From action cams to AI data licensing: GoPro’s new revenue lever

GoPro’s Q2 2025 results reveal a company cutting costs and tightening margins, but also setting the stage for a new revenue frontier—AI licensing. Hardware still matters, yet the company’s cloud may prove to be its most valuable asset.

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For years, GoPro was synonymous with strapping a rugged camera to your helmet and hoping the footage lived up to the adrenaline. But the story told in Q2 2025 earnings was a little different.

Revenue landed at $153 million, down 18% year over year, yet the company managed to improve gross margin to 36%—a notable climb from just above 30% a year earlier.

Cost cuts drove operating expenses down by nearly a third, shrinking losses and giving management something new to talk about: not just cameras, but content.

The camera business itself still carries weight. Sell-through was about 500,000 units, down 23%, a reminder that consumer electronics cycles can be unforgiving. Yet GoPro leaned heavily on its subscriber base, which, while dipping slightly to 2.45 million, maintained an attach rate of 56% and retention above 80% for customers active over three to four years. That’s an enviable loyalty curve in the subscription economy.

The camera roadmap still matters

Hardware isn’t fading. GoPro confirmed it will ship two new cameras in 2025, including the long-awaited MAX 2 360° model, and launch a low-light prosumer camera in 2026.

These bets aim to defend share in a U.S. action-camera market of around three million units, while entering adjacent categories that could add another four million units in annual demand.

The company expects these launches to swing revenue growth back into positive territory by Q4 2025, with H2 adjusted EBITDA forecast at about $20 million—compared with a $9 million loss in the same period a year ago. In other words, product cadence is still the backbone of the story. But it’s not the whole story.

The bet on AI licensing

On July 30, GoPro quietly rolled out something new: an opt-in AI training program that lets subscribers license their cloud-stored videos to model builders. Subscribers keep 50% of licensing revenue (GoPro announcement). It’s a simple but powerful concept: what if your skydiving or scuba footage wasn’t just for social feeds, but also for training the next generation of AI vision systems?

The scale is enormous. GoPro’s cloud houses more than 450 petabytes of footage—over 13 million hours of real-world video. In a world where synthetic data has limits, real environments shot from action cameras are gold. Analysts put the AI content-licensing market at $1.3 billion in 2025, growing 20% annually

That turns GoPro into something more than a gadget maker. It positions the company as a data-licensing intermediary, bridging its passionate user base with an insatiable AI training industry. For subscribers, it’s also a fresh incentive to stick around. Instead of simply paying for cloud storage, they now have the chance to monetize their archives. That could raise ARPU and extend the subscription lifecycle far beyond the initial purchase.

The economics at stake

For GoPro, the licensing model carries three potential advantages:

• Higher ARPU: If even a fraction of its 2.45 million subscribers participate, licensing revenue could meaningfully lift per-user economics.

• Stronger retention: Giving subscribers a revenue share creates financial glue—why cancel if your videos are still earning?

• Margin leverage: Unlike hardware, licensing revenue is high-margin, relying on assets GoPro already stores.

As founder Nick Woodman once quipped, GoPro was “enabling the world to share itself through video.” In 2025, that mission has a new dimension: enabling users to sell their world to AI.

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