding, solely dependent on James' marketing skills. James would continue to report to me in my role as Executive Chairman. I would focus on creation of Gaia community, which we talked before, and it's the main part, main part of our mission statement, and should be the final differentiation from all other video streaming businesses.
I hope to launch Gaia community after we reach our 900,000 annual member average milestone. This concludes our remark. I would like to open the questions. Operator?
Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may press Star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from Mark Argento with Lake Street Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.
Hey, good afternoon guys. Just a quick question. It looks like your actual sub adds were a lot stronger than what we had been modeling. Can you just touch on kind of the environment out there from a subscriber acquisition perspective, the cost to acquire a sub, you know, what channels you're seeing that success in?
Well, it's the environment. I think it's obviously better than it was last two year, quite a bit. It's not fundamentally different than second quarter. I think the doubling our growth is pure internal. I think James helped a lot. We didn't have really CMO, so he's kind of functioning much more as a CMO than COO right now. And the cost of acquisition, it's kind of similar as the second quarter, maybe a little cheaper domestically, and we saw little bumps in places like Latin America, when the churn kind of bumped a little bit because of all the internal, mostly internal things with credit cards and stuff. But pretty much for 90% of our business, it was more positive. And I expect, as I said, that the member -
The additions to increase again in next year from where we are right now. We still have definitely some room, and I think that will be the main part of James's thing you wanna -
Sure. Mark I would also add that, you know, we're focusing a lot, my focus and especially with the growth and marketing team, is on conversion rate optimization. So card conversion, guest to member conversion, first 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, this is a really key focus of ours now. So with the improvements in efficiency that we're seeing in CPA costs, which have come down marginally throughout the year, especially if we compare to the start of the year until till now, there is improvements in CPA costs, whether that's because of the macro environment, less competition, or otherwise, but it's still coming down for us, and we're also working on our side, improving that with a conversion rate optimization.
So I really seek to see more improvement in that in 2024, and marketing efficiency is a very core focus of mine for the 2024 year as well.
That's helpful. Thank you for that. Just pivoting to, I think you said you're gonna take pricing in Q2 of next year. You know, what are you thinking in terms of the pricing? You know how big of an impact could that have in terms of the ARPU for the latter part of that year?
Well, we're not going to do the Q2. It's going to be probably middle of Q3, somewhere, you know, closer to September. We're thinking about $2 for the new members. And we probably will focus on a month lease to move more people to annual, so we probably wouldn't raise annual. The annual takes right now about 25%. And but that's kind of the strategy, not - it's also, we kind of hope that will help lower his retention because people cannot come and leave and come on the same price.
Also that's one I kind of - when I kind of said we'll grow revenue 15 a member spend, is because we expect that you know, increase price for new members will probably take a hit in conversion, so we wouldn't grow revenue as fast, I mean the members as fast as revenue. But our goal is obviously the revenues, you know, the growing the revenues.
I think second to what Jirka was saying, we would be grandfathering or grandmothering, either or how we say it, our existing members. So there is a retention play there in that we can promise our existing members they will stay on their existing monthly price point. And then by not touching our annual price point, it will create a bigger price difference between the monthly and annual membership, which we hope to skew more conversions upfront or ongoing up to annual. Because we see the churn rates on customer cohorts that stay longer than one year, in particular, longer than two and three years, much more beneficial for us as a brand, and so we wanna skew to commit more membership term as much as possible.
Mark, this is Ned. I think the last part of your question was around the ARPU, and so of course, all of this, along with some of the other offerings that James will be spearheading, around our other offers, plus the marketplace. The combination of all of that, plus the increase, we do anticipate would take our ARPUs up, obviously, which we can outline in future meetings with you. But I think that was the last part of your question.
Yep. No, that's super helpful. And then in terms of the marketplace business, obviously pretty good uptake with no marketing dollars behind it. You know, does that make you more encouraged in terms of the opportunity, and does that change, you know, timing or aggressiveness at all from your guys' perspective?
From our side, we plan to be as aggressive as possible on executing on Marketplace. The main focus for us internally at the minute is curating and building out our SKU offering around the three core verticals of retreats or experiences, then courses, then physical product. And once we have more of that in place, we'll continue to roll out wider to our membership base. And as we get testing data of what offers perform best. That will inform our marketing, and we'll continue to keep expanding that. And Jirka has a strong background in e-commerce and retail products with the previous version of Gaia, and can see a huge potential for this, given the community that we have at the moment.
Yeah, we wanna be really selective with the products because we kind of, it's basically the mostly, mostly only target to our members. So which what I would say 90% of revenue will be from our existing members. It's, you can buy it if you're not a member, obviously, but we won't promote it outside, at least not for now. And members also get a 10% discount. So if you come and, you know, buy $7,000 trip, it's better to become a member and get a 10% discount. So it's kind of around that, but we kind of going to - I 'm going to look at it as kind of beginning of the Gaia community.
So we wanna attract people, especially like our kind of items right now, what we really pushed to launch was we have two seasons of show, what's our most viewed show called, Ancient Civilizations, which will really talk about prediluvial time. And so we basically launched it, the tour as a prediluvial Egypt and, you know sold really quick, on pretty high prices. Those prices are typically $8,000-$10,000 per trip. So, you know it's very lucrative business overall, but we wanna be very selective so we don't disappoint our customers with the offering.
I think one final thought there Mark, from an investment community perspective, to summarize the marketplace offering, it's like a conscious version of Costco in that it's a discount membership model. But also there's, in a way, a QVC component because we have content that speaks to the offerings as well. So that's a quick way to summarize the focus.
