Roblox - Q2 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good morning. My name is Rob, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Roblox Second Quarter 2023 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 during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press the star one. Thank you. Stefanie Notaney, you may begin your conference.

Stefanie Notaney (Senior Director and Financial and Corporate Communications)

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q&A session to discuss Roblox's Q2 2023 results. With me today is Roblox Co-Founder and CEO, David Baszucki, and CFO, Mike Guthrie. As a reminder, our shareholder letter, press release, SEC filings, supplemental slides, and a replay of today's call can be found on our investor relations website at ir.roblox.com. On this call, we will make some brief opening remarks and reserve the rest of the time for your questions. Our commentary today may include forward-looking statements, including but not limited to our expectations of business, future financial results, and business and financial strategy. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements. Such risks are described in our. Excuse me, everyone.

Risks are described in our risk factors, including 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 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 as well as our supplemental slides. For our webcast participants, please note the question icon at the bottom right of your screen, where you can submit your questions. With that, I'll turn it over to Dave.

David Baszucki (CEO)

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Q2 was another quarter of strong growth across all our key metrics. We welcome you today. Bookings were $780 million, up 22% year-on-year. Our DAUs were 65.5 million, up 25% year-over-year. Our hours engaged in Q2 were 14 billion, up 24% year-over-year. We generated $28 million of operating cash. Our cash is now north of $3 billion, at $3.025 billion. We showed a GAAP loss of $283 million. Covenant Adjusted EBITDA at $37.9 million. These results, powered by all of our investments in innovation. As we discussed last quarter, we continue to be on track with our bookings growth and our expense control to generate positive operating leverage.

We highlighted in the first half of this year that our bookings are growing faster year-on-year than our cost of goods sold. We continue to expect in Q3 of this year that our bookings growth year-on-year will be faster than our infrastructure growth year-on-year, and we continue to expect in Q1 of 2024 that our bookings growth will be faster than our headcount expense. We expect to return to double-digit, Covenant Adjusted EBITDA margins in Q4 and 2024 as a whole. Let's dive into the business. We're driving continuously to our vision and mission of 1 billion daily active users, and as part of our four-part growth strategy, I want to highlight some results in all areas, including international, all ages, really the utility of Roblox and driving towards a daily product for everyone and our economy and ecosystem.

Let's start with international, I, I want to highlight that many of our huge international cohorts are really big and growing faster than our overall bookings and DAU rate. Let's start with some key geographies. Germany, DAUs, 25% year-on-year growth. Korea, 34% year-on-year growth. Brazil, 38% year-on-year growth. India, DAUs, 40% DAU growth year-on-year. Japan, one of the largest consumer gaming market spaces, DAU growth of 107% year-on-year. A product highlight supporting this, we mentioned semantic search last quarter for Japan. We turned this on everywhere in Q2. This improves search for out-of-catalog searches and pop culture terms. We've seen a significant increase in global click-through rate because of this, north of 3%. We're no longer talking about aging up. We are a platform for all ages.

Our 13 and over cohort is 5x larger than our under 13 cohort, our 13 and over cohort is growing at 33% year-on-year for DAUs. Our 17 through 24 cohort is growing at 36% year-on-year for both DAUs and hours. I do want to highlight that we introduced experience guidelines this quarter. You can read about it in our blog. Around the world, 17 through 24 and our 25 and up cohorts consistently show higher bookings per hour than other age cohorts. Let's take a look at our dev ecosystem. We are on track for our developers to earn $800 million in 2023. Our DevEx payouts in Q2 were $165 million, up 16% year-on-year. I wanna highlight the growing variety of content on our platform.

In the last 12 months, trailing, the 10 highest earning creators earned an average of $27 million each. These are growing and larger, significant businesses. But at the, the longer tail, developer number 1,000 is now growing 2x faster over the last three years, and is making $64,000 a year. That's thousands and thousands of people making a living on Roblox. And as far as content variety, versus a year ago, within the top 150 experiences, we're seeing 9% more variety of new experiences created in the last 90 days this year. A cool feature that we introduced for all devs is product analytics. It's, it's ways for developers to monitor user acquisition, performance, benchmarks.

I wanna highlight, in the last six months, use of analytics by the top 10K devs has gone from 22%-40%. We think this is a good signal. This is 10,000 developers, with 40% of them paying deep attention to analytics to help, we believe, improve the quality of their experiences. For those that are deep into our ecosystem, want to highlight that the anti-cheat technology we acquired from Byfron is live now. It's made a significant impact in the quality of experiences on our Windows platform, where a lot of our more serious gamers are playing, and really significantly reduced exploits and bot activity. As we're moving towards our vision and mission of connecting 1 billion people daily, we're making significant advancements in our products to make Roblox a daily utility.

