Roblox Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
May 1, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Financial Beat: Q1 revenue was $1.035 B (+29% YoY) and bookings reached $1.207 B (+31% YoY), both exceeding the high end of guidance.
  • User Engagement Growth: Daily active users hit 97.8 M (+26% YoY) with 21.7 B engagement hours (+30% YoY), driven by strong APAC (+40%) and India (+77%) expansion.
  • Strong Cash Generation: Operating cash flow of $443 M (+86% YoY) and free cash flow of $420 M (+123% YoY) both surpassed the high end of forecast.
  • Creator Ecosystem Expansion: Developer payouts (DevEx) rose 39% YoY to $281 M, top 100 creators earned an average $6.7 M over 12 months, and creator earnings are on track to exceed $1 B this year.
  • Platform & AI Investments: Launched AI-driven moderation, Cube3D generative tools, text generation APIs and a Google ads partnership to enhance safety, innovation and monetization.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Roblox Q1 2025
00:00 / 00:00

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Analyst

Good morning. My name is Kathleen, and welcome to the Roblox Q1 2025 earnings conference call. All lines are on mute. After the speaker's opening remarks, there will be a Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press Star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the Star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Stefanie Notaney. You may begin your conference.

Stefanie Notaney
Stefanie Notaney
Senior Director, Corporate and Financial Communication at Roblox Corporation

Thank you, Kathleen. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our Q&A session to discuss Roblox's Q1 2025 results. With me today are Roblox co-founder and CEO David Baszucki and CFO Michael Guthrie. Our shareholder letter, press release, SEC filings, supplemental slides, and a replay of today's call can be found on our investor relations website. Our commentary today may include forward-looking statements which are subject to risk, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements. A description of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions is included in our SEC filings, including our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We disclaim any obligation to update these statements except as required by law. During this call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures.

Stefanie Notaney
Stefanie Notaney
Senior Director, Corporate and Financial Communication at Roblox Corporation

Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP measures can be found in our press release and supplemental slides. With that, I'll turn the call over to David.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

Hey, thank you, and good morning, and welcome today. I want to share our results and highlight surpassing our guidance that we provided in our Q4 earnings call, and also surpassing what we shared with you on our 2023 Investor Day goals. Let's dive in first with some numbers that are in our letter, and then I'll share some more commentary as well. We saw a high growth rate in many, if not all, of our operating metrics. Q1 revenue was $1.035 billion. That was up 29% year on year. Ahead of our guidance of $990 million-$1.015 billion, our Q1 bookings were $1.207 billion. That was up 31% year on year. That was ahead of the high end of our guidance, which was $1.125-$1.15 billion. Q1 DAUs, 97.8 million, just shy of 100 million DAUs, up 26% year on year.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

Let's dive into a couple of the areas we've been talking about growing ever since our S-1. First, U.S. and Canada are still growing with solid DAU growth of 22%. APAC, 40%. Japan, one of the largest gaming markets, growing 48% year on year. India, growing 77% year on year. We'll talk a bit about some of the performance things we're doing on our app and the ecosystem to support that. On demographics, very large opportunity for us, over 13. 13 and up DAUs grew at 36% year on year. Now our DAUs are at 62% over 13. On hours, we hit $21.7 billion in Q1. That's up 30% year on year. Similar to the DAU trend, U.S.-Canada, 27%. APAC, 40%, 44% growth. Japan hours, 50% year on year. India hours, 78% year on year. 13 and up, 40% engagement growth year on year.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

On the hours, very similar to DAU, 64% of the hours in 13 and up. Continuing on our effort for thoughtful cost management, combined with our growth in Q1, our cash from operations was $443 million. That was up 86% year on year. That is 17% above the high end of our guidance, which was $380 million. Free cash flow in Q1, $426 million, up 123%, 18% above the high end of our guidance. Just a little dive on some of the operational efficiencies we have been focusing on. Trust and safety, up 8% year on year. Now, 13% of revenue, 11% of bookings. I want to highlight, as we generate this operational efficiency, quality continues to go up. AI continues to be a key component of our efficiency there. We are getting better on all fronts.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

