Roblox Corporation

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Roblox Corporation Q2 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I'll now have the conference over to Anna Yen, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q&A session to discuss Roblox's second quarter 2021 results. With me today is Roblox's CEO, David Buzuki, and CFO, Mike Guthrie. Before we start, I want to remind everybody that yesterday after market closed, we published a shareholder letter, earnings results, and supplemental materials on our investor relations website at ir.roblox.com. Since the letter provides a lot of details, we'll make some brief opening remarks and reserve the rest of the time for your questions. For our webcast participants, please note the question icon at the bottom of your screen where you can type in your questions. We'll do our best to take as many as possible. On today's call, we may be making forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements about our future financial performance, growth rates, and business and investment strategy and plans, development of new technologies, investment in and payments to developers, our ability to bring new brands, music, and recording artists to the platform, investments in international growth, the development of the metaverse, the outcome of any litigation, and the success of and plans for recent acquisitions. Any statement that refers to expectations, projections, or other characterizations of future events, including financial projections, future market conditions, or the impact of COVID on our business and on the economy as a whole is a forward-looking statement and based on assumptions today. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed in these forward-looking statements, and we make no obligations to update our disclosures. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release we issued yesterday, as well as risks described in our filings with the SEC, including in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q, files for the fiscal quarter ended March 30th, 2021, and other filings and reports we make with the SEC from time to time. We will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. These measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics for a reported result can be found in our press release issued yesterday, as well as in our supplemental slide, copies of which can be found on our Investors Relations website. Finally, this call is being webcast and will be archived on our website shortly after. With that, I'll turn the call over to David.

We're going to start with Mike Guthrie, CFO, and then I'll chime in later. Just before we hand it over to Mike, welcome everyone to our Q2 call. Reaching out to everyone out there and your families in the midst of a lingering COVID situation, we hope you are all doing well. It's been an amazing quarter for us. A year ago, we were in the midst of lockdown. It's the first quarter when we started to see a little light at the end of the tunnel. We're extremely proud and excited with our results. Mike's going to kick it off, and then I'll follow up with some comments.

Thanks Dave. Good morning everyone. Yesterday we published both Q2 numbers and we also published key metrics for the month of July. So you can see how we're doing as we start the third quarter. Just so everyone understands, we'll also be publishing August metrics. the second week of September. So look for those as a bit of an update in the quarter in Q3. The second thing we want to go over is still bookings versus revenue. You completely understand that it's confusing. Bookings, the best way to think about bookings It's the value of robust virtual currency that's purchased within the quarter. And then revenue is taking into account the deferred revenue as a result of those bookings. We recognize our bookings generally over a 23-month period, which is the average life of a payer, and those numbers can change. The life of a payer will change over time, and we'll adjust our deferrals as a result of that. We've seen certain things in the past comparing our revenue number to our bookings number, and it causes a little bit of confusion. We certainly understand. But just for clarity, bookings in the quarter were $665.5 million in revenue. Gap revenue was $410. $454.1 million, and that was up about 127% year over year. The bookings number was up 35% year over year. So anyway, sometimes in the analyst model, people call it bookings. And sometimes people are referring to it as revenue. I believe if I look at all the models, I believe what the analysts mean is booking in all of their models. Some of them refer to it as revenue. If there's any confusion, feel free to ask questions on the call and we'll go through with everybody. The other thing we want to just get out is that when people are going through their models, We have $52M accrual in the quarter for settlement with some of the labels and publishers in the music industry. And so if you're doing adjusted or cash flow numbers, just make sure that you understand that accrual was in there and we believe that's one time in nature. And so I just want to make sure that that is properly accounted for in your model. So if there's any questions, feel free to ask us about that. Overall, we ended the second quarter really strong. We're wrapping COVID, obviously, this quarter, continuing to grow the business, and really started off pretty strong with July. So looking forward to talking more before we jump into questions. I'm going to try it back today.

