Greetings and welcome to PodcastOne Virtual Investors Webinar. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A Q&A session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Aaron Sullivan, Chief Financial Officer of PodcastOne. Thank you. You may begin.
Thank you. Good morning and welcome to PodcastOne's Virtual Investment Webinar. Presenting on today's call with me is Kit Gray, President, and Steve Lehman, Vice Chairman of PodcastOne. I would like to remind you that some of the statements made on today's call are forward-looking and are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that involve various risks and uncertainties. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the future performance of the company, including expected future financial results and expected future growth in the business. Actual results may differ materially from those discussed on this call for a variety of reasons.
Please refer to the company's filings with the SEC for information about factors which could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements, including those described in its annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2024, and subsequent SEC filings. You'll find reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures discussed today in the call, which is posted on the Investor Relations website. The company encourages you to periodically visit the Investor Relations website for important content. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, contains time-sensitive information and reflects management's view as of the date of this call, January 16th, 2025. Except as required by law, the company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise this information after the date of the call.
I'd like to highlight to investors that this call is being recorded. The company is making it available to investors via audio and media via webcast, and a replay will be available on its website in the Investor Relations section shortly following the conclusion of the call. Additionally, it is the property of the company, and any redistribution, transmission, or rebroadcast of this call or webcast in any form without the company's express written consent is strictly prohibited. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Kit Gray, President.
Thank you, Aaron, and good morning. I appreciate everybody making the call today. It's a big one for PodcastOne, and I'm excited to have you guys all here. Again, my name is Kit Gray. I'm the President and Co-Founder of PodcastOne, the only pure-play podcast company traded on the NASDAQ. The podcasting world has taken the world by storm, and PodcastOne is a major player ever since I started. It's some 15 years ago now. When I'm doing these types of investor calls and talking to people, I like to have some news to make it worthwhile for everybody's time, and we have some big news today. Some of the biggest news that PodcastOne has ever had.
Our team spent the better part of a year reviewing all the tech platforms available to the space and where each one is going, and we made a huge decision over the last couple of months that will greatly affect not only next year but years to come. And we have partnered with Amazon's Art19 podcast hosting platform. Again, this is a historic deal for PodcastOne with eight-figure revenues over a multi-year period. It's designed to grow as we grow as a network and as Amazon grows their technology and the ever-growing podcasting space. We will have huge growth opportunities and strategies now for our podcast partners and multiple revenue generation opportunities. It's a great day to be at PodcastOne. It's a great day for our shareholders, our employees, and our content partners. We will have better sellout rates, inventory efficiencies, higher CPMs, advertising capabilities, show recording details, and more.
This deal will help PodcastOne, now the number eight podcast network out there on the December podcast ranker from Podtrac, up from 13 in November, a leg up with M&A opportunities, show acquisition strategies, and again, better technology. We have a better way to monetize each listener of our communities, and we are very excited about this deal. It is a great deal. Everybody knows about Amazon, but Art19 is really leading the way in the technology space for podcasting, and we're a big part of it. Again, I'll get more into what that deal means for us in this presentation, but this is huge news for us, huge news for Amazon and Art19. We're excited to bring that up to you guys today. Aaron went through today's presenters. I'm going to present the deck. It should take 10, 15 minutes.
I'm happy to take any questions from anyone on the call at the end of the presentation. Steve Lehman, who is our Vice Chairman and joined the company three or four months ago, is going to talk about M&A opportunities and growth in that section. He's a fantastic asset to the company. He just joined it again three or four months ago. We're really excited to have him here today. And again, Aaron Sullivan will review our finances, and he's our CFO. So I'd like to start on the PodcastOne overview slide. I'd like to remind everyone, and as Aaron said, our fiscal year ends in March of 2025. So you can see on the right side of this slide our revenue projections and our guidance. You can see we are a leading global platform. We have over 194 podcasts in our network.
We produce over 350 episodes a week, 16 million monthly downloads, and 5.2 million monthly unique users. We, as a company, provide a 360 solution for not only advertisers but our content creators. We allow them to create content while we do everything soup to nuts to get the show out great and monetize every impression we possibly can. We are diversifying our revenue streams, and I'll get more into how we're using IP and different revenue channels on that. We are constantly acquiring new talent, expanding to reach new audiences, and we are very much a big part of the podcasting industry, which is going to surpass $2 billion. We have a strong financial profile, double-digit revenue growth, expanding margins, and most importantly, no debt.
