Gaia at 15th Annual LD Micro Invitational: Streaming Success and Strategic Growth

On Thursday, 10 April 2025, Gaia Inc. (NASDAQ: GAIA) presented at the 15th Annual LD Micro Invitational, sharing a strategic overview that highlighted its financial growth and operational strategies. While the company boasted a strong cash flow and expanding subscriber base, it also outlined upcoming challenges, including planned price increases to sustain growth.

Key Takeaways

• Gaia reported $90 million in revenue for 2024, marking a 12% year-over-year increase.
• The company maintains an 86% gross margin and a 93% cash contribution.
• Expansion focuses on international markets and language-specific strategies.
• Gaia aims for Rule of 40 compliance by 2026, indicating balanced growth.
• A price increase is scheduled for March 2026 to support continued expansion.

Financial Results

Gaia's financial performance in 2024 showcased significant growth and efficiency:

• Revenue reached $90 million, a 12% increase from the previous year.
• The company achieved free cash flow positivity for the full year and Q4.
• Gross margin stood at 86%, with a cash contribution of 93%.
• EBITDA margin for 2024 was recorded at 17%.
• Projected revenue for 2025 is $102 million, reflecting a 13-14% growth.
• Estimated value of Gaia's media library is $180 million, while its member base is valued at $300 million.

Operational Updates

Gaia's operational strategies focus on content production and international expansion:

• The company had 856,000 active paying members by the end of 2024.
• Content production costs are significantly lower than major streamers, at approximately $35,000 per hour.
• 44% of members are international, with a target to exceed 50% within three years.
• Gaia Marketplace, launched in Q3 last year, has an average order volume of $1,100.

Future Outlook

Gaia's future growth is driven by several strategic initiatives:

• Expansion of Gaia Marketplace to offer tours, retreats, courses, and products.
• AI integration to enhance user engagement and content discovery, set for 2026.
• Development of a deeper community platform to connect members globally.
• A planned price increase in March 2026 to support ongoing growth.

Q&A Highlights

Key insights from the Q&A session included:

• Premium membership tier offers access to live events, priced at $299 annually.
• Live events are dubbed in Spanish, with plans to expand to French and German.
• Premium membership is growing at three times the rate of total membership growth.

In conclusion, Gaia's presentation at the LD Micro Invitational underscored its robust financial health and strategic initiatives aimed at sustaining growth in the competitive streaming industry. Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - 15th Annual LD Micro Invitational 2025:

James, Gaia: through a quick presentation here, and then towards the end I'm going to bring my off sider here, Ned Preston, CFO for some finance slides. So at Gaia here, the core of our product is a subscription video on demand service that speaks to a growing global niche audience. We have a monthly and annual membership tier.

And then we have a premium tier, includes live broadcast. And the content categories we speak to are categories that are very much outside of the mainstream streaming industry. So we're much more on what's called the edutainment side of the category, which is educating, entertaining content, typically documentaries, series, and also practice content. The content categories we appeal to, and these are all available under the one membership, is personal growth, transformation, ancient wisdom and unexplained mysteries, wellness, yoga, and meditation. The demographic we speak to skews female, it skews older, highly educated, high disposable income, a lot of spare time.

What I find by speaking with the GAIA members is that a lot of people come to our platform after going through a life crisis. So typically, of a loved one, chronic illness, diagnosis, midlife crisis, of which it used to be one back in our days, or when I was growing up, you'd have one midlife crisis. Now people are having multiple midlife crises. And and sort of this crisis of meaning and purpose, what does it mean to be human? And a lot of the experts we have on our platform have series and content related to this primary question.

And so we have experts on here like Deepak Chopra, Greg Braden, Bruce Lipton, Joe Dispenza, you know, people you may or may not have heard of, but our demographic and our core avatar, we call her Celeste. She's an early fifties woman, and you might know some of them, mid fifties. And she loves Gaia. She loves our content, and she's a core subscriber. If we look here at some of the finance highlights, we have an enormous amount of leverage in the business.