I wanna highlight, we believe we have significant headroom, even in our core market, where we got our start, which is USA nine through 12. A highlight, we introduced Meta Quest on beta. We saw 1 million downloads in the first five days on that platform, and it highlights our vision of Roblox being available everywhere. It highlights the vision that when a creator makes an experience on Roblox, it immediately runs on all platforms and is immediately dynamically translated into all languages. We believe that's part of the DAU growth we've seen around the world. Getting into utility, high-frequency communication on our platform. In the USA, we now have 12% of our 13% and up daily actives using voice, and 2 million voice DAUs worldwide as of the end of Q2.

This is a 30% growth over the last six months, and we have strong evidence that as people become more immersed with voice, it has uplift in key metrics, both on hours spent and on Robux. Facial animation, we just turned on for 100% of voice users. I wanna highlight, this, coupled with voice, we believe, makes Roblox communication much more connected and realistic. We also turned on animated heads for everyone using voice. We have some great stuff coming on animation as well. On the social side, want to highlight, we've been hard at work improving the way people connect and the way real-life friends connect, and we've seen a 9% year-on-year growth in real-life friending in the first week, which we feel is significant, and once again, strong directional evidence that this benefits retention.

On our economy, we're creating products and systems to build a vibrant economy and empower our creator community to offer them more ways to earn and be discovered. Advertising is now live in its early form. I want to highlight some key things there. We have promoted Christina Wootton to Chief Partnership Officer to help drive our connection with brands. We've now done over 200 brand activations on the platform, and we'll make revenue this year in advertising. We're gonna share at Investor Day in November, our expectations for this for 2024. I do want to highlight that on the supply side now, 19% of the top 100 experiences on our platform have ad units, and this has been added organically by the creator community.

I also want to highlight that there are areas already where we see strong demand and more demand than supply for advertising on the platform. Want to welcome some of our advertisers that are live, including NARS Cosmetics, H&M, Spotify, NASCAR, and iHeartRadio. I'm really excited about really the vision that we've been talking here, that this is a new form of immersive advertising. This is a form of advertising that actually allows people to go to an immersive experience and experience a brand. Highlighting that we are on track on our UGC economy to get to full avatars throughout the ecosystem by the end of the year. We think this is gonna significantly change the look and feel of Roblox. Really looking forward to that. Also, just highlighting on search and discovery on the efficient frontier.

In Q2, we've been able to increase both the impact of bookings and the engagement on our search and discovery system at the same time, which is what we've been talking about doing for a while. Let's talk a little about AI and just how big it is for a platform like Roblox. We have approaching 14 billion hours of engagement on Roblox in Q4. There are many, many, many areas that we're already live on the platform with ML and AI stacks and more to come. I wanna highlight that we have 70 machine learnings training stacks right now. We have trained, for example, our own translation model with 1 billion parameters. This is the model that helps auto-translate all experiences when a creator makes them.

The range of verticals that we have live right now, we've mentioned material generation and code generation have shipped. We mentioned that we're making really impressive gains in both quality and cost throughout our safety systems on all types of assets, which is live. We've mentioned that we're building our own model internally and running our own inference on voice safety. Internally on search, we're live, and we have a lot of 3D generative coming as we move to creation everywhere and our avatar project. I, I wanna highlight two key things on our platform. First, we've got five, you know, approaching 5 billion hours of human interaction on our platform every month, and this human interaction can help us and does help us reinforce the quality of our civility system.

We believe long term, that on our platform, because we can run infrastructure, inference on our own infrastructure, there's an amazing opportunity to run inference all over the platform and run it at extremely low cost. I'll give you an example. Our personalized recommendations right now, 100% of these are running on our own infrastructure, running inference, and doing it really cheaply at scale. Also, all of our safety pipelines: image, audio, voice, text, and 3D, are running on our own platform, doing inference on our own platform at significant, you know, efficiencies of cost and driving quality there. Longer term, look for us to build bigger and more sophisticated models, first around voice, text, and language, supporting safety and civility.

Look for bigger and more interesting advanced models for us for 3D generation, ultimately, look for models from us on general human simulation and NPCs. Once again, running at extremely high performance and low cost on our own infrastructure. Finally, just to cap it off, then we'll start taking questions. We do have a research group that is producing some really high-quality technology that we will be wrapping into our product over the next two to four years under Dr. Morgan McGuire. Check out research.roblox.com. Maneesh Agrawala just published a great paper on adding conditional control to text-to-image diffusion models in 2023, you can see all of what we're doing there. With that, thank you, we'll welcome questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press Star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of Andrew Crum from Stifel. Your line is open.

