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spk08: Good morning. My name is Brent and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Roblox fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question at that time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press star 1. Thank you. Stephanie Notani, you may begin your conference.
spk01: Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q&A session to discuss WorldWAT's Q4 and full year 2022 results. With me today is WorldBlock's co-founder and CEO, David Bezouki, and CFO, Mike Guthrie. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that earlier this morning, we published a shareholder letter and earnings results on our investor relations website at ir.worldblocks.com. On this call, we will 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 right of your screen where you can type in your questions. We'll do our best to take as many questions as possible in the time we have allotted today. On today's call, we may be making some forward-looking statements, including but not limited to our expectations of our business, future financial results and business, and financial strategies. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements. And such risks are described in our risk factors included in our SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. During this call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics for our reported results can be found in our press release issued this morning, as well as in our supplemental slides, copies of which can be found on our investor relations website. Finally, this call is being webcast. The webcast will be archived on our IR website shortly afterwards. With that, I'll turn the call over to Dave.
spk06: Thank you very much. And welcome, team. Welcome, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here. Welcome to the Roblox community and welcome to all of our investors. We continue to focus on innovation and we're very pleased with our results from Q4 and the early signal on January. We have enormous headroom in our business. We have the whole company focused on one product, one platform. And in the midst of a fair amount of turmoil over the last year, we continue to hire and build an amazing team with amazing people. We're focused on our four growth vectors. One is bringing people together all around the world. One is expanding our platform to encompass people of all ages. Third growth vector is we continue to see expansion into education, into concerts, into communication. And finally, our economy is vibrant and growing as we'll share in our call. A couple details, Q4 bookings, 899 million, up 17% year over year, or 21% on constant currency. And highlighting this is around the world, including US, Canada, and APAC, each at 19% growth in Q4. Some slight acceleration in 2022 going into 2023 with December 20% year-on-year, January 21% year-on-year. And this is highlighting our global growth in January with Europe and APAC up 29% year-on-year. For older users, which is an enormous opportunity for the platform, sometimes referred to as aging up, This is not a new thing for us. We are in the middle of aging up and in January we saw our 17 through 24 year old segment grow at 39% year on year for bookings. Going into usage and DAUs, we're proud to report that in January we had our highest ever DAUs at 65 million DAU. And Q4 DAUs continue to show really strong growth. Europe, 24%. APAC, 21%. U.S. and Canada up 19% in Q4 DAUs. Amazingly, well, not really amazingly, because we're so focused on innovation, we burned almost no cash in 2022, roughly negative 0.5% cash, which we're really, really proud of. And on an adjusted basis in Q4, our EBITDA was 183 million or 20.3% of bookings. I want to highlight that underneath all of this progress, we focus very heavily on key drivers around signups, retention, frequency, engagement, and monetization. And all of these numbers continue to be near or at all time highs, even as we've emerged from COVID. Long term, we remain singularly focused on ushering in this new category of immersive communication. And we continue to see what we believe are the benefits of this new category as we start to roll out voice and facial animation. including the ability for people to be virtually in the same place as they communicate, the ability to pick up many cues around human interaction, including eye tracking, arm tracking, which we don't sometimes pick up on the phone or on a video call, The ability to simulate more and more of the audio that we see in the real world that helps our communication. And finally, of course, what everyone does on Roblox, in addition to communicating, doing things together. This vision, we think, has enormous headroom for us. If you've been with us on our investor day or some of our calls at RDC, We believe this is the next generation of communication following from audio, phone, video calls, texting, messaging. Behind the scenes on our innovation stack, there's a lot of metrics