For 2024, we were free cash flow positive for the full year and for Q4. We operate on an 86% gross margin and a 93% cash contribution. Ned and I like to call ourselves fierce defenders of gross margin, You will not see us booking any vanity sales in our business. We also have an accelerating acquisition cost to LTV growth efficiency. In 2018, let's say we're acquiring customers at around $100 a customer.

The lifetime value was about two eighty, two point eight times the acquisition cost to LTV. That's now accelerated to over 6x acquisition cost to LTV. So we're getting the same efficiency in terms of customer acquisition, but a lot higher return on the customer lifetime value. In terms of total addressable market, we like to see it as a function of growing SVOD households globally, of which many people have two or three services. Then we have subscribers willing to pay a subscription and interested in at least one Gaia topic.

And some of the streamers will touch on some of the topics we have, whether it's ancient civilizations, psychedelics, spiritual growth, self healing, transformation. They'll do one show out of the thousands of items they have. That only helps us grow because they eventually find Gaia, and it's the home of this content. We have a huge library. Then we have a 26,000,000 total TAM with a 5,000,000 subscriber target.

In terms of current subscribers and revenue, on the left hand side is our revenue step up here, and on the right hand side is our members. We closed last year at 856,000 active paying members. In terms of sustainable growth transition, our ARPU continues to trend upwards. This is a function of price increases, growing our premium membership tier, and also a new initiative we have called Gaia Marketplace, which I'll speak to a little later. And we also have growing gross profit per employee.

I think what's fascinating about this model is that we're able to scale top line growth with very small incremental investments in payroll and related costs. And so you can see that in the GP per employee. Also fourth quarter was over $800,000 We anticipate this going north of $1,000,000 and then north of 1,500,000.0 as the business continues to expand. Welcome. Next, we have original content here.

Some of the secret source of Gaia is that we produce our own content. So a lot of studios and mainstream streamers outsource their production to third party production houses. I have an entrepreneur and production background. My first two projects went to Netflix. I've done five feature films and documentaries.

My most recent one was executive produced by Joaquin Phoenix. And so I'm familiar with this space. And so when you're a streamer and you outsource your production to mainstream production houses, you pay a margin on that. Our hourly cost per production is about $35,000 an hour. Major streamers can be north of 10,000,000 an hour.

And the reason we're able to achieve that efficiency is we have a full in house production capability on our campus. So in Boulder, Colorado, we have a 13 acre, 150,000 square foot campus. It's on our balance sheet. And this campus has one of the biggest studio facilities in Colorado. We fly our talent into DIA.

It's about thirty minutes from the airport. We pull them straight into a studio, which you can see a quick snapshot on the top right there. We build a set, we do an original series in two or three days, we pay them an upfront fee, 90% plus of the time without an ongoing royalty. So we own the content in perpetuity worldwide. And we produce that with staff, so we're not paying that loading rate.

And also, we're not beholden to any of the writer strikes or any of the sort of challenges that can sometimes happen in the entertainment industry. The the the net result of this from an investor perspective is that we're able to spend a lot less as a percentage of revenue on content and still provide a deep library to our members. A deep It's Additionally, the second bullet point here shows that we have a lot of viewership on legacy content. So where a lot of streamers will have to have a hit, like Apple has severance right now, they're getting a lot of growth because of that hit. Subscribers come in and watch content from 02/2016, and they're like, wow.

Look at this. This is new to them. And so $2,000,000 of content that we produced in 2014, the year that the channel was born, we returned we've returned $23,000,000 in gross profit off that cohort of content. And we calculate that on a a royalty pool deal with a dollar per minute attribution. Additionally, you can see the efficiency we have on our content.

Obviously, comparing to Netflix is somewhat a fool's errand, but on the content side, we can do that. So our gross profit from the full year of '24 there compared sorry, this is annualized from q three numbers, I believe. It's not updated. So then you have the amortized value of the sorry. No.