We said a year ago, just over a year ago when we went public, that it would be about five years to get to, or three to five years to get to 100 million in revenues, and we are on path to do that with two to four more years in that runway. We have a great management team, which many of you already know about, but I'll touch base on who they are again later on in this presentation. These are media veterans and podcast pioneers. We'll move on to the next slide, which is the recent news. As I just quickly mentioned, we moved up from number 13 to number eight on Podtrac from November to December in the U.S. publisher ranker, which is fantastic news. We have continued our relationships with our staple programs, Adam Carolla, Brendan Schaub, and Kaitlyn Bristowe.
I don't know if you guys have noticed in the news, but Adam Carolla is covering the tragic LA fires and has gotten retweeted by people like Elon Musk a couple of times since he's a leading voice in that space. As you guys know, the elections had a huge impact by podcasting. Donald Trump going on to Joe Rogan really was historic and really shifted the weight in his favor and was such an impactful thing. So we're seeing that now with people like Adam Carolla, and this is how people consume their news. This is how people talk and communicate now. So again, we've talked about the size of our network and the Art19 deal that I just mentioned, which is extremely exciting.
So we'll go on to the next slide, which is our snapshot, again, giving you guys an idea of who we are, the size of our network. We have, again, 194 shows, and that's done by design. When I started the company 15 years ago, talking to advertisers, they wanted us to get moms. So we have a leading female network, but we have sports, we have entertainment, and true crime, and really everything soup to nuts to fit in advertisers' need. You can see our fiscal guidance over there again in the right side of the presentation. We'll move on to the next slide, which is the podcast marketplace. The consumption of podcasting is not only growing, but you can see the revenue is falling. It's really exciting when you see billion-dollar numbers and $2.5 billion numbers. 15 years ago, that was not the case, but we're here.
It continues to grow. And as you can imagine, the qualitative audience of people that listen to podcasts is second to none. Moving on to the marketplace, which is the next slide. This has been really a tremendous run. In 2024, huge paydays. The Joe Rogans of the world, the Alex Coopers shifting from Spotify to SiriusXM, and the Kelce Brothers and Conan O'Brien. These are huge, huge investments by big media conglomerates investing into podcasting. And that's changing a little bit, and our niche is really in that sweet spot of these middle-ground podcasters, as we like to call them, because there's great margins, there's a great business there, and we'll remain profitable and continue to grow in our margins. Moving on to the next slide, our visions and objectives. We are always growing on a day-to-day basis for our near term. We are trying to grow our audience.
We have a marketing team that is out pushing social media, getting people on other podcasts, getting great guests on our podcasts to continue to grow those shows every day, every week. We continue to grow the libraries as we can now monetize backlog consumption as well. That is our day-to-day operation. We're continuing to invest in technology, infrastructure to be more efficient ahead of the curve. When I started the company 10 years ago and Fox News or I'm sorry, Fox Broadcasting, which was the number one advertising and radio, they wanted to be in the space. Well, we needed to target ads to certain marketplaces, right? They're important to get ratings in certain cities. So we went and worked with the WideOrbit of the world and started to get into how to geotarget. Well, that has expanded tremendously.
Art19 has a big part of that behavioral targeting, selling on a network deal. So things like that are really exciting for us in the near term. And then we continue to reach out to top brands and top demographics and continue to grow our revenue channels with different things. On the long-term side of it, we are going to partner with other companies. And again, Steve coming on to really lead our M&A strategy, but there's a lot of middle-ground podcasters and opportunities to acquire, partner up with them both on the content production side of things, but also the technology side of things to really get us to that $100 million number that we talked about and really control the exciting podcast space. So that's our vision and objectives. Our platform, and this is why we're different, right?
If you look at the SiriusXMs or even the Amazons or the iHearts, their businesses are all over the place. We are a podcast company, and we do really think everything soup to nuts from public relations, production. We have a studio in Beverly Hills. We do talent booking. We do strategy calls, marketing, promotion. We have producers that are best in business in editing, not only audio but video. And then I believe our strongest asset is our sales group. We have 12 sellers across the country that are amazing. They're talking to clients direct. They're talking to advertising agencies and growing it. So that's what we bring to the table for our partners. They come in and do great content, and we make their lives easier so they can do more content and we can make more money together. PodcastOne Pro is something we launched.
It's actually been in existence for quite a while, but we officially launched it last year, the end of last year. What that is, is there's this business in the sense that companies want to use podcasting for marketing and advertising purposes on their own. So we've done deals with Microsoft, MotorTrend, Lovesac, and others where we use our already existing production team and marketing team to build these shows in a polished fashion for these companies so they can talk to customers, they can talk to their clients, they can talk to fans and interact with them in a different way. That's a really nice business with high margins for us. Again, we already have all that in-house. So when we sign deals like that, the margins are great, and it's a really nice business, and the companies really enjoy it.