that are moving that to our average user are invisible, but are very, very important, go side by side with our innovation. We're constantly making improvements in the performance of all of our apps, in the speed at which people can connect to Roblox experiences, in the performance of our cloud around the world, and the performance all around the world as we roll out new edge data centers. And of course, the more visible parts of our innovation continue to be visible as well. We continue to roll out voice. We've had over a million experiences so far enabled voice chat. And as we continue to roll this out, we're very pleased with the adoption and the level of immersiveness that this has brought. We talk about dynamic heads and facial animation because we're in the middle of this rollout. But we believe very soon we will assume this is just a core part of Roblox and we will stop referring to dynamic ads. It'll just be part of an active avatar. This is the same with layered clothing with over 100 million, 115 million people adopting layered clothing so far. This will transition to just being called the clothing system on Roblox. And finally, we're well on our way, I believe we passed 90% of our catalog now being UGC. We're well on our way to that being 100%, including all of the avatars on the system as well. And finally, we're really pleased from a safety and civility standpoint to have rolled out experience guidelines in Q4, which is really just continuing our vision of building a platform for all ages around the world. Our active developers are up 33% year on year. We've had 70 experiences now pass a billion visits at the end of 2022. Brands continue to come to Roblox as this is a new form of bringing people together with brands. We're proud to welcome the NFL, FIFA, Netflix, and of course Elton John, Mariah Carey. We have a lot more coming in 2023. And something really near and dear to my heart, just given my prior company was an educational software company, we're really proud to see institutions like the Museum of Science in Boston start to roll out large, immersive educational efforts, such as their mission to Mars, Roblox Interactive Experience, Finally, safety and civility is a foundation for us, and we were really pleased to be the first tech company to support the landmark child safety legislation in California last year called the California age appropriate design code. And we're hopeful more states will adopt it. With that, we'll either turn it over to comments and let Mike have something to chime in on.
spk03: Yeah, thanks, Dave. I just want to add a couple of thoughts before we open it up for questions. As it relates to cash flow, as Dave mentioned, we did continue to take an investment posture this year. We were really happy to see high returns on those investments and to see margins coming back into the business really driven by top line growth. WE SPENT OVER $400 MILLION OVER THE COURSE OF THE YEAR INVESTING IN INFRASTRUCTURE, PRIMARILY RELATED TO OUR DATA CENTER IN ASHBURN, VIRGINIA, AND STILL WERE ABLE TO RUN THE COMPANY EFFECTIVELY CASH FLOW NEUTRAL FOR THE YEAR, WHICH WAS A GOAL OF OURS INTERNALLY. THOSE CAPITAL EXPENDITURES RELATED TO INFRASTRUCTURE WILL BE DOWN SIGNIFICANTLY IN 2023, SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 25 AND 30% LOWER THIS YEAR. ALSO MENTIONED OUR FOCUS ON FREQUENCY ENGAGEMENT AND MONETIZATION. I ALSO JUST WANT TO POINT OUT WE HAD INCREDIBLY STRONG RESULTS AND YOU CAN SEE IN OUR SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS AROUND PAYERS ON THE PLATFORM. SO IN THE FOURTH QUARTER WE REACHED AN ALL TIME HIGH OF 13.4 MILLION PAYERS. HIGHEST AMOUNT OF RETURNING PAYERS THAT WE'VE EVER HAD WHICH MEANS OBVIOUSLY PEOPLE ARE STICKING WITH US WHICH IS GREAT. And we added more new payers than ever before, with the exception of the very first quarter of COVID. So we had incredibly strong growth in payers. And at the same time, the monetization per payer in the fourth quarter was up significantly and as strong as it's ever been. we're also seeing very, very healthy what we refer to as payer conversion. So more users are becoming payers than ever before. And that's pretty much true across the globe. Each individual region is reaching its peak in payer conversion. They did at least over the holidays. And so when we look at that on a seasonal basis, that looks very strong. So again, as Dave mentioned, a great end to Q4, a nice start to 2023. why don't we pause there and open it up for questions.
spk08: At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of Omar with bank of America. Your line is open.
spk09: Hey guys, thank you for taking the question. Um, you know, Everybody's talking about ChatGPT. It's being asked of all the big companies. So I wanted to ask, how does the availability of this new technology maybe accelerate or not your timeline towards inexperienced creation tools? And what proprietary data sets do you have that could create breakthrough domain-specific applications using the GPT-3 models?
