Let's please give a warm welcome to the stage, if I can have everyone's attention, please. Thank you so much. We are excited to welcome from PodcastOne, the Founder and President, Kit Gray.
Thank you. All right. Good morning, everybody. A pleasure to be here. Thank you for being here on a early Tuesday morning. I hope everybody's enjoying the weather and the conference. My name's Kit Gray. I started PodcastOne, almost about 15 years from actually my garage in Marina del Rey, and here we are now. We're a publicly traded company with over 200 shows. I'm gonna go through our business model and everything about PodcastOne. Again, thank you for being here today. PodcastOne is a leading publisher and podcast sales network. Like I said, we have over 200 shows in our network. We do everything soup to nuts for our shows in terms of sales. We have 12 people across the country. We have a studio here in Beverly Hills.
We have a marketing team, a social media team. We have a talent acquisition team, and we actually have a business development merger and acquisition team, which I'll get into on how that all works for us. As you can see, you can see our fiscal year guidance. We are on a fiscal year ended in March. We have not actually given our guidance for 2027 yet. We have not actually finalized our numbers yet for fiscal year 2026, but I will say we are in that range, and everything is looking good on that front. It's actually good timing for me to presenting to you guys. Yesterday, we hit our 52-week high. We just crossed the $4 mark.
Our market valuation is, I guess $110 million or so. Our platform is to actually grow our podcast audience and then monetize it. There's a bunch of different ways that we do that. It's basically designed by me years ago on looking at people like Adam Carolla, Howard Stern, in doing endorsement radios. We saw great responses on commercials, getting high CPMs, high conversion rates, high ROI. Back when I started the business, there were no iPhones. You had to actually download the podcast into your computer and then onto an iPod, and then some people had to, like, plug their tape player into the car, so it was very unique.
I knew instantaneously that if you were doing that and going through that process, that you were a super fan, and if someone like Adam Carolla told you to go buy Mother's Day flowers at ProFlowers or go to The Home Depot to buy paint, that you would have tremendous results, and that rang true. The business has just changed so much over the years with the technology and really what happened in COVID. COVID was actually a good thing for podcasting. Pre-COVID, it was all just an audio medium. As people got more used to watching shows on YouTube and watching interactions like Zoom, hair and makeup and costs of video production went way down. In our world now, we are both an audio and video play.
We're seeing higher CPMs, higher integrations, more money, more attribution, more advertisers in the space. We have a long-term play as well. About two years ago when we went public, my goal was to get the company to $100 million. We're still, you know, within three to five years, we're still in that range. There's a couple ways that we're gonna do that. We're gonna continue to acquire shows. We're gonna continue to grow our shows. We're gonna continue to reuse the resources that we have as a marketing team, a production team, to take some of the heavy lifting off of podcasters so we can get more content, monetize old content, find new ways to monetize that content, and expand. We also have a plan in place to acquire companies, not only in the podcasting space, but also technologies that now exist.
There are new revenue channels always coming into the space. I'll get more into that a little bit down the road. That's our long-term play. As you can see, the podcast market has exploded. If you don't know what a podcast is, you've been, you know, living in a closet. The President of the United States definitely made a big impact in getting elected by being on podcasts. As Elon Musk on Joe Rogan said, You can't hide in a two-hour interview, right? People really get to know people in an interview like that. The growth of podcast consumption, as you can imagine, is very much in the 20 to 40 year-old range. Everybody listens to podcasts.
We're actually seeing it more recently in the last year or two , that older demographic is really taking to it. They listen to the finance podcasts. They listen to travel podcasts. The crime world in podcasts is exploding. It's a very female-oriented consumption of crime podcasts for whatever reason. You guys can take that for what it is. It's just an amazing space, and we're seeing great ROI in terms of advertisers coming back into the space, paying high CPMs and so forth. Here are some of the marketplace and some of the deals that have been done over the last, you know, couple of years . Joe Rogan, we all know, being with Spotify. Alex Cooper as well. SiriusXM did the deal with SmartLess, which is a great podcast.