It's a lot of fun for them. MotorTrend just signed on for their third year doing it with us, and they're now bringing in advertisers to their show now as we continue to grow. So it's really an amazing platform, and we're excited about the growth of that for not only next year but years after. Moving on to our blue-chip national advertisers. This is pretty self-explanatory. These are the biggest and best advertisers in the world, and we're really proud of that. The business has always been the direct response use case business. They do that, and they pay the highest CPMs, those direct response people, because it works, right? When you can prove ROI, the advertisers come back.
But a lot of these brands now, and part of the beauty of podcasting is you not only get the old-school Howard Stern endorsement type thing like he did with Snapple for years, but you're also getting the beauty of digital advertising and digital advertising budgets where we can use attribution, retargeting. It's crazy. If Adam Carolla, for instance, does a read for Home Depot and says, "Go buy this paint," or there's a discount in paint, if you go to HomeDepot.com and you heard that commercial, they can track that. It's scary, but that's the world we live in. So you get really the best of both worlds in terms of old-school endorsement radio and digital technology advertising allows us to plan all those different budgets. So moving on to revenue segments, we have our core ways, and our core team is out selling endorsements, post-reads, audio, and video.
I'll get into why video has been such an important thing for the industry and us in a second. But we do host reads. We do dynamic ad insertion, and that's really where the Art19 world kind of comes in. We've been doing it for a long time, but this is just a more robust, advanced process that we'll have at our fingertips for our sales team and our advertisers now targeting behavioral segments and commercials that you can rotate in and out so you're not hearing the same message over and over. You can tell a story. We do custom segments. We have CEOs on our podcasts. We do social campaigns. Again, we're not a spots and dots podcasting company like a lot out there. We're more entrenched in that. We are also diversified and emerging into new revenue channels. I talked about PodcastOne Pro already.
We are heavily involved in paywalls and the IP scripted world. We sold two shows already for TV adaptation, and this is an amazing opportunity, right? We funded two amazing projects, two amazing stories, which are much more cost-effective to prove concept, improve the story, having a fan base. We've done that. We then were able to go out to television movie conglomerates and sell the rights of those stories to make TV shows. And so we're able to, one, get a fan base with podcasts, monetize that consumption from that fan base, pay for all of it there, and then make some money and actually sell it to some bigger conglomerates where that's even more upside in terms of rights and IP rights on how many episodes, seasons they make. But this is really exciting.
We have a portfolio of more shows in that space, and that'll be a heavy part of what we do not only next year but years to come, and it's really exciting. Podroll is another company that we work with where we're actually dropping podcasts at the back of some of our episodes. People pay high CPMs, and things like that come up here and there, and I'm sure there'll be some new great ideas in the podcasting space to make more money in different ways based on the content that we have, so we're really excited about that. Again, we do branded podcasts. We do merchandise. We do live shows and more. Moving on to the next slide, reaching audiences across every medium. When you are a podcast with PodcastOne, you go everywhere and anywhere a podcast can be consumed.
iHeart, Apple Podcasts, LiveOne, Amazon Music, AdamCarolla.com, you name it. But really, where the world has changed, and it's only been two, maybe three years since YouTube has been in the podcasting space, but it is now the number one consumption base for podcast listening. It makes sense. Google being the number one search engine in the world, YouTube being owned by Google, and also the number two search engine in the world. Discovery is amazing. And now that we're able to produce video content at efficient, cost-effective means and put those ads in there, we're able to get a new audience base, higher CPMs, put those commercials in, and higher impressions to sell to advertisers. So that's been a really exciting part of podcasting in general, definitely for PodcastOne.
Moving on to our 2025 growth strategy, I'm going to hand this over to my dear friend, Steve Lehman, and let him kind of talk about mergers and acquisitions, all the other organic stuff I've kind of talked about already. But I'll give this over to Steve. Thank you, Steve.
Thanks, Kit. I recently joined PodcastOne. Part of my motivation was because I felt PodcastOne was really kind of best of breed in terms of podcasting. As the former Chairman, CEO of Premiere Networks, which is the largest radio network in the United States now owned by iHeart, I can tell you there are some amazing similarities between what network radio went through back in the '70s and '80s and where podcasting is heading right now. This is going to be a time of roll-up and consolidation.