Yeah, just a couple highlights. Looking at our core business, Once again, very proud with our 29% PAU growth year-on-year, specifically because we've been lapping that super lockdown quarter in Q2 a year ago. Jumping to a bit of a vision we shared with all of you over the last six to nine months about the future growth factors for Roblox. One thing we're really excited about is our 13 and up growth. We have passed having the majority of people on our platform be 13 and over as opposed to 13 and under, which is a huge benchmark for us. And in Q2, we saw 46% 13 and up DAU growth year on year, which is a great bellwether for where we're going. internationally in Q2, second big thing, part of our vision of really bringing the whole world together. We saw 42% DAU growth outside of the US and Canada, which we think is spectacular. And we've also seen in response to this, a broadening and acceleration of the diversity of content on our platform, which has been very satisfying as well. In Q2 last year, 58% of the robots were coming from the top 10 experiences. That curve has flattened a bit as we have a wider array of content, and that number is now 37% in Q2 of this year. So lots of fun stuff. Looking forward to diving in with your questions, and we'll turn it back to anyone.

Great. Actually, I'll turn over to the operator. Operator, you want to start taking questions?

Yes, at this time, if you'd like to ask a question, simply press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Again, star 1 to ask a question. Our first question comes from the line of Alexia Quadrani with JP Morgan.

Oh, hi. This is David Kronowski for Alexia. I guess I'll start with the Gilded acquisition. Dave, can you maybe discuss how you plan to integrate their platform with Roblox? Do you see Roblox users on Gilded communities now? And if so, how do you see that impacting their overall experience? And then how do you plan to maintain support in sort of the non-Roblox communities that are on Gilded? Thanks.

This really goes to a bit of our vision here. And when we speak about Roblox, we are an immersive 3D metaverse platform company. There are complementary product categories. Gilda is in one. We might call that the social communication and community platform area. We're really interested in the way these types of products work together. We see our people who play Roblox use various apps sometimes to hop from place to place and communicate outside of those apps. Even though internally we simultaneously are hard at work on immersive spatial audio for people who are in 3D. Gilded, we came across an amazing team. They're also extremely innovative in a lot of their ideas and what they're building in this area of social communication platforms. It gives us the opportunity in an open way to experiment with the various ways these classes of applications work together. more to come on that in the future and no future announcements. But it really gives us this opportunity to experiment with APIs and how these products work together.

Okay. And then I was just hoping you could expand on your shareholder letter commentary around RedLux in China so far. What did we learn? How are users engaging with experiences there relative to what you might have seen in other launch markets? And just as a follow-on, how do you kind of evaluate the current or future regulatory risk in the market? Thank you.

Yeah, a couple things we've started to see that we want to see, and one is with this vision of a worldwide platform that simultaneously is compliant with local customs and regulations and things like that, We've seen a few things. One is we started to see amazing content come out of China and start to hit the worldwide platform. Livetopia coming out of China has hit one of the top 12 experiences on Roblox, which is amazing. We've also seen very great success with a lot of the U.S. global content going into China, which is also a bilateral network effect. We're really excited about the traction we've seen in China with respect to just the initial user growth. And especially in China, education is so important, both learning to code, learning to create, that we think there's amazing opportunities there to adapt and be beneficial there. I just saw some stats in South Korea, which shows how well our platform is working in that the top 10 experiences in South Korea are somewhat different than the top 10 in the U.S. There's a lot of overlap with some of the very top U.S. experiences, but we can also see South Korea-created experiences merging into that top 10. And our system is working. We're seeing both cultural affinity mixed with global hits. We're very excited with the growth we've seen in China so far. It's been really gratifying to be live there on both iOS and Android, coupled with our partner Tencent and a government license. I think great opportunity and at the same time consistent with our values. We take a very long view in China.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley.