Amazon did a deal with the Kelce Brothers. Those type of deals are still happening. The marketplace to acquire podcasting is extreme. We have, I don't know, a team of four or five people working with talent agents, podcast directs, and we're actually creating our own podcast shows as well. These are different ways that we sell advertisements and monetize the podcasts. On the left, you can see our core aspect, which if you listen to podcasts, you've heard the host reads, both again are in the audio and video consumption. I'll get into it in a little bit, YouTube is now the number one place for consumption of podcasts as well as discovery. Makes sense, having their parent company being Google and so forth.
That's something that just happened over the last two, three years. We do dynamic ad insertions. This is an interesting thing. We signed a deal about a year ago with Amazon and their hosting platform called ART19. Why that's so impactful for us is one, having a partner like Amazon is fantastic, they give us a minimum guarantee based on impressions that they can sell into their marketplace as well as their advertising deals as well. It gives us monthly revenues. You know, right now it's about $6 million a year where Amazon pays us to host our programs, which is totally different than what it was five, six years ago when we actually had to pay for hosting. We have an amazing sales force.
My CRO, Sue McNamara, started and ran the Howard Stern network with CBS for years. She has amazing relationships and an amazing sales team across the country that not only sell the spots and dots, but they also sell these amazing segments where we can charge, you know, $30 ,000-$40,000 to sponsors to own an episode and so forth. Social media more and more is becoming our 360 packages. There's a couple other ways now that we make revenues come through. We sold a show called Varnamtown. This was a really cool thing for us. We hired a team from Epic with their writers, and they went down to Varnamtown, North Carolina, which I know no one's ever heard of or ever been to.
It's a small fishing village that back in the 90s was infiltrated by Pablo Escobar's organization, and drug trafficking went through there. Anyhow, a bunch of characters, as you can imagine, came through this and a sheriff, and it's a wild story that we produced, I think 13 or 14 episodes, and we actually just sold it to Paramount. They're doing a television pilot on that, and if it gets picked up, we'll have IP and residuals off of that. That's a whole way we're able to use our network to not only make hits in the podcast space and prove concept, but also pay for production, pay for all of this to happen, and then have residual revenues down the road.
PodcastOne Pro is another avenue where we work with companies like MotorTrend, Microsoft, Lovesac to produce their podcast for their corporate exposure. A lot of these companies love talking to their thousands and thousands of employees through podcast content. They also talk to their clients through that. It's a great way for them to get their brands out there and their stories out there. We do all the production, social media, marketing for them, talent booking as well. We do paywalls. We do PodRoll, which is something that popped up literally a year ago. I never saw it coming. Basically this company buys into show feeds, right? We are able to monetize that. That's a seven-figure deal last year, it's growing quite nicely already into this year.
Again, just different ways to monetize our content. I'm gonna get into some other exciting things that we have in a little bit, but that's the gist of our business. We talked about us. We're zero- debt. We, like I think I said, we did between $60 million and $62 million in fiscal year 2026. We have a positive EBITDA of between $4.5 million to $6 million. Again, we'll be reporting that shortly. No debt, and we're out talking to a multitude of podcast companies about acquiring them, partnering with them, and using our infrastructure, which we have in place with all our back end, our team, to just actually take these on, cut a lot of costs, and move forward.
We're really excited about where that stands. Steve Lehman is running that. He started Premiere Radio Networks, if you guys know what that company is, and he's leading that for us as well. There's some interesting ways we've been able to actually cut some of our costs as well, and no one ever likes letting anybody go, but we've been able to take our team and put them into more revenue-generating opportunities within the company, taking away a lot of the, you know, the work that basically is time-consuming that now AI can take over, whether that's doing research for our podcasts, marketing our podcasts, finding out what topics are trending instantly, talking about those in our shows, researching guests, and more. We're able to use all of that. We talked already about YouTube.