AI-driven moderation has really driven the quality of our system, both for content safety and communication safety. Our personnel costs, exclusive of stock-based comp, were $238 million. I want to highlight these are growing less fast or slower than bookings and revenue, at 23% of revenue and 20% of bookings. We are getting great leverage here. More leverage to come as we start to continue to accelerate our coding efforts with AI. At the very same time where we would like to see more money moving in addition to our bottom line is creator earnings. DevEx was up 39% year on year in Q1 at $281 million. That is 27% of revenue, 23% of bookings. Our creators are on track for earnings over a billion this year for the first time ever. I want to dive a bit into our investments on creator success and making them more successful.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

We highlighted a few of them. Differential Roblox pricing is really working. We shared some of the results here in our letter. The creator community is really getting into this. Also, the in-experience price optimization that we rolled out is giving us roughly 4% more in median creator earnings for creators who are participating. We are now at 35% of top 100 experiences by spending using price optimization. We have seen some experiences do as well as 15% improvement in earnings, including Slap Battles. A really, really satisfying thing here, when we started running this optimizer, prices went down, not up, which is really just a great testament for helping creators find more revenue in a really engagement and spending positive way. Also, last week, regional pricing recommendations for game passes.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

This means that dynamically, users in, for example, India or Brazil will see different prices than they would if they're in the U.K. Our early testing is showing really promising results. We've only released it for game passes. Stay tuned. We're going to be adding in-game and Avatar Marketplace items. Going over to search and discovery, we want to highlight we really try to surface diversity in content in a fair way. This is really, really important because 90% of the traffic on Roblox originates from our homepage. This is a really crucial channel. We said publicly, and I would say not just on Roblox, but across the industry, a belief and commitment to transparency in search and discovery algorithms. We have started outlining how retention, engagement, monetization, and intentional co-play are signals.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

We've gone so far as to make these signals available as much as possible on our analytics dashboard for creators. Transparency, but giving feedback to creators so they can see how they're doing on these signals. We have a lot of creators of all sizes. We're trying to really drive search and discovery, not just with short-term optimization, but factoring long-term ecosystem health, which is really long-term enterprise value into our search and discovery and recommendation algorithms. I'll share a few results. Our top 100 creators now earned $6.7 million on average in the last 12 months. That's up 35% versus the 12-month period ended March 31, 2024. The top 100 creators earned over $1 million in the last 12 months. That means a creator number 100, if we stack rank them by earnings over the top 12 months, creator number 100 earned over $1 million.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

We have over 100 creators and studios supporting themselves, which is a great diversity of content. Discovery efforts are really helping. 24% of the top 100 experiences by spending in March were created in the last 12 months, which is amazing content velocity. Let's look at the top 10 creators. They earned $36 million on average in the last 12 months. That's up 28% versus the 12 months ended March 31, 2024. We highlighted at RDC, I guess it was just last year, the goal of having a Roblox studio valued at a billion dollars. We're seeing a lot of M&A action in the Roblox ecosystem. You can read about it on the news. We're really proud that we're starting to see this kind of growth on the platform.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

We've shared publicly our goal, and our belief is we're going to see 10% of the gaming market by consumer spending on the Roblox platform. We're growing faster than the gaming industry as a whole because we are a platform. We have a lot of headroom. We've also shared that one of the tools we're going to use to do this is a real focus on genres and watching how we're doing in sports and racing, how we're doing in role-playing, how we're doing in battle genres, and tracking these and making sure our platform, from a technology point of view, search and discovery, economics point of view, can support awesome properties on this. I do want to share in the three genres we're tracking, we've seen 69% year-on-year growth in these three genres that I just mentioned. A couple of highlights about Live Ops.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

We're continuing to run Live Ops events. The most recent event was the Hunt Mega Edition. Mega, yes, Mega stands for a million. We had 10 finalists compete for $1,000,000 in cash on April 4 at our headquarters. There were over 183 million visits to our hub during this event. I would invite you to track down this event and watch it if you want. It's really fun to watch top-flight, super high-quality pro gamers playing a fashion game like Dress to Impress competitively. That's a fun highlight. On brands and ads, we announced our partnership with Google to help scale ads in formats like video and rewarded video. That integration is underway. We've also added additional tech and analytics providers, Kantar, DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, Kantar, and Nielsen.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