spk06: Great question. And this is a wonderful area. There's going to be a blog post from our CTO, Dan Sturman, coming out tomorrow, sharing really the wide range of opportunities that you could imagine ML will accelerate and stuff we've been working on for quite a while. Going through the whole Roblox virtual universe, We can, of course, imagine code acceleration and the amazingly large data set of Luau code that all of our creators have built on the platform that sits in our cloud that we can accelerate. Of course, we can imagine 3D model acceleration. And something very near and dear to the heart of every player on Roblox is their own personal avatar. Traditionally, avatars have been created in many, many ways, including mixing and matching parts, moving sliders. But we're going to see more and more a range of innovation around avatar creation. There's much more natural and natural language-based creation. And behind the scenes, in addition to this, there's another wide range of opportunities around customer service, around how NPCs perform, around the performance of search and discovery. around the creation of 3D materials. So there's really many, many ways we're going to harvest and tap into ML here. We have a lot of data and feedback from our users. And stand by and read more, please, on Thursday.
spk09: That's wonderful. Okay, well, looking forward to that, reading that blog. I guess this, first for a follow-up and a separate question. You know, you've talked about... the kind of transition. You've talked about the transition to a limited items economy and exclusively limited items economy on Roblox. I just wanted to hear how your thoughts have evolved on that and what you think the timing might be, whether that would be phased or if it's already in progress and when it would kind of be complete. Also, I guess, as part of that process, Will you still be, you know, having items created primarily by UGC Creator Program or will it become open, you know, by the time of the completion to the general public and the general user base?
spk06: I'll share the long-term vision. You're going to see pieces of this rollout throughout the year. With long-term in the real physical world, there's no constraints on who can create the items that we use in our everyday life. New people can enter that market at any point in time. And we have a wide range of pricing and activity in the real world. We have generic items like white t-shirts. We also have very expensive items like Gucci purses. We're working as quickly as we can To mimic the range and expressiveness of the commerce we see in the real world and potentially go beyond that. So this is actively out of under development. We're moving to a UGC economy where there's no limits where everyone can participate and where Roblox doesn't make everything anything really our community makes all of it. where the economy is very vibrant, where more and more creators can make a living creating items on Roblox, and we have a wide range of pricing that makes economic sense. So look for more and more things during the course of this year and more and more innovations that mirror how the real-world economy works in a virtual world like Roblox.
spk03: Thanks, Omar. We're going to catch up with you in about an hour. We're going to move to the next caller, if that's okay. Thank you. Thanks.
spk08: Your next question is from the line of David Karnovsky with JPMorgan. Your line is open.
spk04: Hey, thank you. Dave, on the prior call, I think you mentioned that 17- to 24-year-old users were mostly monetizing in the top experiences but were experimenting with some of the aged-up experiences. So I want to see if you could update on this, whether those older users are starting to migrate further into the mature content and what opportunity that presents for next year. Mike, just on expenses, there was real moderation in cost growth quarter over quarter for R&D and infrastructure. Just wondering if you could kind of discuss how you're thinking about investment for those OpEx lines in 2023 and if that growth pace we saw in Q4 is kind of reasonable to assume going forward. Thank you.
spk06: I'll give a general highlight. When we say mature experiences on Roblox, As of now, with our experience guidelines, we do not have any 17 and up experiences. So the experiences on Roblox are nudging in that direction. We are seeing more and more things that I would say are exciting for older players. It's interesting that the horror genre in Roblox has really perked up in the last three or four months. Experiences like Doors and others have become very, very popular. Many of the experiences on Roblox, even for older players, cover all age ranges as well. And just as in the very early days of Roblox, we saw the market really respond to the opportunity of that player base. We're seeing that with our game fund as well. So there's more and more aged up content showing up on the platform.