I have joined the company to help Kit and the team in M&A. I believe this is going to be a fast and furious process, and PodcastOne is literally in the best position for this roll-up and consolidation. PodcastOne, as a public company, will be able to use its currency to do deals that will be accretive. I think based on the conversations that we have had so far with companies, there's a tremendous amount of interest. I think that this roll-up and consolidation will play very well in terms of shareholder value for the PodcastOne shareholders. I'm really excited to work with Kit and the team. I think there's an incredible opportunity here. I'm really enthusiastic about this, and I look forward over the next six to 12 months for really game-changing growth for PodcastOne. I'm glad to be here.
Appreciate the opportunity and look forward to working with the team.
Great. Thank you, Steve. We're really excited to have him and his expertise and all his knowledge in M&A and growing companies, and especially in the media space. We're really lucky to have him, and he's a great fit. So, as you said, this is an exciting time to be in podcasting. It's a growing community, but a very tight community. We've already had some amazing conversations with some great companies, both on the tech front and the content production front. So it's an exciting time to be in this, and we're well-positioned for great growth and beyond. So that being said, I'm going to hand this over, this last slide or second to last or a couple last slides, sorry, to Aaron to talk about our financials.
Thank you, Kit. Excuse me. Thank you, Kit. Just to reiterate, it's been mentioned a couple of times. Our fiscal year end is March 31st. So we are three quarters of the way through our FY 2025. Our guidance is for $51 million in revenue for FY 2025. That's 17% growth on the prior year. And we've also got it to positive adjusted EBITDA for that timeframe as well. Just to kind of walk through some of the other numbers here. Our gross margin bounces between 13% and 8%. And we've kind of covered this on previous calls, but for our new listeners, we've experienced a little bit of pressure there over the last kind of couple of months as we're onboarding new shows. Those new shows have costs upfront with MGs that we pay them.
The revenue associated with new shows is typically lower in the first couple of months of onboarding. As we continue to onboard new shows in kind of a large number, we're going to have a little bit of pressure on our margins, but that should improve over time. We're expecting the Art19 deal, as Kit mentioned, to help us out a little bit on the margin side there. In terms of our kind of operating cost structure, we're built for growth. There's not much more we need to do to add to that. Anything we add on the top line from an acquisition perspective that Steve's out hunting for, we can add the revenues and kind of rev share expenses and everything else should kind of flow through. We really don't need to add a whole lot on the operating cost side.
The other important piece I'd like to point out there is the very last line there is our debt. We have no debt. So that's kind of a nice position to be in with the balance sheet that we have. Kit, I'll turn it back over to you. Thank you, Aaron. And I just have a couple more slides. I'm on the case study slide. It's funny to see Amazon Groceries as one of our case studies in here. And it's an account I closed a couple of years ago personally, and it had great success. And I have to believe it's part of the reason that Amazon has just put a lot of weight behind podcasting. They saw the results. They're, as we all know, a very tech-savvy attribution-based company and saw some amazing results on that.
We weren't the only podcasting company involved in that deal, but there were some great results, and they continue to invest heavily in the space, and obviously, with the deal that we just signed with them, it further reiterates how important podcasting is to Amazon. You can see Adam Carolla, just some highlights. Again, Adam is one of our biggest tentpoles. We just signed him to a multi-year extension. We were on the phone with Adam yesterday. He's really leading the way in this LA story, and if you guys get a chance to listen to the Adam Carolla Show, it's been pretty tremendous over the last couple of days, so we're excited to continue our relationship with him. I've known Adam now 15 years, and we still do the old Loveline show with Dr. Drew and him, which is tremendous. Moving on to the management board, we're really fortunate.
We're a team of people that we're under 50 employees, and we're in the 40 range. But most of our team has been with me for six, seven, eight years. I'll quickly highlight Sue McNamara as our CRO. She's been with me for five or six years now. But her background was when Howard Stern was with CBS. She ran his sales team nationally and just is top of market in terms of talented and a great reputation. We're really lucky to have her. Eli Dvorkin, who has been with me since day one, is our Chief Content Officer. He is leading the way in terms of not only acquiring new content, but relationship building and doing more things with our current content. Rob Ellin, who's our Executive Chairman, he and his LiveOne team have been tremendous partners.
They help us with a lot of our backend efficiencies and being able to work with Slacker and their team and do some really cool production and live shows and virtual live shows and pay-per-view events. So it's been a great partnership with Rob and team. You can see the names of our board of directors. A really strong, diverse group. We're excited to have them on. And moving to the next slide, up and trending shows. I'll quickly highlight I've Had It. They're an amazing group of shows. And basically, I've Had It as a show that we took on maybe three years ago. They had 20,000 downloads, and they now have over 150,000 downloads. They do multiple episodes. We just launched a political show with them, and they are a seven-figure business for us. We're able to do that with some amazing properties.