We continue to be really excited about creating an ecosystem where our creators have a wide range of monetization opportunities, including freemium, including Paid Access, including ads. On brand activations, we're seeing more and more licensing-type deals. NASCAR teamed up and did an activation with Driving Empire. PGA Tour Ultimate Golf Simulator launched. We've seen European Soccer League show up with, and I want to pronounce it right, Bundesliga. We've also seen people using our platform to reach out to young people. The Ad Council did a program with Love Your Mind to support teen mental health with resources from Headspace. Alo Yoga also updated their experience that's focused on mental health and physical well-being. I'll look around and see if we can announce there's a fun food activation on the platform. I'm looking whether we can announce it.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

Yeah, Chipotle's also activated with a repeat of their great partnership. On the AI side, we're live now with Cube 3D. We've built our own foundational 3D model and trained it on over one and a half million licensed and publicly available datasets in the Roblox ecosystem. We now have 1,500 experiences that are playing around and experimenting with in-experience generative 3D AI. This is just the beginning. We have shared publicly that we're moving forward to full 3D scene creation. We're also enabling, over the next few quarters, what we call 4D generation. 4D generation means not just creating props and static assets, but creating native Roblox 3D immersive assets that are functional, that include embedded code.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

The example there is cars where you can walk up, open the door, hop in the car, drive the car, and get a heads-up instrument display on the car, as well as avatars and other interactive elements. We have also done, we are live now with a beta of a text generation API in our system using an LLM. Creators can also use this directly in experience to power NPCs that are conversational and AI characters. We are now over 300 Roblox-created ML models that we are running in our system, where we got that start way back four years ago with our first few models in trust and safety. We are running this with a focus on low-latency real-time inference at low cost. Highlighting on safety and civility, really our top priority since we started.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

We launched in April the latest iteration of our open-source AI voice classifier model, which is even more accurate, runs more efficiently. This is open-source. I want to highlight a personal anecdote. When I now go to GDC, I bump into companies, and I've heard them say, "We're using your model," which is awesome. We added three powerful parental controls in April to give parents even more control of how their children spend time on Roblox. We joined the Roost Consortium to contribute more of our open-source work to that for this industry-wide initiative to improve civility and safety. A lot of great opportunities are in front of us. With that, I'll hand it over to Michael.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

Thanks, David. Just a couple of comments on top line and on cash flow and margins.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

First thing that I found interesting in the numbers this quarter I'm particularly pleased with is that a year ago, our bookings and bookings growth was very concentrated at the top and a smaller number of experiences. We've dramatically expanded that this year over the last year. If you looked at just experiences numbered 11-50 on our platform, a year ago, they were growing at about 5%. This year, year over year, they're growing at over 100%. That means more developers on the platform and, frankly, more genres, which is very important as we strive to get 10% of the gaming market. A great data point is that just over 100 developers over the last 12 months have earned more than $1 million. There really are a lot of developers flourishing on the Roblox platform.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

Number two, we're very pleased with the performance in the U.S. and Canada. Last year or last quarter, rather, we had a few questions about, which we explained about growth rates there, but we had very high growth in DAUs, very high growth in hours of engagement, and about 31% growth in bookings in the U.S. and Canada. Great performance in the first quarter. In Europe, when you look at the geographic output, you'll notice that DAUs and hours are growing more slowly than other regions and overall, but bookings Europe is growing just perfectly in line with the rest of the world. That is still because Turkey is still offline, and that is affecting our DAUs and hours, but not having a big impact on bookings. We are doing incredibly well and very consistently across the globe.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

On margins, we're just really pleased with the margin growth in the business and the cash flow generation in the business. Since we had Investor Day late 2023 over the last six quarters, we have just dramatically outperformed the notion of 100-300 basis point improvement. We're just well, well above that. In this quarter, adjusting for a working capital benefit that we got in Q1, operating cash flow grew at over 70% year over year. Free cash flow more than doubled year over year, over $400 million or right about $400 million for the quarter. At the same time, we are hiring and we are retaining great people. We only diluted the business by about 2.2% year over year, which means our per-share metrics are very strong. We think that's great for investors.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