spk03: And so, yeah, and David, on cost, maybe just back up a little bit. We really, if you look at our cost structure, there's really four primary areas of cost in the business. The first one is, of course, COGS and payment processing, which is more or less strictly variable, though has been coming down as a percentage of bookings primarily because we've been really successful with prepaid cards and other alternative payment methods that are lower cost. So that's one. The second one, of course, is the investment in the developer community. And In a sense, we have been leaning more heavily into that. We think that the returns are now. We're seeing those returns in more content. Better content, which is historically been a part of the flywheel that's driven Roblox for for years. And, um. In a way, the, the, the savings and margin that we've seen in. Cogs is more or less moved into over the last few years into the investment in the community, which we think is great. Those are variable costs. On the fixed cost side, it's been infrastructure and people, as you rightly point out. We made a lot of investment in human capital over the last few years. This year, we're slowing down the rate of hiring, but we are still hiring quite a few people. We're making a huge investment. in great engineers. We still need them. We still have ambitions that are large and a lot of work to get done. So we're going to continue to make that investment, but we are slowing that down just slightly over the last couple of years. And some of that is also digestion and bringing in a more senior team to help manage and onboard and grow the engineering teams, which is great. As it relates to infrastructure investments, And trust and safety, those are high priorities. They really tend to be driven by the growth in our user base so that users have an amazing experience. But we do, over a long period of time, we expect that is going to be an area of high operating leverage. I'm not prepared to talk about the growth rates of expenses. I'll have to go back and take a look at Q4 and, you know, reference exactly what you're talking about. But I would expect to see us to continue to invest because we think the investments are high ROI. But to the extent we are driving healthy growth in the top line, you know, we have operating leverage, which is what you saw in the fourth quarter. So normally, just in terms of trends, because I know this question will come out, fixed costs tend to continue to grow throughout the year as we, as we, hire and invest in infrastructure, again, albeit at a slower rate possibly this year, but overall as the top line keeps growing, we think that's the right way to show operating leverage because we do believe the investments we're making are very high ROI. Thanks.
spk08: Your next question is from the line of Mario Liu with Barclays. Your line is open.
spk07: Great, thanks for taking questions. The first one's on the January trends. You know, for bookings saw a three-point acceleration of XFX. So I was just curious in terms of, you know, how to parse that out. You guys also mentioned the Lunar New Year coming in January this year. Is that typically an uplift to bookings or a drag? So any color in terms of what that trend looked like before the Lunar New Year would be helpful. Thanks.
spk03: Well, December bookings is probably a good guide before Lunar New Year because it was before Lunar New Year and the growth rate was pretty high. So that's probably a good way to look at it. And so what was the other question about? Yeah, so January. Yeah, January accelerated a little bit over December. because the business is accelerating. There's more content. There's better content. We're seeing growth. It really is basic stuff. We're seeing growth around the world, as Dave talked about, specifically incredibly strong growth in strategic regions. So I think Western Europe and East Asia. We talked about that area being a secular tailwind of the company, I think, in the last earnings call. And that continues to be to be the case. As an example, just in the month of January, within the strategic region alone, bookings grew by about 37%. And that's now becoming a pretty big part of the bookings. Opportunistic regions, Latin America, Southeast Asia, et cetera, grew at 23% in January. So again, huge part of the world, lots of population and also healthy growth. The other thing that's continued to allow us to drive bookings growth overall is the fact that in our core markets, U.S., Canada, U.K., Scandinavia, A&Z, those are the parts of the world where we had highest rates of penetration, biggest businesses going into COVID. Obviously, they popped up very high during COVID because we were so well established there. But we are now through that and now growing above the peaks that we had. in terms of the user base in COVID. And in particular, our younger users continue to grow, even though that's the most highly penetrated part of the market. But really, it's those aged up users that Dave referenced, 13 to 16, in particular, 17 to 24-year-olds. And now we're seeing really interesting growth and substantial scale in the 25 and over user base. So really, it's strength around the world and strength in all age demos, but in particular, aged up.
