Gaia at Sidoti Conference: Strategic Focus on AI and Profitability

On Thursday, 19 March 2026, Gaia Inc. (NASDAQ:GAIA) presented at the Sidoti March Small-Cap Virtual Conference, outlining its strategic priorities and financial performance. The company emphasized its focus on increasing profitability and enhancing user engagement through AI and community features. While Gaia is optimistic about future growth, challenges such as managing churn due to price increases were also acknowledged.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Unidentified speaker: A streaming service. Our overarching theme is creating transformational network to empower a global conscious community. Just by way of brief background, we’re a premium SVOD channel. We just did a price increase, which I’ll touch on a little bit later, where we raised from $13.99 per month to $15.99. We also have an annual subscription that we just raised from $119 to $139.99. Again, this is ad-free, which is unique in our niche market and amongst the other streaming services. We also have a Gaia Plus, which is $299 per year, and that’s premium live broadcasts.

For example, we just had an immersion conference here on our campus this past weekend on Saturday and Sunday, which we had a lot of our talent, the people that are in our shows come in and present. That represented over 300 people in person. Then we had over 1,000 people that actually paid for a service to come in and watch that live. Of course, our Gaia+ people were able to watch it as well. It was very well attended this past weekend. Our content categories include. A lot of times people think of us as, like, a yoga mats company. Gaia actually started as Gaiam back in early 2000s and then expanded into more of initially DVDs with the Gaia yoga mats.

We became a streaming company back in 2015 and became Gaia instead of Gaiam. Interesting, as I talk to a lot of new people, yoga and meditation really only represents about 15%-20% of our viewership. We’ve really expanded our shows to be more around overall wellness, ancient wisdom and unexplained mysteries. Our ancient civilizations has very high viewership. Our highest area of watching is personal growth and transformation. I think that surprises some people. Kind of transitioning over in our core demographics, this helps, you know, kind of make a little more sense of that. 65% of our members are female. Our kind of sweet spot is kind of that 45-65 years old people.

Although we are starting to go downstream on that as we start leveraging new product innovations with AI and community. Again, I’ll touch on that later, down in this presentation. Yeah, one of the biggest secret sauces or claims to fame for our company is our improving LTV to CAC efficiency ratio. Over the past five years, you can see that that has been improving. We actually just celebrate our eighth consecutive quarter of positive free cash flow. I’ll show you in a minute on our annual P&L that we actually finished last year right at $5 million of free cash flow for the year, but it’s been the last eight quarters that we’ve been positive free cash flow.

Very high margins, 87% gross margins, 94% cash contribution margin. Great business model when you have a recurring revenue stream. We have this accelerating CAC to LTV growth efficiency that I described earlier. Our market is quite large. You know, if you look across, we’re just over 900,000 members at the end of December 2025. We think that our realistic market is 5 million. A lot of times people ask me, "You know, can you grow internationally faster than you can domestically?" The answer is we can. We have been growing internationally, but we’ve been growing domestically as well because we really feel as though there’s a lot of untouched market potential here in the United States. Although that’s changing.

I really do think a lot of the content we have is becoming more mainstream. You’re starting to hear a lot more of things. Three years ago, I was living in Boston, and people didn’t know what Gaia was. Now when I’m out there in the Northeast, a lot of people have heard of Gaia, which was just great to hear. Our annual revenue has grown over the last five years from just under $67 million. We finished last year at $99 million. We will flash members, you know, just a couple last times here. We did announce on our last earnings call that going forward, we will not share members, and I can explain why in just a moment.

We did finish it at an all-time high of over 903,000 members at the end of 2025. Really from a members reporting standpoint, it’s something that a lot of the other streaming companies gave up on reporting members over the last couple years, the Netflixes, Paramounts, Disneys of the world. It’s something that we know is important. Obviously, it drives our revenue, but we really have been striving and concentrating more on revenue and ARPU. Really from a member standpoint, we could easily drive this number up over 1 million if we got into markets like India or other places in Asia. Although the ARPU and really the LTV and overall profitability of those members is not what we’re looking for.