Again, just so you guys know, if you don't, our model, we are the exclusive sales rights for all of our podcasts. They get distributed everywhere, which is totally different than how the world used to live, where you'd have certain places had certain content, and that's the only place you can get them. We're everywhere. We're on Spotify. We compete with Spotify. We compete with SiriusXM. We're on their platforms, iHeart's platforms as well. We compete with them, but we also work with them. It's an interesting world. Again, YouTube being the most exciting thing in the last couple years for the business, and that exposure that they've brought to the medium. Here's some financials on where the company is.
Again, we'll be reporting guidance in finalizing our fiscal year 2026 shortly. Here's our team. We, Rob Ellin is our parent company from LiveOne. They own, I think 74% of PodcastOne. You can see our other people on this list have been with me for years. We just welcomed Craig Christensen, who's our new CFO. But besides that, you know, the people that work for PodcastOne have been with me for eight, nine years. Most of our shows, The Adam Carolla Show, the A&E network with Cold Case Files, I Survived..., History Channel, The LadyGang girls, they've been with me for eight, nine, 10 years. Jordan Harbinger. We're lucky. I think we live and breathe podcasting.
We talk to our shows all the time. We're different in that sense. We work hand-in-hand with them. We get more out of them. They get more out of us, and it, and it works. Our Board of Directors is really tremendous. Patrick Wachsberger was integral on the Varnamtown deal. He again, was big in the Lionsgate world. That's been amazing. Jon Merriman and our team is just full of great people and great backgrounds, they've been extremely helpful. Here are some of our key takeaways that you can kind of see, and before I take Q&As, I wanted to talk about a couple really exciting things and why people should invest in PodcastOne. One, like I mentioned, we're right at our 52-week high right now.
I, you know, really excited about it. We're really only, I guess, 1x-1.5x earnings and revenue. I think extremely undervalued. If you look at some of our competitors and what they've been valued at, it's 3x-4x, and I think we have a huge opportunity to do that. The business plan, just as is growing exactly how I thought it would and how I wanted it to go in terms of growth, in terms of our network size. We signed a couple of these deals with other podcasting companies, a couple tech companies. We're on our path to $100 million really fast. There's always things that change. I can't imagine how many times everybody in this room has heard about AI this week.
I've heard about it a lot. What I will say is we're talking right now extensively with three or four companies where they're very interested in taking our audio and video content and licensing it at a big, a big point for big dollars. I mean, if you look and you just do a Google search on, you know, what companies are doing that right now, that includes, you know, People, New York Times and others, where we're in the same spot. I mean, we work with Dr. Phil. We work with Brendan Schaub. We work with Adam Carolla. These guys have been doing great video/audio content conversations for years. I mean, I think it's been the hundreds of thousands of hours of video content that we can now offer to these AI companies. It's extremely exciting.
If you look at what Barry put out in the news and what a couple of our analysts are saying, it has huge potential to be a home run for us. We're excited about it, and I think that's a reason for people to get excited about our company more. As I leave this presentation, I just wanted to say that you all are listening to podcasts. Continue listening to podcasts, enjoy podcasts, check out PodcastOne. We're really excited about the future. We think we're, you know, we're in a great position. I believe you're gonna see more consolidation. You're gonna be seeing more acquisitions.
If you look around the news and talk to people, there are people, you know, that are talking about iHeart and SiriusXM and mergers there and acquisitions and, you know, the people at Amazon aren't slowing down, and Spotify as well. There's a great opportunity for us to make some of these right moves and get that stock well into a higher range than we even are right now. Again, I appreciate everybody's time. If you have any questions, I'm here to take them.[ Barry].
Kit, I want to ask you a question about your talent. Obviously, a podcast network is only as good as the talent you have with the podcast.
Those folks are small business people. Some cases not so small, pretty big businesses. Their business is very important to them. How do you treat them? How do you deal with them? What kind of metrics do you provide? How is PodcastOne differentiated from other platforms? The talent can go to another platform.