Thanks for taking my questions. I have two. The first one, in the second quarter, it looks like U.S. and Europe DAUs were down quarter over quarter. Talk to us about sort of what you're seeing in July and August in U.S. and Europe DAUs and sort of some of the drivers of that DAU decline. Secondly, a bigger picture one on the competition for developers, specifically the highest quality developers. Dave, talk to us about how you think about continuing to bring on and retain the highest quality developers for the ecosystem, in particular now that you have some other social networks with large budgets and capability to invest to build a metaverse, potentially offering developers even higher take rates or better economics, etc.? ?

First, on DAUs in the U.S. and Canada, year-over-year in Q2, they were up about 5%. I think you're referring to engagement, which was down year-over-year. First of all, largest market, most users to begin with. I think in the second quarter, it's pretty clear that as we had referenced and anticipated when we went public and we talked about the only guidance we've ever given, we expected that during the second quarter, our modeling assumption was that COVID would go away during the second quarter and then we would return to normal curves on signups and retention and conversion and monetization. That's very similar to what happened in the second quarter. I mean, by the end of the second quarter in June, there was a lot of, you know, quote, unquote, reopening activity. especially in the U.S. and Canada and the United Kingdom. And some of that's reflected in engagement, though substantially higher than it was in 2019 on a year-over-year basis. Flax is slightly down. And then now in July, it looks like some of those trends are reversing themselves. So, you know, the overall growth in the quarter was definitely driven by Asia-Pacific. and rest of the world, which includes things like South America and Eastern Europe. So anyway, so I think that's just to make sure that we got the trends exactly right.

Yeah, and then this is Dave chiming in on the takeaways and just a little bit of our vision going forward. For 15 years, we've been building this platform, and we've been supporting that with three major tenets. One is driving innovation, really participating in inventing and shepherding in the metaverse in an innovative way. And what's got us here so far is many, many innovations, and we have to keep having those in the pipeline, and we're trying to scale that linearly as we grow our employee base. Last year, at this time, we had 750 employees. We're over 1,200 this year at the same time. The second thing is, historically, we've been a metaverse pure play for the last 15 years. Everything we do piles into making our platform better, and we iterate that with 14 groups every single day, shipping new and interesting functionality. And third, we're in a really unique position with a foundation of civility and safety and learning, and we're growing from there. And we think that's a very positive place for people to come together of all ages, and it's a great foundation to build a really big company on. On the take rates, In Q2, we upped our engagement-based payouts. As you can see, I think we announced 129 million to devs in Q2, so that's on a great track. In general, we much prefer money flowing to creators specifically. systemically as part of the self-service UGC architecture as opposed to any hand-given grant type program. And that number is going to keep going up. You can also see with how much cash we're generating when you look at a bookings cash flow type accounting. There's a lot of room there. We're not making any announcements on the increases to our developer rate, but generally we want to maximize the amount we're using for our employees and for our creativity as well as what's flowing to our developers and, you know, more to come there without any future announcements.

Got it. And just to clarify that, Mike, from a modeling perspective, so the July DAU trends you're seeing, are you saying you're seeing U.S. and Europe DAUs up quarter over quarter, or is that more driven by rest of the world, just so we can understand from modeling?

I'll double-check, Brian. I think it's driven by all regions. Okay.

Great. Thanks.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Ng with Goldman Sachs.

Hey, good morning. Thanks so much for the question. You guys have made a ton of progress in diversifying your experiences and aging up your user base. I was just wondering if you could talk about a few of the drivers that have led to that and how that strengthens the durability of the business. And then as a quick follow-up, I was just wondering if you could preview some of the takeaways that you'd like the investment community to get from your investor day later this year. Thank you.