We will report on other KPIs, you know, such as ARPU, other cohorts of our direct and indirect member base, but it’s not something that we will be reporting members going forward. I think it’s the right time for that. A lot of covering agencies have stopped even reporting on it. Looking at our ARPU, our average revenue per member, that has been a great story for us. The obvious jump from 2024 of $106 to $113 is we did a price increase back in October 2024. That was a 17% price increase at that time. We are putting a new price increase into play as we speak, March first.

We actually announced it back in early February. We went out to all of our existing customers, new potential customers, explained the value proposition of new capabilities in our AI product, as well as community, as well as a lot more content, new content. Those price increases have gone well and have not had the headwinds that some may have anticipated. We actually have exceeded expectations around lower churn on both of those price increases. Gross profit per employee. This is one that I think people marvel at. I tell people I came here three years ago, and we had just over 100 employees, and we were at about $80 million in revenue.

Here I am three years later, and I think we’re at a whopping, you know, 109 employees, and we’re almost at $100 million in revenue. That obviously translates to this great productivity factor of gross profit per employee, $817,000 in gross profit per employee. This is growing and something that we track regularly. It’s another one of these KPIs. We look forward to this exceeding $1 million in the next year or so. All right. Another one of our kind of secret sauces, if you will, is how we produce our original content. I’m sitting here just outside of Boulder, Colorado, on a 13-acre, 150,000 sq ft campus. We have our own studios. We fly in a lot of our talent into DIA.

It’s a 30-minute drive in here. We employ all of our editors, producers and film people right here on site, and we have our own studios. We’re able to produce these shows at much lower prices than other streaming services. We have this exceptional gross profit to content efficiency multiple. Gaia has gross profit on its content is at a 2.2x, whereas large companies like Netflix are under one. This is a true competitive advantage for us. Looking at international expansion, we do own the rights for 98% of our content library. We’re expanding into other foreign operations. We’re already translated into Spanish, German, and French.

We’re looking at things like Portuguese ’cause we think that the Brazilian market is quite intriguing. That’s sped up over the last several years. We’re able, using AI, to translate our content more quickly and much less expensive. That continues to accelerate. We have international members in 40%. You know, our members are 40% now, and we plan for that to expand to 50% within three years because like I said earlier, we feel as though we still have a large market to address here in the United States. Then we’re present in over 185 countries. Looking at our kind of distribution channels, you really can find us on the major channels.

You know, I know a lot of people find us through Apple or Roku, Android, Fire TV. You can see that the ratings and reviews there is once they find us, they really have an easy time working with us. Also from a third-party standpoint, we work with Amazon very closely. Again, that Amazon Appstore, very high ratings on the experience with Gaia on Amazon. Taking a peek at some of the future growth opportunities, I’ve touched on these a little bit, but we started talking about just over a year ago, the company raised some money to get out in front of artificial intelligence, as well as opportunity we saw in the community space.

What we were able to do, and a lot of you have probably seen this, with AI, is it just moves so quickly. It accelerated throughout 2025 so quickly that we brought that forward, and actually launched a Gaia’s AI agent, back in November of last year. Really, that was more than just Gaia using AI internally and Gaia using AI to as a marketing tool, but it was an actual product. When people came into our site historically, it was kind of, you know, maybe we used some AI to, you know, if you like this show, perhaps you’ll like this other show. Really now it’s a destination. People can come into Gaia, they can watch the shows as they have in the past, or they could start asking our AI agent, Sage, questions.

You know, instead of maybe watching a 50-minute show on the pyramids in Egypt, they can ask our AI agent questions specifically about those pyramids, and we can show clips, five, you know, 10-minute clips, or answer specific questions. We just announced a couple months ago, those results were pretty crazy. In the first two mont