And also, if you model it, the way how we kinda look at it on these trips, so we take, you know, 30%, we provide 10% discount. So effectively, only the 20% hits the revenue and the operating income. The rest, we treat as outside vendors, so it's going to be relatively high margin.
Great. Very helpful. Good luck the rest of the way, guys. Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you.
As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Thierry Wuilloud with Water Tower Research. Please proceed with your question.
Yes, thank you. Good afternoon, and James, congratulations on the new position. Jirka, you explained a little bit about revenue and for the marketplace, and I was going to ask you, but I think I kind of got it. So the $100,000 of revenue that you said, that's your share of commission on the gross sales number that Gaia Marketplace did?
No.
Is that how that works?
No. It's the original, the one what we boost, basically one tour, the sale was $100,000. From that, we would report revenue about $20.
Oh, okay. Okay, I got it. So, okay. Great. You haven't talked about third-party channels in a while. Can you give us a bit of color? Is there, are you putting some emphasis on a specific one, or, or what's your thought around that? Obviously, the direct member acquisition seems to be doing really well, but, any color on third-party channels?
Thierry, hi. Thank you for your congratulations, pending board approval of course.
Okay.
I will speak to third party that reports directly into me. It has been flatter compared to our direct membership growth. However, I'm seeking to be more aggressive in our expansion with third party, keeping it in alignment with our current balance of direct to third-party revenue contribution, making sure that it doesn't get too high. But we plan to be growing third party, in particular, by rolling out new territories in 2024, in particular, with our largest third-party distributor, which is, or partner, which is Amazon Prime. So we have a Prime Video channel within the Amazon infrastructure, and we are in the process of renewing our agreement with them to expand the term for a longer period of time.
I just met with one of the Amazon executives over the weekend to confirm this, and we have already plans for Q2/Q3, sorry, Q2, correct, for Australia and New Zealand. And I'll be meeting with the Australian, New Zealand rep as well. So this is very much in my court, and I'm seeking to expand our international expansion with third party.
Yeah, with Amazon, we actually triggered initiation or regular renegotiation because our price increases we want to do. So we had to kind of give them notice and signing a new agreement with the higher price. So that was caused this negotiation was actually initiated by us.
Mm-hmm.
And also, you know, when you asked the question about the 100,000 sales, so it was the first 20 days we get 100,000 -
I know.
The tour is actually sold, so it creates about $100,000 revenues from the first trip, from the single tour. But it took, like, a month and a half to sell it.
Okay. Great. We've talked about ARPU, and we've also talked in previous conversation about the focus on international growth. Is there a big difference in ARPU from your international members versus the U.S. members?
No, there's not. I mean, short of some Latin America, which we're scaling actually down, which we kind of play with, you know, lower the prices, but didn't really work for us. So it's basically the prices we would charge pretty much in Europe, very similar as we would charge here. So it's very, it's the - the ARPU same, pretty much for right now.
And Thierry, I would add that there are three drivers for increase in ARPU next year. One, Jirka already mentioned, which is about the planned price increase, circa middle of the year. In addition to that, what we've spoken about is marketplace with the revenue attribution. And then third, would be an increased focus on our premium Gaia Events+ tier at $299 a year. That's also something that I have my sights set on for expanding in 2024. So each of those three levers will be improving ARPU throughout the next year.
Yeah, the increased ARPU, it was always as a part of our mission, and now we actually wanna accelerate that, because now we kind of get to the place where we can generate positive cash flow continuously. So the ARPU become much bigger focus right now. So the revenue would be definitely our focus more than the numbers of members. So as we're going forward, it's going to be our focus. That's why the ARPU and this initiative, like increasing the price, GaiaSphere, sorry, GaiaSphere you know, premium pricing, t he Events+ or, the Marketplace. You know, effectively, what we say that we're going to grow members 10% and revenue 15%, you'll see that we're increasing the ARPU dramatically, and we would wanna keep doing it.
Great. Maybe a last question, Jirka. You mentioned that you will be focused on Gaia community. Can you tell me what does it mean? Is it focused on the marketplace? Is it focused on live events? Or what did you mean when you said you'll focus on Gaia community?
If you go to the bottom of our, you know, Gaia.com, you'll see what the mission is. So that's pretty much that community, what I'm talking about.
Okay.
We kind of look at launching it. We already built something about a year ago, but the time we decided the way I was designed it, the community is right now too much split between the by the different events in the world, so it's not a time to launch it.
Right.
We restructure it a little bit. It's basically, we have now, you know, two-thirds of our people are with us more than a year and one-third over three years. That's increasing. The three-year number obviously increasing every month as a percentage. We know a lot of what people are watching, what they're interested, and one of the things what we hear is they would like to find people like them, you know, watching Gaia in their community.
Yeah.
That's what it's going to be focused. We're going to use all our venues, what you mentioned, as a part of that.
Okay, that sounds very interesting. Great. Okay,
I think that will be the final differentiation for us. If you look in other SVODs, they'll become in three years, you know - we have something that nobody else in SVOD has t his, this loyalty and following, and it's a niche business and we wanna keep it that way, and this community will be based on that.
Thierry, if I had to say one part of that Jirka is alluding to, among many things would be some form of a decentralized town hall in a way, where members can get together on forums and, like Jirka mentioned, organize watch parties and meetups.
That sounds very interesting. Great. Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We have reached the end of our question and answer session. I would now like to turn the floor back over to Mr. Rysavy for closing comments.
Well, thank you everyone for joining, and we look forward to speaking with you when we report the fourth quarter results in March. Thank you very much.
This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.