That is our gross profit, full year 2024. So gross profit for the both of the businesses, and then the amortized value of the content on the balance sheet, and then the multiple there. So Netflix has a point 6% multiple. We have a 2x multiple, just showing the efficiency in our content production. In terms of international expansion, so we own 98% of the rights globally to our content library.

And it's very efficient for us to expand internationally without adding a team locally. I spoke to some investors this morning about this very topic. So we have French, Spanish, and German language versions of the site and content, so fully dubbed and localized versions of the site in those territories. And we're expanding very quickly in the DACH region, particular in Europe, French speaking Europe and the world. We see languages more than territories.

So we see French speaking, German speaking, and English speaking, and Spanish speaking, and less territory based. And all of those language teams are based in our office in our head office campus in Boulder, Colorado. So it's a little bit the United Nations at headquarters. And we're able to expand additional languages without having to have local operations in those territories, so we would build the language leads and teams in our office. Currently, we're 44% international members, we'll be over 50% within three years, and we have members in 185 different countries around the world.

In terms of distribution, we have what's called direct and then third party. So third party distribution you see up on the top right there. That's YouTube, Amazon, Fios, Xfinity, and Comcast. So if you're a subscriber to any one of those platforms, you can one click add the channel. So if you're on Prime Video, for instance, we're part of the Prime Video channel infrastructure, and we're one of Amazon's fastest growing channels in North America, especially in the niche channel business.

And then we have apps across all of the major platforms, iPhone, Android, iPad, Roku, Fire TV, and Apple TV. And you can also see the ratings there. You probably can't read it that well, but bottom right is 4.8 out of five on 128,000 ratings on the App Store. This is an enormous amount of social proof in the brand and shows that we have a raving fan database. And if any of you have an iPhone right now, if you go to the iOS app, it will have 17,000 ratings, 4.8 star as well.

Enormous social proof. Amazon there, nearly 15,000 ratings, 4.1. And Trustpilot, which is a third party customer satisfaction platform, has 4.3 on 10,000 reviews. So it's not just me blowing smoke out here. There's a lot of people that love this brand.

In terms of future growth, ARPU, and retention drivers, we have a number of irons in the fire, as my off sider, Ned, would say here. GAIA Marketplace, we launched at the end of last year. This is essentially our conscious Costco model for our community, And we offer retreats, tours, travel, courses and training programs, and physical products at a 10% discount to our members. We've essentially curated these and put them onto this new site. We launched in Q3 last year.

The average order volume for a new purchase on our marketplace was $1,100. So we're taking someone paying a hundred and $19 a year, who has high disposable income, a lot of spare time on their hands, loves this content category, We're saying, Do you want to go to Egypt or Peru on a tour with one of the talent from our shows? Do you want to go to Costa Rica for a transformation event? Do you want to study a certificate in yoga or meditation or transformation? Average $1,100 purchase, step up from $119 a year.

So there's an enormous amount of value extraction that can take place in this new business unit. We are early with rolling this out, and we continue to expand this as we grow. One of the things that we love about Marketplace is, as I mentioned before, Ned and I are fierce defenders of gross margin. So if we book a member on an $11,000 tour to Egypt with one of the talent from our shows, We give them a 10% discount, so it's $10,000 We pay roughly $8,000 to the tour provider, but we collect all the cash upfront until the tour happens, or shortly before, and we only book the $2,000 margin on that at 100% gross margin. So you will see in some of the pro form a slides that Ned will be presenting shortly that our gross margin will actually continue up north of 86% as we grow.

We recently did a price increase at the end of last year. It was 18% for U. S, a little more for GBP and Euro. And that was very successful. We more than made the delta on that price increase when we look at any churn impact from that member cohort.

And so we are planning another price increase in March 2026. So that'll be about every year and a half cycle, and prior to that it was about every four years. Now we are lagging Netflix's tier by about $4 so we still have headroom there, we believe. Then we recently did a capital raise a few months ago for AI expansion in Gaia Community. One of the things that we noticed from our research is that when people interact with the product, they retain at a higher rate.