Yeah, this is Dave. I think what we're going to be showing at our investor day is, is as much transparency as we can with respect to both what we're shipping right now as well as our future vision and hopefully give a glimpse into the architecture of the company and the architecture we built to drive innovation so look forward to some coverage hopefully of the whole product stack going all the way from our apps on multiple platforms to our game engine, to our developer tooling, to the technology we use to make experiences run all around the world, all the way into our platform in infra, which allows us to run at high performance and high reliability at low cost. We're hoping to show as much of this as we can and hints at the vision in all of these areas without at the same time announcing any price. Great stuff. Aging Up is something that we talk about. We're actually in the middle of it, and we've been talking about it for three or four years, and a lot of the visionary stuff we put in place three or four years ago is what's been driving this position now where over 50% of the people on our platform are over 13. That includes awesome personalized search and discovery. It includes increasing immersion of our 3D engine. And it includes also a lot of things that we've spoken about that haven't quite shipped now. We've given highlights that our avatar system has a lot of opportunity and is going to go full UGC, which will radically increase the diversity of the types of avatars on our platform, which is super exciting. We've given hints that over time we would expect maybe for those of you more familiar with the movie industry, not R-rated but PG and maybe PG-13 type similarities in some of the experiences we do. And we've also been very, very hard at work with the philosophy of that we're building a unified platform that is both safe, civil, and educational for six-year-olds will simultaneously be very interesting for 22-year-olds. That goes all the way from our branding to the performance of our app to the way people find content to the way we matchmake people. So it's actually something we're right in the middle of. The amount of white space in the 13-month market relative to our TAM is enormous because we've gotten to where we are very heavily on a very small sliver of the world population, 9 through 12-year-olds. So we think a lot of these early signs for 13 and up bode well for us.

Okay, your next question will come from the line of Matthew Thornton with True Securities.

Hey, this is Anthony Duplissi on for Matt. Thanks for taking the question, guys. I wanted to ask about content extensions outside of gaming experiences. You talk about how the pipeline is evolving with music artists and labels. Is there any momentum with TV studios, networks, and online learning companies? And then how and when could these content extensions start to have an impact on financials? Thanks.

Yeah, so I love that you brought up online learning. You start internally. We have a very big vision around education on the Roblox platform. And it goes, as you, I think, might hint at, way beyond learning computer science. It goes into learning all topics. It goes on to learning about history immersively, all the way to learning about physics by jumping into a physics experiment. So we are hard at work. on an educational vertical segment and more to come on that within Roblox. Really, when we think about the metaverse and what Roblox is, we do think of it as a utility where there's going to be a lot of use cases that we can't even imagine The Gucci Gardens experience for us was really interesting. It's not really a concert. It's not really a game. It's almost like going to MoMA and going to an art installation. It's really the first Roblox experience my father really liked. Just the ability to go around and see what's going on there. And that couples with Netflix's Stranger Things experience on Roblox, which is much more around letting fans participate in an experience immersively rather than watching it. And then that jumps to our vision and our hopes for the future of music, where for artists and musicians today who are very creative and need to support their careers, it's primarily live concerts or recorded right now. And those live concerts are wonderful, and they're immersive, but it's hard to get more than 20,000 people or 50,000 people into a live concert. Whereas with the Zara Larsson launch party, for example, we've been able to go well over 4 million, and those numbers go higher. Yes. We're very optimistic about a future where musicians can use immersive 3D with live participation that feels very different than watching video. It's with other people. We're very optimistic it is a third monetization area for musicians to interact with their fans.

And Anthony, I just point out that in things like Gucci gardens, those are monetized today in a very traditional way. There's the purchase of virtual goods. There was a store at the launch point of Gucci gardens, and it was obviously getting popular. with users who purchased, you know, millions of dollars of virtual items. So today they're traditional forms of monetization. In the future, you know, we obviously can imagine different things that we can do with the brand to expand that and with the developer community as well.

Of course.

Thanks, guys.

Your next question comes from the line of Drew Cramlisky.