spk07: Helpful. Thanks, Mike. And just one on the EBITDA margins. You know, it's 20% in the fourth quarter. Any update to your prior commentary that, you know, EBITDA margins should be below 10% in 2023, especially with the strong bookings growth in December and January? Or should we expect, you know, any upside to bookings kind of reinvested back into the business? Thanks.
spk03: I think what we've What we hope everyone takes out of the fourth quarter is that over the course of the year, we were really, really thoughtful about what we invested in. We believe that we had a business that had a very, very long way to go. We took a really long term perspective. We believe that hiring great people was the right thing to do. We believe that investing in the infrastructure was the right thing to do and that the best way to show operating leverage was to grow the top line. And so we were, you know, I know the concept of efficiency is being talked about a lot, which is obviously very, very important. And you can get there in a couple of different ways. You can get there through cutting costs. You can get there through growth in the top line. You can get there by doing both. We chose very strategically last year to invest in the belief that the top line would grow and we would see that kind of leverage. So my only update to what I said last year is that we are, thoughtfully investing this year. We were fortunate to bring in a lot of very talented engineers over the last couple of years and talented employees in general. We can slow that growth this year a little bit, but we're still out investing. And our investments in infrastructure are supporting an ever-growing user base. And those users are converting at very high rates into payers. Um, they're doing what they've always done, which is that they, as they stay on the platform, they find great content, they make friends, they find a community. They end up being very valuable and then gave us a follow on.
spk06: riffing on what Mike is saying, there is enormous long-term headroom in our business. We're focused on getting to a billion DAUs on the platform. The largest segments in our business are 17 and up, and those are growing at enormous rates. And we really are focused on the appropriate balance of growth, innovation, and efficiency. Our infra is amazingly efficient. We built our own cloud, which continues long-term to bear efficiency benefits. And we have a fair amount of control on our headcount, velocity, and growth. And simultaneously, we're trying to move as much money as we can to the developer base. So we're taking a very balanced approach here to the velocity of innovation as well as our efficiency.
spk07: Great. Thank you both.
spk08: Your next question is from Bernie McTernan with Needham and Company. Your line is open.
spk02: Great. Thank you for taking the questions. Just wanted to zero in on Western Europe and APAC. Just any additional color you can provide in terms of why the acceleration is happening right now from either engagement perspective or content perspective or anything else that's driving this?
spk06: Some of the countries in APAC and Western Europe are not as mature as the U.S. as far as our user growth. But I would highlight the U.S., which has been traditionally where we got our start continues to show amazing growth and continues to show growth in the 9 through 12 segment, which is really where we've got our start. So there's underlying growth that is worldwide as we focus on frequency and as we focus on engagement, we focus on the quality of our product, even for our core market. But on top of that, Germany, France, less mature than the U.S., continuing to grow. In January in Germany and in France, we saw DAU and hourly growth both north of 20%, so there's a lot of room there. And we ultimately, once again, as part of our vision of innovating the way people come together, we are ultimately trying to get every country in the world to the same level of engagement as the U.S., and so some of those countries are just earlier on the growth curve.
spk03: And Bernie, just as you're doing the math, maybe two thoughts. One is, I think David, language is getting better and better everywhere around the world, so where there is translation, I think that certainly is helpful. But the other thing is because, as Dave mentioned, in the U.S., we started off with a younger age demographic. Through that age demographic, it became very, very popular there, and then the older age demos started to come on board. In some of the other markets in Europe and Asia, it took a while for Roblox to sort of get there. And when it did, it was almost like we had much more content. So all of the ages came on the platform almost more so at the same time. And so we get growth from U13 and over 13 almost at the same time in places like Western Europe and East Asia. And I think that affects the math as we see the platform really gaining traction because it's doing so across all ages in those markets at the same time.