A&E's Cold Case Files is also. We have four shows now with A&E. We've had that relationship for seven years. Stassi, we just grabbed her from one of our competitors, and that is an amazing show for us as well, and then we'll go to the key takeaways, which is pretty much everything I just went over, but you guys can take a look at that, and you can see this deck on our IR site, PodcastOne.com. So with that being said, I really appreciate everybody's time today. I'm here to take any questions that you guys may have and open that up to the floor. Thank you very much.
Thank you. At this time, we'll be conducting a Q&A session. If you're on the telephone and you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. To ask a question via the webcast, you may need to refresh your screen and then type your question in the Q&A box and press enter on your keyboard to submit. Our first question comes from the line of Sean McGowan with Roth Capital Partners. Please proceed with your question.
Thank you. Good morning, Kit and others.
G ood morning, Sean.
All right. I wanted to start with a clarification question, something you and I have talked about before, and then more about Art19. So moving up from 13 to eight, is that a function of your growth, or is that a function of consolidation above you in those rankings, or is it some change in the way Podtrac is tracking that? I'm just trying to get a sense of what's driving it. Because we've seen that number bounce around from 10 to 12 to 13 to back to 11 or something, and all of a sudden, it's up to eight. And I'm just trying to get a sense. Is that your growth driving that, or is that a change in the methodology?
It's a tricky ranking because there is really no ranker for all podcasts or podcast networks out there. We like that one because it has a lot of credibility in how they track the downloads. They're associated with the IAB, which is important. And all the major, major players are on there. There's different rankers out there, so they're all a little different. But some things have changed. If you can see that number one and number two is like iHeart, and then they're iHeart Network too. So it doesn't really make sense on why they do that.
I mean, I'd like to say we're number seven, but they change it all the time. What I look at is how do we compare about are we going up in terms of total downloads? Are we staying consistent while others go down? That's what's important to me. The rank and the number really doesn't matter too much. It's just kind of a nice little bit of a grading scale for us. I did notice, and what I like to see is a lot of the podcast networks were going down, and we did not in December. And I think that has a lot to do with the quality of our content. Maybe I'm a tough boss, but maybe I don't let our shows just take off December, right, and for the holidays. Part of the beauty of podcasting is that you can bank a bunch of shows.
So what we do is our team works really hard those first couple of weeks of December. We get banked content and then release new content over the holidays. People still want it, and they consumed it. And I don't think everybody else does that. So that's what I would take into account when looking at that ranker. I hope that helps.
Okay. That is helpful. Thank you. And then on the Art19, could you just give us a little bit more color on what the nature is of the deal? Exactly how does it help you? Revenue? Are you giving them something? What is it that you're giving them in this? I don't really understand who's doing what and how the money's going here.
No, it's a good one. And you can get really into the weeds on it, but I'll give you the high level of it. So what they want is to have all our shows hosted on their platform. So all our ads and impressions will go through that on the dynamic side, not the embedded side. In turn, we'll be able to look at our download numbers and geotargeting and where people are consuming, how they're consuming, all that stuff, just like we had in the past.
But really, the beauty of the deal is we grow as a network, and we acquire new shows or grow with networks coming on. We have a guarantee in revenue. So when we go out and forecast what a show could potentially be worth, which that's what we do, we now have more concrete numbers on exactly how that's going to work. Cash flow purposes, and Aaron loves this, is we know we're going to get paid.
If we deliver the audience, we're going to get paid on time in certain amounts, which protects us, and really, it doesn't change anything in terms of revenue right now, but there's tremendous upside, and the reason for that is the first wave is our direct sales team. They have access to that inventory. Then Art19 has access to that inventory, Amazon. So they can package our impressions with all the other podcasts that they host, but also Prime TV, all their big advertising brands that they have in the Amazon world, they can funnel into the podcasting space, right? So there's another level of revenue potential there with higher CPMs, and that's run-of-network stuff. They don't talk to our hosts and get them to do it or show specific, but they'll target men 25-54.
And then again, we still also have the access to the programmatic desks, which has been such a great thing for us over the last two years, three years, really, where we can still tie into that to monetize it. So rather than what it was, it was really two monetization opportunities. Now it's three. And that third one being Amazon, you can't get a better or bigger company than that to be involved with, right? So that's why we're so excited. And as we just acquire new shows, the deal grows with us, right? So there's minimum guarantee, and there was a signing bonus and all that stuff, which is nice.
Right. So in the press release, it mentioned $15 million minimum over three years. Exactly what is that? And should we think of that as incremental to what you were already kind of built into your longer-term forecast?