The kind of top-line growth we're driving and the kind of cash flow growth we're driving per-share metrics with a small amount of dilution look really fantastic. All in all, the financials look great. The balance sheet is incredibly strong. We have $4.5 billion of gross cash, $3.5 billion of net cash. That number has grown dramatically over the last two years. The liquidity at the company is really strong. With that, we'll end our comments and open it up for questions.

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you have dialed in and would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad to join the queue.

Operator

If you are called upon to ask your question and listening via loudspeaker on your device, please pick up your handset and ensure that your phone is not on mute when asking your question. Your first question comes from the line of Matthew Cost of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Matthew Cost
Matthew Cost
Executive Director and Equity Research at Morgan Stanley

Great. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe David, I just want to double-click a little bit on the commentary about genres and sort of breadth of growth in kind of 10 through 50 and the top developers. I guess it seems like that's a really important driver now, and you're having a lot of success. What are you doing and what can you do to keep that ball rolling to make sure you're seeing more genre expansion, more growth from those smaller developers?

Matthew Cost
Matthew Cost
Executive Director and Equity Research at Morgan Stanley

Obviously, it's something that happens naturally, but what steps should we be watching for you to take as a company to help keep that momentum going? I have one follow-up. Thank you.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

Hey, great question. I want to highlight, besides RPG, sports, racing, and battle, we do track all of the genres in the gaming space. There's a bunch of genres in addition to this around avatar, sim, social, whatever, where Roblox is amazingly powerful and well on its way to having more than 10% of that genre running on our platform, either by hours, bookings, or DAU. We've taken genre as a way of breaking down the whole gaming space and looking at it over the next five to six years to build a little bit of a roadmap of what Roblox might look like when 10% of the gaming space is running on our platform.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

We have identified these three genres, RPG, sports, racing, and battle, as key genres to highlight both the work we have to do, but also the opportunity. A huge part of this is tech. We believe the core way the gaming space is running today is a little bit in the Stone Age. We think more and more in the future, developers will create a single build that will both perform very well on very low-end Android in difficult, I'd say, networking environments, as well as have that exact same experience go high-res on a great gaming PC, have that experience launch immediately rather than download, and have that experience really have all the benefits of a platform like Roblox: dynamic economy, dynamic pricing, built-in safety and civility, built-in AI, and all of that.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

For RPG, sports, racing, and battle, we're really looking at, do we have the tech on the platform? We shared it at RDC. Do we have the tech to build an amazing battle royale that runs great on a 2 GB RAM Android device? Do we have the tech to build a super competitive sports game with great avatars on a gaming PC? Do we have the tech to ultimately build and run a 1,000-player experience? We're also looking at economics. We shared initially for higher-priced experiences, Paid Access, we're going to give a higher rev share. Stay tuned on that. On search and discovery, we're more and more rolling out ways for people to gather more users both on and off platform. Long term, we think, in addition to the great tech, we want the economics to be hyper-competitive.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

It's why we get excited when creators make more money on the platform, and stay tuned on that. Economics, technology, search and discovery, all of them, along with, of course, partnerships to make that possible.

Matthew Cost
Matthew Cost
Executive Director and Equity Research at Morgan Stanley

Great. Thank you. Going to Michael. On the differential pricing initiative, I guess it said in the shareholder letter that it's so far been neutral to slightly accretive to margins. What inning are we in for consumer adoption of kind of those desktop payment and gift card payment options? As we move into later innings, will it become more clearly accretive to margins as you guys see it? Do you have any view on the announcement last night from the Epic lawsuit and any ability that might have to open the aperture for you to do even more on the direct payment front? Thanks.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

Matthew, thanks for your question.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

Since we just launched differential pricing, I guess to stick with the metaphor, it has to be the top of the first inning. I do not know how many outs there are in the inning, but it is pretty early. We did testing before we launched, and thus far, as we said in the letter, the results are good, but it is very early. It is logical to us that this is what we would see, but until we see it in practice, we, of course, do not know for sure. So far, so good, but very much early days.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

Yeah. Just on the Apple side, I would highlight currently, without any messaging in our mobile apps, we do see the Roblox community amongst themselves becoming aware that they get more Robux on web with gift card and through credit card. This has so far happened organically.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

We're staying tuned to see what happens with the court ruling.