spk06: One final riff on what Mike said, and also riff on AI. One other thing behind the scenes is we continue to improve on our own natural language translation facility, which is getting better and better. The higher the quality of that system, the higher is our experience quality around the world because our developers traditionally develop in one language and we auto translate into many, many languages for them. An example would be Japan, which we believe we started to hit the level of product quality both on our app as well as the experiences to drive viral growth there. And in January in Japan, our hours and our DAUs were growing at over 100% year on year. There's a little bit of a leverage as we improve the quality of our translation technology.
spk03: And we do see signs of different kinds of content being popular in different parts of the world. And that obviously speaks to a massive developer community. And when you have that, again, that flywheel of content and users, it's very powerful. So what we see being very popular in Japan is slightly different than what we see in other parts of the world, slightly different than Europe, slightly different than the U.S. There's generally a certain measurement of local affinity. And so the more we lean into the community, which we certainly did again last year, significant investments in our creator community, the more content that's appealing to more people around the world. And I think we're just continuing to see that leverage.
spk02: That's great to hear. Thank you. And just as a follow up to one of the previous questions on fixed costs, if we look at R&D and trust and safety, is there just a rough breakdown, a rule of thumb we can think about for how those buckets are people versus infrastructure?
spk06: I can go very high level on that. Trust and safety, we believe, which is our top priority over time, has a lot of headroom around automation. And our view as we add more ML and more automation to our trust and safety system, we're optimistic this is going to scale well below a linear Whereas with R&D, we have a fair amount of more control on the more engineers we hire, the faster we can develop product. And so we tend to balance that independently. But look for trust and safety to scale below linear as we grow.
spk03: And Bernie, we can spend some time on the models. But let me make a comment that I hope is helpful. And let's see if I can get towards your question. On trust and safety, most of the cost today is headcount related. I think over time it won't all be headcount related, but that is a more of a fixed cost in the short run number where you get leverage over time. Infra is about running data centers. and the cost of the data center. So think of those as more like fixed cost investments where they get absorbed over time as the user base grows and as the user base monetizes. You'll see absorption of that and then leverage on the model. So the infra is almost all the cost of the data center. Data center is very few people cost, and trust and safety is the opposite.
spk02: Understood. Thanks, guys.
spk03: Okay.
spk08: Your next question is from the line of Brandon Ross with LightShed Partners. Your line is open.
spk05: Hey, how are you? Thanks for taking the questions. Kind of sticking on the cost theme here. I think in response to David's earlier question and a few times throughout the call, you talked about reinvestment in the community. And you paid developers more than ever in Q4. But if I look at it on a percentage of bookings basis, DevEx came down to, I think, 20%, the lowest it's been in five quarters. Was wondering if you could, that doesn't feel like an area that would benefit from leverage. So just wondering what your thoughts are on the trajectory of how you're paying the dev community on a percent of bookings basis and what you see going forward as we kind of clean up our models.
spk03: Yeah, Brandon, so it not intended to go down as a percentage of bookings bookings grew very quickly in the 4th quarter. So. You know, we had a little bit of again absorption, if you will, of the cost. And so, but generally, if you look at that number over the last 3 or 4 years, you're going to see. A shift of a few 100 basis points, so December was Q4 in general was a little bit. Unusual because of the spike in the growth rate of bookings. Our intention is to continue to move more of the economics towards the dev community. Our intention is to continue to find innovative and cool ways for the devs to monetize on the platform through various sources of bookings and monetization. And yeah, normally I would expect that that's one number that I can tell you will go up as a percentage of booking. Uh, this quarter and throughout the course of the year, so we'll go back up to where we had been, which is like that 2223% range and we'll still try to push through to higher numbers. So what you're seeing in Q4. Was unintended leverage because of the top line.
spk05: Does that make sense? So, yeah, it's essentially it's timing. It's like you're timing.
spk03: That's right. That's a good way to put it. Just to make it simple. In the month of December, that number, the amount of capital that went out to the dev community was at an all-time high. And obviously, it's a seasonal number because we obviously have high bookings and it's largely variable. But we noticed as we did the math that, you know, if you run-rated December, We can see a time in the near future where the market availability for debt is a billion dollars plus, which is really exciting for us.