Okay, thanks. Good morning, guys. Mike, I wonder if you could drill down a little bit further on the monetization or the opt-out metric that you disclosed. It seemed to flatten out in 2Q. Can you discuss some of the puts and takes on that metric? And then, Dave, just to circle back on the brand partnerships and music experiences, can you talk about any observations you've made in terms of how that's impacted new user growth and what you've seen in terms of retention slash engagement trends for that cohort? Thanks.

hey drew um and three thoughts on on monetization um one is because we talked earlier there's a there's a clear broadening of content on roblox over the last year as more experiences are part of the monetization engine some of those experiences are early on in their curves and learning actually how to monetize and so it's not unusual a lot of things in roblox um you can model through with experience curves. And so as some of these experiences are on the platform for longer periods of time, the developers will learn better how to monetize and users will be more engaged and they will want to monetize better. So that's one. The second thing is geographic. diversification in our base. So obviously, when you look at growth in Asia Pacific and other parts of the world, again, some of those parts of the world are similar to slightly lower GDP per capita. So you might have more monetization in those parts of the world. You also have early payer cohorts. So those payer cohorts, as they get older, What we've seen over many, many years on roadblocks is payer cohorts tend to increase cumulative bookings quarter after quarter after quarter. We still have, we can go back to 2016, and look at q1 2016 pair cohorts and the cumulative uh bookings of that pair cohort is continuing to grow at a at a very consistent and healthy rate so some of these um new users and new geos are early in their as pair cohorts and they're early in maturing and over time uh they will increase cumulative bookings overall my third comment on monetization is simply just be careful when you're comparing ratios uh using that we can have very strong booking and very strong user growth and app dial can go down it's just a ratio if your users are going faster than your bookings um that would lead you to understand that in the future you've got some really powerful tailwinds around booking but the users might just be growing faster right now similarly if you look at just july um hours of engagement was really strong 3.8 billion hours quite honestly, was a big number. It was probably more than we expected to come out. So if I happen to be looking at bookings per hour, I might look at that number as having gone down in July, and I can tell you we're very happy with bookings and we're very happy with hours. But when you get to the ratio, you just might have a little bit of movement back and forth. So anytime we look at the ratios, we should just be careful and make sure we deconstruct that into the growth in the numerator and growth in the denominator. But overall, I think all of those things are weighing in, Drew. Thanks.

Yeah, and I think this is Dave, just following up on the brand partnerships. Really excited about the brand partnerships. At the same time, our core growth is driven primarily virally, well beyond the size of the user traffic we're getting from those brand partnerships. And that is organic, word-of-mouth growth, people talking to friends, coming to the platform, being referred by friends. I think we... We have a bit of a vision starting all the way from our foundation that Roblox ultimately is a platform that people will use every day to play, to work, to learn together, to communicate together, to be together as a utility when they can't be together in person. Music and concerts are an exciting way of possibly bringing people to the platform, but the retention comes from staying with friends and socializing with friends and playing with friends following that. It might be a little controversial. We don't need music events to grow this business enormously large, and we don't factor in them as a traffic source. The business is growing organically, but they are a wonderful thing on top of our core organic growth. And I think ultimately there's a vision where these concerts and experiences will be more and more self-service. We're really focused on building the tools and technology. So just like games and experiences, concerts are built by a wide network of intermediaries. And we also have a vision ultimately that they're going on all the time, just as play is going on all the time right now.

Your next question will come from the line of Brandon Ross with LightShed Partners.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. I have a big picture one to start. And one of the more interesting parts of earnings this quarter was when Zuck said that Facebook is now a metaverse company. And I wanted to get your perspective on how you think the broader metaverse will play out in the future. Do you see a distributed metaverse like the broad Internet or one dominated by a few key platforms like social media. And do you think companies like Facebook will have a real place in the metaverse? Or do you think metaverse native companies will be the only real winners?