So what that $15 million did was basically that kept us flatlined with what we're doing right now. There's also a bunch of efficiencies. I don't think I've mentioned that. Having Amazon take over a lot of our tech, we don't need to do as much, and there's a ton of cost efficiencies in that too. So that'll help our bottom line on that front. It protects us. And again, as we grow and Amazon grows, especially in selling audio like they are, the upside is really exciting. And that's why we did it. I mean, again, it took me about a year with my team and Eli and Michael and all those great people that are on our team. We looked at every platform in high depth. And this one was by far the most exciting.
I wouldn't do it if I didn't think it was going to make my content partners more money. And that's what we're really excited about. And our shareholders more money, right? Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Barry Sine with Litchfield Hills Research. Please proceed with your question.
Thanks for taking my call. Good morning. I want to also ask a question.
Hey, Barry.
About Amazon Art19. In the past, we've talked. You've talked about your infrastructure as a competitive advantage. So I want to better understand what will you still do inside PodcastOne, and what are you farming out to Art19? In response to the last question, it sounds like dynamic ad insertion is one thing.
And then how does this affect your infrastructure competitive position vis-à-vis other podcasters, especially if they're using Art19 and have the same technology?
Okay. A lot there. Let me try and I'll start out. So we're going to continue doing business as usual. Exactly what we're doing for our content providers, our advertisers, and our team is where you're going to see some of the changes. We're not going to have to spend as much time on the backend tech, the CMS, which was fine and good, right? It was totally good. But we know and we have word from Amazon, theirs is better now, but they don't just sit still as a company. They're going to continue to advance their technologies and get better and more efficient.
My team now is going to be spending their time in different ways to make our business more efficient: delivery, ways to use AI, ways to get information to our podcasters, get more audience to them quicker. We're also going to be able to use the technology to help advertisers also be more efficient, hit the right targets, make sure their messaging is the right way. So those are some of the strengths. Why we'll be different and we are different than other people that are on Art19 is, again, that team. We have a marketing team. We have a production team. We have a network that can promote and launch programs. We can do different revenue channels. We can do all of that soup to nuts and bring that to podcasters that might not have that ability now, right? So we'll continue to be leading the way in that.
Again, PodcastOne has kind of definitely always led the way in terms of new ways to grow and monetize their content, and this is just a step to be ahead of the game and continue to be ahead of the game because of our team. Okay. And I just want to amplify something. I think I heard you say clarify. It sounds as if you're retiring your own CMS and you're going to move on to theirs. I thought that platform was pretty advanced and was a competitive advantage, but it sounds like you like theirs better and you're going to retire your own system. We'll still have part of our business on there. The launch type business is still a little bit in flux on what we're going to do there. It's still running fine. Still have the ability to do that.
But I think what we have a $100 million goal, right, in two to four years. And it's my job as CEO and President of the company to look not just at what are we doing this afternoon or tomorrow, but it's to look at what are we going to be doing in two, three, four years from now. And my belief is that the revenue potential for our partners and our company and our shareholder is better to jump on this opportunity and go from that base. And so two particular metrics I want to talk about. One is CPM as a result of this transaction. And then maybe you've already talked about a cost saving. So there's potential for, sounds like, operating margin improvement. Can you quantify both of those a little more, please? I can't quantify the efficiencies.
And I know there's hundreds of thousands of dollars that will be saved in our operational costs, which we'll then reallocate into future growth endeavors. That's what I can say about that. And I'm sorry, your other question, can you ask that one more time? I'm sorry.
The other metric I wanted to talk about was CPM. Will this generate more revenue per podcast as a result of being on this platform?
Right. So the name of the game, and I think Steve and my old business partner and dear friend, Norm Pattiz, we always talk about inventory management and that being a big game. So now if we have our direct sales team, the Amazon team, and the programmatic marketplaces, which are all also growing in terms of revenue, you have a lot more demand on that inventory. And that's where you want to be, right?
That's where you can start to dictate CPMs and bigger spends from advertising agencies and so forth. So if I know my sell-out rate is going to be a lot higher, that's great for us. We can raise rates, which we will do and are doing, and kind of go from there. So really, it's an efficiency game. It's an inventory management game and a CPM game. CPMs are going up based on the medium working, video not being involved, social being involved as well. So why we're so successful as a company is we're able to take what talent and our producers are doing and do more, right, with all our resources, and that's always been by design.
So we can get more and not necessarily ask our talent to spend more time working on the project because they're all pretty busy, but we can monetize more in their communities, if that makes sense.