Matthew Cost
Matthew Cost
Executive Director and Equity Research at Morgan Stanley

Great. Thank you so much.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

Thanks.

Operator

We'll move next to Jason Bazinet of Citigroup.

Jason Bazinet
Jason Bazinet
MD at Citigroup

I just had one quick question. Obviously, investors are very nervous about macro, and we don't have a lot of history with your company in terms of how it might fare in a downturn. I'd just love to get your perspective on sort of the pace of innovation. Do you think that could just sort of power through any sort of potential macro weakness, or do you think investors should sort of think about the consumer potentially weakening and therefore spending moderate a bit?

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

I'll go first, then Michael, you go. What's interesting about this is we were live, and past results is no predictor of the future, but we have been alive in prior economic downturns.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

I think we were—I am looking around the room—I think it was 2007 or 2008 where we were live, and we saw minimal impact during that. From a high level, Roblox is something where the majority of the people on our platform do not spend money, and then for others, these are small incremental amounts. These are not cars and houses and vacation homes. That makes me a bit optimistic. The notion of using innovation to power through, I think that is a statement rather than an assumption. I would say we would detangle that. I think without innovation, we are a very powerful platform, even in the midst of these economics. We see innovation as the way to drive towards 10% of the gaming space, and we do think that is important because that is what we want to get. I would not say raw innovation is needed to power through macro.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

Yeah.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

Truthfully, I don't have much to add to what David said. Every investor will make their own macro determinations, and investors will map businesses against that environment and decide who they think will do well against that. At this point, obviously, given the quarter that we just produced and the growth, so far we're doing quite well, and we're relatively low-cost entertainment, but that's where we are today. It doesn't mean that's where we're going to be in four quarters. I agree with David's comments.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

Yeah. We don't import physical components to assemble Roblox.

Jason Bazinet
Jason Bazinet
MD at Citigroup

Understood. Great color. Thank you, guys.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

Thanks, Jason.

Operator

We'll move next to Clark Lampen of BTIG.

Clark Lampen
Clark Lampen
MD at BTIG

Thanks very much. David, I wanted to, I guess, follow up on the comment that you just made in response to Jason's question. You mentioned that the majority of people on your platform don't spend money right now.

Clark Lampen
Clark Lampen
MD at BTIG

You guys have done, I think, a very good job over the last year or so of improving engagement rates across the aggregate user base. North America, I think, being a very good example of that this past quarter. You have also expanded the array of monetization options, AI capabilities, new ad tools that are very native to the sector. I am curious, I guess, where you see the biggest opportunities of improving sort of passive hourly monetization. Ads, I know, are not going to be huge this year, but maybe remind us, I guess, sort of what is on the table for the next couple of years and where there could be bigger unlocks.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

When we look at our bookings per hour, we see that as a very healthy number, and we have generally seen by region and by age that scale with growth.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

We always first go back to growth rather than increasing bookings per hour. We think there is enormous opportunity for DAU and hourly growth. Some of this, I believe, will come naturally as we analyze many of the genres on our platform, irrespective of how we are monetizing. The genres I mentioned, RPG, sports, and racing, and battle, typically amongst older users, I think, as people would look at bookings per DAU or bookings per hour, and do not hold me to this, do your own research, I think you would find those typically monetize even higher than we monetize. I think what we will see is, as we go after these genres and we move to some of the targets in these genres, we will see a natural ability for the creators on our platform to monetize better.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