That's a wonderful question. It goes to what we've been doing for 15 years. And I'll start with a couple of comments, just big picture comments. The technology is very complex. The technology to support ultimately a 50,000 person concert where we all feel like we're there, we can talk to our friends next to us, we can wave across the stadium, it feels photorealistic, the audio is awesome, and there's 50,000 people doing that. That's a huge technological challenge. And so that technological challenge, I just want to put that out there, and that it's very exciting that there's so much work to do. And we're pretty far into this. If we look back to SecondLife.com, you know, this started a long time ago, so there's a lot of fun stuff to do. Our focus for the last 15 years has been on innovation and inventions now we have 1200 people that will continue there's a a wonderful focusing effect for a company like ours when we're only working on one thing and everything we do piles into making this single platform better and better so we we do have this roblox benefit of extreme focus with now 1,200 people on that growing. The other thing that we believe long-term for a metaverse utility, it must be a civil and safe platform that welcomes six-year-olds and at the same time welcomes 30-year-olds who are working together. this is very complicated and this this takes i think it's much easier to start from that stability and safety foundation and then open up the freedom than to try to reel it back in and go the other direction and and so we really think that's a wonderful opportunity for us as well i think as far as openness We're signaling that with our acquisition of Gilded right now. And we do think the various components that people might create and use as part of their metaverse experience, including the way a social community communication app is very interesting. I think there's amazing opportunity for creativity on that integration. So those are a few hints at how we view, you know, what we're doing for the last 15 years and what we'll do for the next 15 years.

Well, maybe just to follow up on Gilded, and I saw that voice in video for a big part of that. I wanted to ask, as you move from more text-based communication to more integrating voice and video for communications. How much harder of a problem is that from the safety perspective, and how prepared are you for the explosion of those forms of communications on Roblox?

We take it, it's really our top priority. So civility, safety, whether it goes to how we filter text, whether it goes to thousands now of live human moderators out in the field, whether it goes to the ML that we use to filter, it's always been our top priority. And doing this for voice and video ultimately is very complex. It's something we take very seriously. But we will come at it from that safe foundation that we've always had. On the audio side, to clarify. I believe that there's two classes of audio. What Gilded does is think of it as team audio. It's the audio, maybe like a phone call, really, that groups of players use as they hop around various experiences. And I think we, you know, in our Gilded announcement, we haven't done anything with Gilded to say they will still not keep working with other platforms as well. There's a lot of people from many, many gaming communities on the Gilded platform. Simultaneously, we have a vision of metaverse audio. It's what we share with you. It's what we do at our company holiday party. It's what we've been prototyping internally, which is really true 3D immersive audio. We think these are going to complement each other in a wonderful way.

Thank you.

We'll now take questions from the webcast audience.

Okay, so the first one is from BTIG. Can we talk about the trends, particularly usage and spending trends, between the over 13 and under 13 audience?

I'll take that one over to Mike.

Yeah, they're incredibly similar is the short answer. If you share engagement and monetization in whether under 13 or over 13 is actually quite similar.

And the follow-up to that was I'm curious if we're seeing partnerships with Gucci help stimulate demand for avatar personalization.

This is a really great big question. The demand is everywhere. And when people participate in an immersive 3D environment, It's so important, and we all want it, and our younger players want it, and our older players want it. Everyone wants to represent themselves in the metaverse in a way they feel proud of and they feel comfortable with. And when we look at how we work in the real world, I was very picky today on what shirt I picked out, what shoes I wore, how I cut my hair. This all applies in the digital world as well, and it goes to body, clothing, hair, makeup, accessories, glasses, everything. So building a system where we can have a vibrant market where people can mix and match, where clothing items work on any avatar, where people can have any body they want and any face they want. It's super important to us, and it's really been part of Roblox since we started, and there's amazing opportunity there.

We've got a lot of questions coming in about China, particularly what is our response to the government's comments on the gaming space.

Yeah, one of the reasons that Tencent and Roblox was so excited about going into China is how focused parents and kids are in China on education and how focused they are on learning to code, on participating in creation. And that thread has been very, very powerful to us. The other thread that has been very powerful to us is country by country. We're building a distributed worldwide platform that is policy aware in software of the rules and regulations of any country. And if a country has a certain set of laws, we will abide by them. Our developers are also very understanding that the content they create will, country by country, either be applicable or not. We have a very long-term view in China. A lot of the play on Roblox is both educational as well as social, because it's way beyond gaming. So our response is really no response. It's to keep doing exactly what we've been doing. We have a 10-year vision there. We know it's going to be big and interesting. And we're in this unique position with our Tencent partnership, a government license. live on iOS, live on Android, and bilateral network effects of great global content going into China, as well as great China content starting to hit the world market. So our response is to keep doing what we've been doing.