And so we're wanting to build two other interaction possibilities within the product on top of our content. And first is AI. One of our board members, Keur Patel, he was early in building Amazon. He got 5% for about $500,000, which you can imagine how much that's worth today. Was an early investor in OpenAI.

He was an early investor in Anthropic. He built the test platform for Netflix. He still gets invited to their board meetings. He suggested that we build our own AI platform and not to license it, our content library, to any of these major LLM players. So we are using part of the proceeds from the capital raise to build our own AI wrapper that we will have agnostically wired up to multiple multiple LLMs that we can launch inside our platform.

So as people are watching content, they'll be able to, right there and then inside the platform, query this AI, have a chat with it, discover more content on this topic, and increase stickiness within the in the product experience. This will launch around the same time as the price increase, 2026. Additionally, at the core of what we do, we see ourselves more of a community company than anything else. And I'm sure that many of you have subscriptions to Paramount or maybe Netflix or Disney, yet you don't feel that any of those brands are a community. They're more a streaming platform, and it's like Internet one point o.

Here is information. Internet two point o is that here is a community connecting together, which is social media, and Internet three point is tokenization and digital value exchange. So we are a web two point o company where we have a deep connection with our member base. And on our campus in Colorado, have a live event center, which is part of our premium tier. Our Gaia members come to that center in Boulder from India, from Australia, which is my native country, if you haven't told by my accent just yet.

If you were guessing British, you were wrong. And from from Canada, from within the Continental US, from The United Kingdom, we have members from all over the world come to events at our headquarters. This is a rich community. They love connecting with each other. And so we're building out a deeper community technology platform where members will be able to meet in local person in person, in local groups all around the world.

They'll be able to interact with other members. They'll be able to chat on certain topics. And as we deepen this community connection, not only will it be another engagement point in the brand, we also believe it will lead to further retention and increasing LTV. And given our efficiency on the acquisition side, we'll be able to leverage that into further top line growth and flow through to the bottom line. Speaking of that, I'm going to pass over to Ned and I'll be back for Q and A.

Ned Preston, CFO, Gaia: Everybody. My name is Ned Preston. I'm the CFO, and I'm, of course, going to cover numbers with you here. So taking a quick peek back at 2024 is a very successful year. We finished just over $90,000,000 in revenue.

That was 12% growth from our previous year. To elaborate a little bit on some comments that James made around our high margins is a big reason why I came to Gaia, actually. I've been at this for thirty years working for a lot of high-tech companies, most recently with Akamai and PTC up in Boston. Before that, Cisco Systems and Oracle. And so when I came to Gaia, was like, wait a minute.

We have 93% cash contribution margin and 86% gross margin. We have a growing recurring revenue base of members and our deferred revenue is going up. We should be considered almost like a SaaS company. And with SaaS companies, a key benchmark in that space is something called the Rule of 40, which is simply is your EBITDA margin, which you can see at 17%, and your percent growth on revenue. As that closes on 40%, that just means you're growing at a very profitable rate.

And so we finished last year at 29%, but we do have within our viewpoint trying to get to Rule 40 on a quarterly basis by the end of twenty twenty five and on an annual basis in 2026, which is also the year we plan to become breakeven. We put this benchmark scenario in here. So again, just to remind people of numbers, we were at $90,000,000 last year. That left hand column is just a bit underneath. I think our consensus is about $102,000,000 or 13%, fourteen % growth.

But if you look at it, this goes back to the comment James had earlier about leverage. So if you look at that left hand column and directionally call that 2025, we'll finish just over $100,000,000 We still have the very high margins, And we're generating over $5,500,000 in free cash flow and that 6% free cash flow margin. But as we grow and double that, which we see on the rise in the next three to four years, that free cash flow will more than triple. So doubling our revenue to $200,000,000 We can sustain the marketing as a percent of revenue around 40% to 42%, but we already have everything built into our business model so that you're not having to scale out very much. Another point that I think is extremely valid, especially this week around tariffs and whatnot, is that our product is insulated.

