And this has been really positive for us as a company. And we’re seeing these improvements continue to roll through into Q1, which we’ll be reporting on in more detail shortly.
Mark Argento: Great. Appreciate the color. Thanks, guys.
James Colquhoun: Thank you.
Operator: Our next question comes from Thierry Wuilloud with Water Tower Research. Please proceed with your question.
Thierry Wuilloud: Yes. Good afternoon. Yes. I think you’ve covered most of the questions. But still the 38,000 — the improvement in membership for the first quarter, is it seasonal? Is there something new? Is it — I’m wondering if — I know that you talked about acquisition costs being lower. I’m wondering if you can give us a bit more color maybe on what’s driving that?
James Colquhoun: I’ll start and I can see if there’s further answers on this side. I would say, first and foremost, just the continuing improvements in marketing efficiency since I moved from the Board to COO and then COO to CEO in December, one of my key focuses has been on how can we improve on the efficiency of acquisition pathways of our customers just by really dialing in on understanding our market segment in a deeper way and targeting our message to our sort of core avatars plus some fine-tuning some of the work that Jirka did previous to my coming on board, where he was focusing on how we are focusing our marketing acquisition on our highest retention segments as well, which has further stabilized the business. And I just think, over time, Thierry, we’re seeing this come together, and we’re getting more and more data as we grow. So it’s a really strong signal. And I’m happy to see that we’re back to growth in a meaningful way.
Jirka Rysavy: All I would say in the marketing is definitely lowering the cost, but it was actually my personal big expectation because that’s how I kind of wanted James to come to this position because marketing that’s his background as we merge this company in and we kind of, he did a lot of it with outside capital, and I kind of like that. So you see some of the first impact of, I think, James’ impact on the marketing. But it’s a lot of the work actually marketing work was done by our President over the last second part of the year to prep the thing. So it’s going to be more like a fine tune. So you already saw it in the fourth quarter, third quarter, we started to grow again. But we like the idea, keep accelerating that growth because I think it’s — we have such — so much potential. So I’m glad that James doing his job.
Thierry Wuilloud: Did you say that you are using live events to attract new members. How does that work? Do you invite them to attend and then that gives you good leads and you sign them up? Or how is that working?
James Colquhoun: So one of the strategies, Thierry, that we implemented last year was, like I mentioned, putting some content in front of the paywall. So that people — our leads and prospects can experience some of the content inside of Gaia before inviting them into a membership. And this has been very effective for us in terms of reducing acquisition costs. And then also encouraging people directly into an annual membership, which boosts our retention because clearly, for most businesses in this space and the subscription industry, the 0 to 90 days is your typically your largest churn event. So to leapfrog that is a huge incentive. You’re referring to a recent event we had in March that sold out. We did open that up for a limited time, livestream attendees.
And as I mentioned, we had over 52,000 unique attendees. And it’s great to see an initiative that was launched by Jirka in 2019 with the GaiaSphere Event Center that we’re able to start really leveraging that technology to reach more people and open up our top of funnel. And ultimately, we’ll be able to retarget these people and that the hope is will further drive acquisition costs down and scale our membership as we continue to move forward.
Thierry Wuilloud: I mean 52,000 unique attendees for one event — that’s a live event, yes, that’s pretty amazing.
James Colquhoun: Yes, we’re very happy with the result.
Thierry Wuilloud: Yes. So you said you will give us some more insights on Gaia+ when you report the first quarter? Or is that — did I understand that well because I had a bunch of questions about Gaia+?
James Colquhoun: That will be when we do Q1 and just to let you know, this only happened within the last few weeks of the first quarter. So it will be just beginnings of our leaning into that premium tier, and we intend to continue scaling that throughout the year, alongside our Marketplace initiatives. So I’m grateful that a lot of the groundwork is done, and we can focus on execution as we move throughout the year.
Thierry Wuilloud: Are there any metrics about Gaia Marketplace that you can share with us, maybe the number of offerings on the platform, is it open to every single one of your members or not quite yet? Can you give us some color there?
James Colquhoun: Thierry, we’re still in a beta on the marketplace. I’ll be providing some more data that on our Q1 call. And so far, the testing we’ve been doing continues to prove great results, and we’re just staging our rollout to our full membership as we continue to solidify the offering. So I’ll let you know more on that on the Q1 call.
Thierry Wuilloud: Okay. And then maybe a quick last question for Ned. Presentation changes. Is there — can you quickly give us some insights as to what those changes have been completely?