spk05: Great. And then I wanted to dig in a little bit on brands and advertising because that was a highlight at RDC and your investor day. So a couple of questions there. How has the ad test gone that you've been doing? that you've been executing on and do you expect advertising to be any kind of real contributor this year or next? And you mentioned brand experience, the likes of Elton John, which actually caught my attention because the fan base for Elton is obviously much older than probably your typical user. And so have those been successful from an engagement perspective and to what extent or experiences like that driving this age up that we're really seeing from you guys?
spk06: Yeah. They are a part of it. And for performers like Elton John, we see millions and millions of people visiting their experience. But that's just a part of it. There's continuously more and more high-quality content that is a – daily, weekly, monthly place where our older players come to visit as well. We are in the very early innings of advertising right now. We have our eyes right on the target of making this a self-service platform above and beyond the early experiences we're doing with brands. And we believe there's a huge market for on-platform advertising for brands who want to bring people to their experiences to engage. We've been very, very conservative on the forecast this year as far as the contribution from advertising. But when we look at other platforms, and whether it's print or online, web or video, and we look at the level of engagement on those platforms relative to on Roblox, Obviously, the opportunity is really, really large. So you will see us this year rolling out more and more self-serve capabilities for advertising, but we're being very conservative on the contribution.
spk03: Hey, Brandon, we're going to move on just because we only have time for one more question, but we can catch up with you after. Thank you for the question. All right, we have time for one more.
spk08: Your final question comes from the line of Clark Lampin with BTIG. Your line is open.
spk00: Hey, thanks, guys. Two quick ones, I guess, for me. Dave, I guess just to clarify, was there any contribution from advertising or a meaningful one in the first quarter, or in January, I guess I should say? And could you comment maybe a little bit more on sort of what's working or not working? You talked about the ad units, sort of teleportation, and then also more static units last quarter. Anything, I guess, that you would call out in terms of advertiser or developer response so far? And then, Mike, if there's time, could you remind us, I guess, given some of the lumpiness with sort of COVID and comps over the last year or two, what sort of seasonal patterns maybe we should expect for either the duration of metrics reports or the next, you know, sort of quarter or two? Thanks.
spk06: Yeah, we are working with a select number of brands as part of our early experiments with advertising. I think any contribution that would show up is essentially shouldn't be considered right now. We've got our eye on the prize of self serve this year, at which point you'll start to see the contributions.
spk03: Yeah. Um, so, Clark on on comps. We're largely, I think through. COVID comparisons, which is nice to say. This time last year, we were basically coming out of Omicron. And so we don't really, other than in emerging markets, we don't see too much of COVID variability in our numbers. And I think getting through that in December and January, Has been helpful and has cleaned up the, the analysis for people. So, I think going forward, I, you know, my, I'm, I'm optimistic that we're, we're more or less through that. I would, it seems to me like December and January. Performance would indicate that that that we're, we're done with that. So anyway, so I assume for the rest of the quarter, we will feel the same way. We shouldn't see anything around COVID meaningfully affecting the numbers. Again, some of the emerging markets are a little bit behind where we are in the US and Europe. But we don't really see that. We look through our trend data. We don't see big swings related to COVID anymore.
spk06: Yeah, and keep an eye on our year-on-year numbers, which, in effect, neutralize seasonality. Q4 always tends to be bigger around the holidays. So keep an eye on our year-on-year numbers, which kind of take care of that. Yep. All right, Clark.
spk00: Thanks very much.
spk06: Yeah, and I think we're going to wrap up here once again. I just want to thank our investors in the Roblox community. Appreciate you being on the call with us.
spk01: Thank you for joining us today. And Brent, thank you for being a great operator. And that's a wrap for us.
spk06: Thank you, everyone.
spk08: Thank you. And that does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation.
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