We're not going to realize any sort of price hikes or anything of the sort with what's going on in the current macroeconomic environment. And then lastly, taking a peek at our balance sheet, we finished December just under $613,000,000 We raised $7,000,000 back in early February, again, to aim at accelerating our AI and community initiatives that James just covered. And so we have a strong balance sheet overall as we close out the year, and it's only getting stronger with some of these elements. But one of the things that's not on our balance sheet, you see to the right there in the estimated column, is our media library, our member base, and some NOLs that we have on record. So our member media library is valued at just over $180,000,000 member base just under $300,000,000 and the NOLs.

And so this is just another way of kind of showing not only is our balance sheet strong, but if we were to ever and there's no plans to do so, but if we were ever to try to sell or spin off this business, there's just a lot of value that's included in here. So I'll just finish up. This slide presentation, by way, is on our IR site on the GAIA website. But just a little bit of background on our founder, Jirka Rysavy. A lot of people at these conferences seem to remember him from his Corporate Express days and Wild Oats.

He was on the board at Whole Foods and started Guy. Actually, we have been twenty five years on the NASDAQ. Then you can see a little bit of background on James and myself. But let me finish there. I see the yellow light.

I think we have about five minutes for Q and A. And thanks by the way. See a lot of familiar faces out there. There's Henry. Good to see you all.

Thanks for checking in with us.

James, Gaia: Any questions?

Eric: Sure,

James, Gaia: Eric. So so we have a a in a premium tier as part of our headquarters, we have this live event center, which can hold about 300 people in person. Plus, we live produce content and live stream content to our premium membership tier. So typically, we do is we track top performing talent from our subscription video service and then invite them either on their own or as part of a conference set up with multiple speakers to one of, six events that we currently run on an annual basis at our headquarters. These events then livestream to the premium membership tier at $299 a year, which is roughly 3 x our annual membership price.

And they are live dubbed in Spanish currently, so we have small translation booths off to the side where we live dub into Spanish. We don't yet live dub into French and German, we will do in the future as those languages expand for us. And then these premium membership the premium membership tier will also get access to the replays. So all in all, we've done about 22 events at our headquarters now, which are all available for replay. We have, like, a three day becoming supernatural event with Joe Dispenza.

You know, it's, about $600 to attend in person, $300 a year for the platform. And these events, if you go to one of Joe's events now, are, like, $1,500 a weekend. We also we have individual events. And then the group events, have based on top performing content. So we have a transformation event in March called Immersion.

Then we have our Ancient Civilization Conference around August. We have a channeling conference in September. And, again, the best thing to do we've had multiple investors come to these events because they're like, is this is this brand real? You know, what's going on here? And as they come there and they see a room full of people and, you know, at one of the events, you know, like I said, those people from India, The United Kingdom, Australia that flew in for the weekend for this event.

We have a unique sticky group of members that are willing to do that, and it just shows that there's a strength in our community, and there's many ways that we continue to expand and monetize this. So we're seeing that membership tier grow at three x our current total membership growth right now. So it's in the high twenties in terms of growth, and we're very excited about that continuing to drive incremental improvements in ARPU. So yeah. Thank you.

Any further questions? Yes. So will the events be at other locations? Not at this stage. Typically, because we we do partner with other events where they're running an event in our sort of category, and they're filming it.

And we will do an agreement with them saying, yep, we will license the content and publish it on our site. Typically, we don't introduce that to our premium tier because the quality of the production is not the same. So, like, here, this is an event. There's one a s seven, I think it is, Sony camera out there filming me. Our event has, like, six camera operators.

We have a live switching room. We do live color, live audio, live dubbing. It's like a 12 person show, and you get essentially what you would get from the Oprah network or something. A perfectly produced live event. Most of these conferences, it's a black curtain and, you know, something like this.

We have like set, you know, it looks totally different. So yes, we do partner with events, but we don't run our own branded events globally, simply because we are very cost efficient as a business and we want to make sure we don't blow out cost with production unnecessarily. Six seconds to go. Thank you very much. Appreciate your attention.

Okay. Thank you.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.