Clark, just to add to that, Clark, sorry to finish up. In a market as large as gaming at $180 billion, even in a market that was flat to even contracting, we're still around 3%, a little under 3%. In this quarter, with 31% growth, we are continuing to grow market share. Market share is still very, very small in a very, very large market. The track record of growing that market share over the last few years has been very good. In this quarter, we're starting to see genres and, as we said, more developers really making a very good living on the platform. I think the dynamic for continuing to grow share is very, very good here.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

Yeah. I would say, just to add to that, that doesn't mean we ignore bookings per hour.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

It means we focus first on genre expansion and DAU hour expansion. In the backdrop, we already mentioned three on the call. Automatic price optimization improves bookings per hour. Regional pricing, we're not sharing any numbers in the early developers, improves bookings per hour. Finally, as we move our really payments, more of them to higher leverage-type payments also improves our ability to move that money back. I think the big one is moving genre expansion and just growing, but in addition, we do focus on bookings per hour.

Clark Lampen
Clark Lampen
MD at BTIG

Can I just ask a very quick follow-up on the sort of direct payments push right now? Has that in any way changed the way that you guys look at the opportunity with gift cards, or has that sort of really just augmented the push with a more elegant, I guess, mechanism for users re-upping their Robux balances?

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

The Roblox user base is very communicative and savvy. The more we move to giving Robux proportionate to the amount of raw cash we can put into our system, the more they tend to become aware of that and nudge in that direction. Our gift card business is very, very healthy, and consumers are becoming more aware that with gift cards, they do get 25% more Robux than they might get from a mobile native payment.

Clark Lampen
Clark Lampen
MD at BTIG

Thank you.

Operator

We'll move next to Cory Carpenter from JPMorgan.

Cory Carpenter
Cory Carpenter
Internet, Video Games and Equity Research at J.P. Morgan

Thanks. Good morning. I'd add too. On advertising, you mentioned earlier that the integration work with Google is underway. Just hoping you could talk about what that rollout looks like and if that's something that you expect to be perhaps a meaningful contributor to bookings this year.

Cory Carpenter
Cory Carpenter
Internet, Video Games and Equity Research at J.P. Morgan

Also, in the shareholder letter, you talked about being in a position to reinvest a little bit. Could you just talk about your biggest priorities on the investment side and where you plan to reinvest in the second half of the year? Thank you.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

I'll go first on any bookings is meaningful to us. Advertising is already, from that definition, contributing meaningful. As far as when we break it out, I'll leave that up to Michael. We are seeing growth in all the various advertising channels. On the reinvestment, when we look at where we spend money, we would like payment processing to go down. We would like personnel costs to be balanced and grow slower than bookings and revenue and become more efficient as we AI accelerate it.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

We would like our infrastructure and safety costs to go down relative to bookings, but at the same time, get more efficient and our safety to continue to increase quality and performance from AI. That leaves the two things we would like to go up, which is payments to creators, and we said over a billion, and slow improvement in our margins. That is the breakdown on those five. Michael, you can talk about if and when we would break out ads.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

Yeah. We said we will probably do that when we feel like the number is big enough that it really moves the needle. To David's point, of course, any revenue is meaningful, but it is not a very big business today. I would just say the core business is doing so well. It is growing so quickly. It is dominating the financial performance of the business right now.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

That is really where we should focus. Obviously, we are excited about where we are with ads. We are excited about our partnership with Google. As soon as we have really good data to share with people, we will.

Operator

We will move next to Shweta Khajuria of Wolfe Research.

Shweta Khajuria
Shweta Khajuria
MD, Internet and Equity Research at Wolfe Research

Thank you for taking my questions. Let me try two, please. Could you please talk about the rate of margin improvement through the year? How should we think about it as we go through the year? The second is just on AI-powered tools. You have talked about this in the past that developers use. How should we think about the flow-through or the benefits that you are seeing from that? Is that just time saved for developers? Are you seeing economic benefits, and where should we be seeing them? Thank you.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