Okay, great. The next one comes from Altimeter. Can we provide color on the trajectory of expenses versus bookings growth over the next couple of years? Obviously, there's going to be some catch-up in building the platform, but any insight into the trends?

So we've been really clear. and in our discussions around investment that we have a real focus. The first is hiring the best engineers in the world and attracting them and great product professionals to Roblox. And we will continue to focus on that. The company is laser focused on recruiting and growing. We're around about 1,300 employees today, which is fantastic, but our ambitions require a significantly larger a group of professionals working at the company. The second thing is to increase investment in the creator community and the developer community on Roblox and continue to share a greater percentage of the economics with them over time. Both of those, in effect, are circled back into faster and more prolific product releases, which tends to drive more content, which tends to drive higher bookings. Generally, we view our business as having the kinds of cash flow margins where our ability to invest is relatively unconstrained, and we're very fortunate to be in that situation. a lot of operating cash flow, and even though we continue to invest in the infrastructure around the world on Roblox, things like Data Center in India that we talk about in the letter, we've still been able to, over the long run, generate a lot of free cash flow. And so we have the ability to invest more aggressively because ultimately what we're interested in is a billion users, not high 40 million active users. potentially a billion hours of engagement every day on the platform, not, you know, obviously a much smaller number today. So we'll continue to invest at heavy rates. We believe ultimately that Bookings will support that, but we do have a lot of flexibility in terms of margin, and we view that as really fortunate. It's a fortunate outcome of our business model, and ultimately we're trying to get to, you know, our end goals of growth and scale as quickly as we can. So those are the major areas that we'll be investing in.

Yeah, and this is Dave chiming in and riffing on what Mike said there. Kudos to our core platform and infrastructure teams who have built such an amazingly high performance low cost, high reliability network around the world. We've got over 24 edge data centers now. We've got four in China. We've got three primary zones. It's really, that is all money that we're able to funnel back to employee growth and our developer ecosystem.

So the next question talks about July, great July month. Can we talk about the underlying drivers of the performance and also specifically how, maybe give some cover on how August and September of last year, but the trends were given the seasonal impact of back to school in terms of dials booking and monetization.

Yeah, just to take the second question first, seasonality in the business, the typical seasonality would be your summer peak is July, August people start going back to school, and in September it is back to school. So sequentially, typically August is lower than July, and September is back to school time. I would look... very carefully at year-over-year growth rates in this business now. We're starting to come back to a more normal seasonality, which means, I think, that year-over-year data is insightful. And I think we're also comparing into an application and belief and certainly what's embedded in our financial expectations, is that notwithstanding Delta variant, schools are opening in September, offices are reopening. That's what we all hope for personally, and that's what we're expecting. So I think those normal curves will prevail in the third quarter. And in the fourth quarter, again, typical seasonality, we've talked about this before, is that October, there's usually a pickup from September and November. Eventually you get to the start of the holidays and things pick up and December is always very outsized in terms of that month. And that hasn't changed and that's very normal and we've talked about that before and I think that's what we'll see in the back half of this year. The question on what do we attribute the trend in July? We're very happy to report monthly metrics. It's a great way for everyone to keep up with the business. The trends don't change very much month to month. I've been the CFO of the company for going on four years, and we've been talking about international growth and aging up the platform and making those investments for my entirety here at the company and making progress on those for my entirety at the company. And I think what you saw in July, Possibly there's a little bit of a COVID impact between June and July where things were definitely opening up in June and July, maybe it's a little more questionable. On the other hand, there's so many other trends that are going on inside the business that I think drive growth and performance that it's hard to just It's great to be one of those. Again, much more content on the platform, a diversity of content on the platform, users growing really fast in places like Asia Pacific and rest of the world. You know, some new payers coming onto the platform, so we're early in their payer codes. There's just a lot of different things, I think, that are, that feed into the numbers. And I just always caution people, month to month, I'm not sure that the trends change dramatically. Unless there's a really big macro shock, you should believe that we're doing the same things to grow the platform with an incredibly long time perspective.