Okay. And then I want to ask. This is a pretty major deal, so I want to ask from a number of perspectives. From the standpoint of talent acquisition, I'm assuming that this will give you a bit more of a leg up because you're going to have more of an opportunity to monetize any new podcasts you bring on board. You already provide your talent with superior information and support infrastructure. And I met with the LadyGang team in October at their event and talked to them about that. But talk to me about being on Art19. Does that give you a leg up and improve your ability as you look to add more talent?
Definitely. One, we'll be able to know all those three revenue channels well. I'll be able to forecast them a little bit better or a little bit more in-depth, I guess you could say. Just knowing if we can make more money for our shows and then know that the show has this much of an audience, then we can calculate that. So we'll have a little bit more of a mathematical advantage, which you guys know me. I'm an analyst at heart too. So that's really important to us to be able to forecast revenue so we make good deals. The technology, as is our current CMS and what Art19 has for the ability for shows to say, "Okay, I've got more listeners in California versus Florida," right?
So we're able to do that. There's going to be tremendous advancements on that, real-time data attribution. There's going to be some really cool ways that we don't even know about, right, that Amazon will be investing in heavily to get ahead of the curve in the podcasting space to not only help advertisers, but also help our shows market them to their audience or new audiences better, right? So we're hopping on the Amazon train, which is a good one to be on, I think.
And another question about this transaction. So I'm wondering how moving on to this Art19 platform, does that give you any greater visibility? Your deck cites YouTube as the largest platform for listening to podcasts. And I believe their data, they're pretty stingy with their data. I believe, for example, their data is not included in the Podtrac ranking. So I've always got to gross that up. Does this give you any more visibility on the biggest platform on YouTube through Art19, or is it still unchanged?
Right now, Art19 is audio and only audio. They may. Amazon's definitely in the TV world, right, and the movie production world. So they will, I'm sure, get into that. I'm not sure at what level just yet, but when they do, we'll be one of their first partners, I'm sure, in that space. But really, it's hard to compete in the video world with YouTube. I mean, they just are tremendous at what they do. They love podcasting. They love the discovery. So we're going to just continue diving into that. It's going to continue to grow. I mean, we have a show on our network called Some More News, smaller audio, and a much larger YouTube presence.
And all we do is we add those two numbers. They do amazing video ads as well as the audio ads in the shows. And we're able to charge a higher CPM and hit those impressions and get more money. So it's interesting. There's going to be more podcasters that are YouTube shows that we're talking to come on and do more audio or, in some cases, just take the video that really doesn't need to be video and could be audio and put it on these audio platforms, start to market it and monetize it. So that's going to evolve and change over time, but we like where it is right now.
And if I could squeeze in one more question on a different topic. And heads up, Aaron, this might get thrown to you. On January 10th, LiveOne filed an 8-K on a Fortune 500 new media customer signed in December. First of all, is that revenue inside PodcastOne? And it sounds like that's different than this Art19 transaction. So these are two distinct and separate announcements.
Aaron, are you able to take that?
Barry. Kit, I can take it. Yes, they are two separate transactions. And was the January 10th 8-K, is that revenue going to be inside of PodcastOne or inside LiveOne or both?
Both.
Okay. You're a man of few words, but you answered my questions. That's all my questions. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Barry.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we ask that you keep to one question and one follow-up to allow for as many questions as possible. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Kinstlinger with Alliance Global Partners. Please proceed with your question.
Great. Thank you so much for taking my questions. On a few occasions, you mentioned higher margin revenue streams and expanding margins. So a couple of questions around that. What are the higher margin revenue streams? What is the target gross margin when you reach scale in this business? And then, as Aaron commented, over the last few quarters, you've seen a lot of pressure on the gross margin. But assuming you're continuing to onboard new content, how should we think about the potential for the margin to recover in the next 12 to 18 months?
Okay. That was a good one. So I mentioned about PodcastOne Pro and that having some high margins based on our team already being and our infrastructure already being in place, right?
I don't need to hire more producers or backend and marketing and all that to do those deals, which really just come in as bottom-line deals for us with high margins. What's happened over the last year and a half or so, a lot of the negotiations with talent for extensions, lower rev shares in our favor, things like that, more upfront payments, definitely put some pressure on margins. But where we will offset that pressure will be on being able to monetize differently, right? We monetize consumption of backlog episodes. We monetize social. We monetize segments. We monetize both embedded and audio and video, right? And we do dynamic ad insertions. We do pay-per-view. All these things that we'll bring to our content providers and partners are high-margin deals.