Yeah.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

Thanks for the question. On margins, let me just take a step back. Over the last five quarters, margin improvement in the business has gone 260 basis points, 710 basis points, 1,010 basis points, 510 basis points, 750 basis points. We have had a pretty dramatic increase in margin. We have guided this quarter to 314, actually, basis point improvement in our guide at the high end of the guide. We have given you guidance for the full year, so it is pretty easy to do the math. Basically, the way we with guidance for the full year, on top line, we baked in the beat on bookings, and we basically kept the margins for the full year the same. Again, you can do the math on the back half of the year. I am more than happy to say we will not continue to improve 700 basis points year over year.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

It's just not going to happen. What you will see from us is growth rates in cash flow in excess of growth rate in bookings for quite a while, which is very positive. We have so outperformed our guidance back from late 2023 on margin that we've delivered multiple years of improvement in a single quarter. Last Q3, for example, over 1,000 basis points. It's like three years plus at the high end. We have pulled that in fairly quickly and pulled that cash flow in very fast. You can do the quick math on the back half of the year.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

On acceleration of human potential with AI, I'll share it in three separate areas: both Roblox engineering, creators on our platform, and then users on our platform.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

For both Roblox engineering as well as creators on our platform, we view AI as a human acceleration tool that will allow individuals to do more. I was making the metaphor. I used to use a calculator. This is a very powerful calculator that can leverage people a lot more than a calculator. I do believe we'll continue both internally as well as on our creator platform to see higher quality and more output and more creative output while still having humans in the loop. I believe long-term, we will see people coupled with the AI they use as the overall output of that person. We are making available code generation, 3D object generation on our platform. Stay tuned because what I shared in my prior comments is our goal is full 3D scene creation.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

Describe the environment you would like, describe the objects in it, and generate that whole thing. Coupled with 4D generation, non-static objects, interactive things, cars, humans, animals, things that you really can interact with rather than static objects. Finally, in the third segment for the experiences and games on Roblox, there's a bit of unpredictability here in what are people going to build when they have native embedded 3D generation and text generation in their experiences. My hope is we're going to see generative 3D fashion experiences, for example, where people can describe what they would like to wear and other things within games so everyone on Roblox can be more creative.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

Just for the operator, we have time for one more call.

Analyst

Thanks, David. Thanks, Michael.

Michael Guthrie
Michael Guthrie
CFO at Roblox Corporation

Or one more question.

Operator

We'll move next.

Operator

We'll move next for the last question, which is Kenneth Gawrelski of Wells Fargo.

Kenneth Gawrelski
Kenneth Gawrelski
Research Analyst at Wells Fargo

Thank you for the time. Appreciate you fitting me in. Just one for me. Could you talk a little bit about the status of the Shopify partnership and also just more broadly opportunities on the e-commerce side to drive e-commerce outside of maybe even the curated experiences that are on the platform today, but to kind of broaden the aperture a little bit on the e-commerce side? How important and how strategic is that to the business in the longer term? Thank you.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

I think it's augmentative and important at the same time. It's part of a vision not just of getting to 10% of the gaming space, but ultimately getting to a billion daily active users on the platform.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

We have shared that as we move to 10% of the gaming space on the platform, we roughly estimate that could be around 300 million daily actives. Our goal is a billion. As we go to a billion, we do believe, in addition to the physical shopping that we do, the 2D shopping we do by ourselves, the fun that we have seen in a lot of fashion and clothing-oriented experiences on the platform will continue to expand to the purchase of physical items as part of that. The Shopify integration is early. We do not yet have a full-on simulation of Stanford Shopping Center on platform where one can walk around with a friend, try stuff on, and buy it. We do see that as an interesting opportunity. We also see physical shopping as a way to fully attribute on-experience advertising and close the loop on that.

David Baszucki
David Baszucki
CEO and Founder at Roblox Corporation

It is important, but we're still in the early phases of this.

Analyst

Thank you for joining us today. That concludes our conference call.

Stefanie Notaney
Stefanie Notaney
Senior Director, Corporate and Financial Communication at Roblox Corporation

Thank you. That does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. Good.

Executives
    • Stefanie Notaney
      Stefanie Notaney
      Senior Director, Corporate and Financial Communication
    • David Baszucki
      David Baszucki
      CEO and Founder
    • Michael Guthrie
      Michael Guthrie
      CFO
Analysts
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