Okay. Can we talk about the investment strategy in more detail? Are we investing enough on the creator side to differentiate Roblox Studio relative to Unity, Unreal, and other game engines?

Yeah, I want to highlight, and then I'll kick it over to Mike. Once again, our belief in system-wide investment, which means it's self-service. We have two ways that our developer community builds their business. The first is on the Robux economy. The second is on engagement-based payouts. We are really proud with what the engagement-based payout system has done in that over time, more and more developers down, ranking 1,000-plus, are starting to make a living on our platform without even thinking about it and this goes to hobbyists or new developers so we really focus on the depth of that pipeline and getting people successful early on so they can make a decision to jump onto the platform we increase those in q2 there's a lot of room to turn those knobs even though we're not announcing anything as we look at where our cash is right now And we would always prefer to turn those knobs rather than doing manual by hand type investment programs. Our top developers now, whether they're organic on the Roblox platform or they're outside companies like the companies that are coming on platform to build experiences, It's getting very pretty serious. Tens of millions of dollars a year, larger and larger teams, VC-backed teams. So I think you can see, say, the future for us will continue to be UGC and really system-based, and there's a lot of room there. I think the amount we paid out to our traders over the last two years is up by about 5x, and that will continue. Then, Mike, would you like to add on to this?

No, I think in the first half of the year, it's about just under $249 million. We talked a little bit about where we hope that would be on our last call, and obviously it's on track. Again, we really remain laser-focused on our investments, infrastructure, talent inside the company and the developer community. Outside of that, actually, we're really careful about spending and investment. We really are quite focused. The only other significant investment that you're going to see in our numbers in the back half of the year will be a little bit around tending improvements because we're growing quickly and we need more space. That's a good thing. We've got one great campus here in San Mateo. It's very very well located. So we'll make some investments there. But we're incredibly careful about where we put our capital. And I think we're in a really privileged place because this business over the 15 years that it's been in existence um as most of the cash that you see in the balance sheet is generated by the business and so that gives us the flexibility to continue to invest at high rates and um historically those those investments have proven to be productive in terms of running the top line of the business that's been it's been a really great match uh in terms of the financial model but we'll continue to do those things okay and then i think two more

Quick one, fraudulent credit card usage accounted for 5% of bookings. Has it been a persistent problem and how are we planning on tackling this internally?

We have a whole team that's focused on fraud. The numbers have bounced around a little bit, but I wouldn't assume that you're going to see that number kicking up and causing us any significant issues. But we're focused on it, absolutely. We're laser focused on making sure that fraud is as low as it possibly can be.

Okay. And then the last question is on the developers. Can we talk about the traction you're seeing with new developers, professional studios, and higher quality content coming to Roblox?

Yeah, this is Dave. I'll chime in. I think Ytopia is a great example. It's out of a team in Shanghai, and they broke into the top 12. We have this vision, both the current people on our platform are right now growing into studios that are competitive with any external studio. The top 5, 10, 20 teams on Roblox. are big they're talented they're out recruiting on universities for programming talent so they stand side by side and we're really proud that we've grown these internal studios At the same time, external studios, whether they're VC-backed, whether they're backed by other larger studios, we're seeing those as well. So great traction. China, Shanghai, studio breaking into the top 12 on Roblox, great early sign of that.

Okay, great. I think that's all the time we have for today. And we'll hand it back over to David.

Yeah, just circling back, wishing you, your friends, your families, the Roblox community a hopeful and safe emergence from this COVID situation. And thank you for all your support.

Great. Operator? Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.