So maybe the ad revenue split might be a little bit lower, but if we can use all of our resources to get more out of that partnership that doesn't cost us more money, we then can make more money for our shows, and then hence those margins go up. We're not in the place of needing to hire more salespeople, or maybe we'll do hire some low-cost production people on our team, but we are pretty much built, right? So we're ready to go. So as these new deals come on and they get them in our system, we don't have to pay a lot for marketing because we own a lot of that inventory or have the rights to market our shows in the existing network that we have. So we're able to kind of make sure our margins will grow over time, right?
So our baseline costs are going to remain consistent, but as we do more for people and we do grab more shows, that's where our margins will continue to grow, and new distribution chains, for instance, Twitter or X, however you want to talk about it, are now getting into the podcasting space. They have made some major announcements over the last couple of weeks of certain people doing podcasts on there, and those are new distribution channels. If we can get our podcasts on X and distribute that, well, maybe we can add, or in concept, you could add all those different numbers together, right, and for instance, Slacker with Tesla and how successful that is, our podcasts are on there as well, and there's distribution and continued consumption growth with that and our relationship with LiveOne, where now we can just start to add all these numbers.
The bigger the numbers, the more we can charge and the more we can make for the show and have better margins.
So I don't know if that answers your question, but. Partly. So my follow-up would be, when do you expect to see this? I mean, you've got an 8%-11% gross margin. You've got this $25 million deal that Aaron intimated is under your business. When do you start to see that? What's the long-term potential? And does the cost of acquiring content change at all with Art19?
Okay. So the cost of the content probably not. But the value of the content will go up. So that's where it's going to offset and have better margins. I think when you look at where we were two years ago, we weren't making money, losing money to where we are now, where we're going to be even a positive on our year and growing in double-digit revenues. I think over the next two to three to four years, like I said, with that 100 million, if we grow the right way, we should be a very profitable business that's really exciting for investors and shareholders and talent and all of the above.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Sure. Good to talk to you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jon Hickman with Ladenburg Thalmann. Please proceed with your question.
Hi. Can you hear me okay?
Mr. Hickman, your line is live now.
Hi, Kit. Hi, Kit. Yes. Hi. So I just want to make sure I understand. So you have to put all of your content on the Art19 platform, but that doesn't exclude you from all your other channels, iHeart, whatever. Is that correct?
Good question. Yes. It doesn't change where the distribution goes. It will go everywhere and anywhere, like it always says. So you won't, as a fan, you won't know any difference. If you listen on Apple Podcasts, it'll be there. And if you listen on iHeart, it'll be there. Spotify, it'll be there.
But now I can listen on Amazon?
And you could before too. So you can listen on Amazon and you could before too. So all those same distribution channels.
Okay. So then, I'm sorry, I'm just confused about why they're paying you if nothing's changed.
So they're paying us because.
Maybe that's not for you. It's too fast.
They have the ability to. So they have the ability, well, like Amazon, we actually use their CloudFront services and hosting was with Amazon for years, but they own all that stuff, obviously. So there's really no cost to them. But what happens is they have the ability to take advertisers and basically buy that inventory from us, right? And they've committed to a minimum guarantee on a monthly basis to pay us based on our audience size, right? So whatever the CPM is, I'm sure they have a higher CPM that they've sold that to advertisers. So they have the potential to make money as well.
Okay. So all of your advertising business is going to go through them now?
No, no, no. I mean, they're just. That's just one. They're just a small. They're one part of it, right? And like I said, the waterfall, for instance, or direct sales team is first, Amazon second, and all the programmatic desk after that too.
Okay. I get it.
And they can't sell show-by-show. They do run-of-network stuff and can't talk to our host or any of that kind of stuff.
And is there any chance that they feed you new talent?
Definitely. Or some. Yes. And so Andy Slater, who I did the deal with at Art19, has been a friend of mine in the business for 25 years when I started as a radio rep back in Boston, and he was in Long Island. And he's a good friend of mine, and his job is to bring networks and shows onto Art19. And we talk regularly about shows that need new homes.
Because, again, Amazon's just part of the process, they need everything else that we do as well. T hat's just another benefit of our relationship together.
Great. Thank you. That's it for me.
Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our time allowed for questions. I'll turn the floor back to Mr. Gray for any final closing comments.
All right. Thank you very much, everybody. I really appreciate it. It's a huge day for PodcastOne. I'm really excited about the future. You guys go out and listen to our podcast, and we really appreciate it. If you guys ever need anything from me, feel free to reach out to our investor relations team. Happy to get on a call, talk to anybody. Thank you for your time today. We're really excited about podcasting and PodcastOne. Thank you.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.