That's right. I'm gonna repeat the question for the live stream. Basically, as I understand it's how is PodcastOne different when it comes to talent relationships than other companies? What I can say is, we're unique. What we do and what we offer in terms of services are second to none. We have a handheld process with all our talent. We do monthly calls with them. They have access to see their numbers. They can see where they're downloaded, where people are consuming it, what's working, what's not working in terms of the dashboard. They have access to finance. They have access to Sue and our sales team. We have weekly sales calls where some of our talent comes on.
I designed the business very much how Katz Media Group, part of the iHeart world, was designed when they represented radio stations. They'd have the radio stations come in, talk about whatever they've got going on, we go out and do media calls. We do the same thing. We have Adam Carolla talk to media buyers at Home Depot and so forth. We create segments for them. We give them an understanding on why they need to do certain things the way they need to do. I think you'll see a lot of podcasters leave other companies based on recommendations from our shows and understanding, you know, they've been with us seven, eight years. The LadyGang girls give us recommendations for shows all the time.
That's a testament to what we do. If you just let this be a spots and dots business, you're gonna get $7- $8 CPMs. Revenue shares are gonna go down. The talent of people that are working in the space will go down. It's our job to create value for these shows and value for the talent so they recognize why they have to pay us 30%- 40% of revenue share, right? You know, you'll see 80/20 deals with talent favor with some of these companies because they don't do any of that. I think that's a disservice to the podcasters and the advertisers and the audience, frankly. That's what we do. Sure.
Just real quick on your 2025 fiscal financials. You show I think it's $6 million of gross profit, and against that you have $42 million of operating expenses. Yet you're getting to even positive, so there's clearly some add-backs there. Can you just go over those real quick?
Yeah, sure. Our biggest expense is our talent rev share, right? Every deal that we do, they're all a little different. We in many cases give minimum guarantees, and then there's a revenue split on it. We're all swimming in the same direction. That's where most of our cost goes to. It's the talent payment. When you look at expenses, it's not paying me and the team, it's really the advertisers come in and then we break off the money based on those deals. That's where you're seeing most of the expenses on it. You know, that's the interesting thing, right?
As we continue to grow and we don't need cash in any way, but we're able to craft deals where I know it's very much like an analyst bet, right? Like I look at the downloads, I look at how much extra content I can get out of them using our staff and our services, and then I know that I can grow that show 15%-20% over the term of the next contract, and that's how I price it, right? I make deals on that. Yes.
In regards to AI and all content being so valuable these days, just wanna ask a question. How would you value, like, 250,000 hours of content? Is it a one-time proposition for your company if, you know, if they wanna purchase it, or would it be a continuous stream and how would it affect the bottom line?
Sure. Hi, Nancy. Thank you. She's asking to the virtual world out there about AI and what the valuation potentially could be. You know, it's really we're right at the frontier, the tip of the spear, as they say. This is a world that's a little unknown, but I think if you do some research just by putting it in, you know, a Google search, you'll see that the potential's extreme, right? I mean, if you look at the deals that The New York Times have done and others, you're looking at, you know, a really nice, you know, $100 to $300, $400 per hour clip if the audio and video is in the right, you know, stratosphere for the AI to take and consume.
I mean, that could be a huge game changer for us as I've read about certain deals. They could be annualized. They could be yearly deals. They could be forever deals. It really each one's a little different. We're investigating all of those right now, but they're really exciting. I mean, again, this is something that we didn't see coming, you know, even six months ago. There's a lot of really smart people in it, and a lot of these bigger companies are already starting to do it. It makes sense. If you think about, you know, it's kinda scary in a way, but if you think about how AI is consuming math, science, data, written word, it's tremendous.
They don't yet know how to interact with people and their mannerisms and the amount of content and video content we have. Think about it. Dr. Phil has been on for, what, 40, 35 years every day, and the guy still is cranking out five, six hours of content a week of quality audio content, of conversations, and that's extremely valuable. That would be a complete game changer for us. All right. Any other questions? Okay. Well, thank you very much. I hope everybody enjoys the rest of the [day].