Andrew Crum (Senior Analyst)

Okay, thanks, guys. Good morning. Dave, I think in your prepared remarks, you made a comment that the company is on pace to pay out $800 million in developer exchange fees this year. That would imply an acceleration in the second half over the first half, against conceivably a deceleration in bookings growth. Just wanna make sure those assumptions are correct, and, and what's driving that uptick in the second half? Thanks.

Mike Guthrie (CFO)

Hey, Drew, it's Mike. You know, generally, back half revenue in our business is higher than the front half of the year. It's, it's pretty simple. It's, it's straightforward. You, you know what roughly what the payouts are, that's what's, that's what's driving the, the, the $800 million number.

Andrew Crum (Senior Analyst)

Got it. Okay, and then just a quick follow-up. Can you address your plan to enable developers the ability to offer subscriptions within their experiences? Any sense on timing and, and if or how Roblox would share in the economics of the accompanying bookings that are generated through subscriptions? Thanks.

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah, hi, thanks for highlighting this Roblox way of thinking about things. A lot of our developers would like to offer VIP subscriptions directly for their experience. We are working on it. We plan to support this. We're not going to give a date or a time. We do think it'll be significant, and we do think it'll interact with subscriptions on the platform and recurring revenue.

Andrew Crum (Senior Analyst)

Thanks, guys.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from a line of Eric Handler from ROTH Capital Partners. Your line is open.

Eric Handler (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Yes, good morning. thanks for the question. Wonder if you could talk about what the impact has been on various cohorts for now having, you know, 17+ rated content?

David Baszucki (CEO)

I wanna share that it's early. That said, we have started to see some organic traction, which is just the same as we've seen in all areas. We have started to see developers build specific 17+ experiences. They're starting to show up in our sorts. We think this is gonna continue to grow and get bigger. You can check it out on the site.

Eric Handler (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Great, thanks. And just as a follow-up, with advertising beginning to roll out now, how, how are you pricing the inventory?

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah, this is really exciting. We've been a little gentle on the pricing right now. We expect at some point in the future to float the price, and when we do this, we will see the true value of what we believe is an extremely new and valuable ad unit, which is a teleport into an immersive experience. This is a new ad unit, unlike a video ad unit, unlike an image ad unit. It's literally moving real-time people on Roblox into one of our partners' experience, and we will self-discover that in the free market as we float pricing.

Eric Handler (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from a line of Clark Lampen from BTIG. Your line is open.

Clark Lampen (Managing Director)

Thanks, good morning. I have two. Dave, I wanna start with some of the AI commentary you made in the shareholder letter, understanding that it's, you know, an accelerant to creation across the platform. I think the consequence from a user side seems fairly obvious in terms of the overall experience improving. As we think about the developer side, how does that increase, you know, sort of in, in volume and velocity of content creation impact developers? Does it make it a more competitive ecosystem? If it is, you know, is there a need to, I guess, sort of offset that with potentially higher developer distribution rates over time?

David Baszucki (CEO)

We think I mean, we're entering an exciting new period on our platform. You highlighted that for users, traditionally, when users create immersive 3D content or social content, they're used to doing it with graphics tools and 3D type creation. What we think experiences, for example, a fashion design experience, is gonna migrate all the way from using a virtual sewing machine and scissors to purely based text prompts, and ultimately will enter an age on Roblox, where anyone can make their avatar or clothing 100% through text prompts. So if, if I or you wanted to build a piece of clothing, we could describe it. We're gonna see that created in real time. We think for developers, this is going to accelerate quality up and down the stack.

There's, you know, there's a great video clip, we're not gonna claim when we will achieve this on Westworld, where there's a text-based interaction of threeD creation. We do think that's the product vision, where developers will have all tools at their disposal. We'll see a greater diversity of experiences. We will see people who, before, didn't expect to be creators, making immersive threeD experiences, and we'll see the ones that are created by developers become more rich and dynamic. We, we may ultimately even see experiences that are dynamically personalized for each individual player. It's really early, but we think it's a, a really exciting frontier for threeD creation.

Clark Lampen (Managing Director)

That's, that's helpful. I appreciate the comments. I, Maybe, one for Mike as a follow-up. I want to kind of pull at the thread that you dangled a moment ago with saying the back half of the year is gonna be bigger than the first half. Traditionally, I, I think that sort of implies an acceleration or, or I guess, at the very least, steady growth into the back half of the year. Assuming that sort of persists, if not improves next year with product cycles that are unfolding and sort of improving, you know, we talked about advertising already. Could you help us, I guess, think about ongoing rates of margin improvement with the business? You know, you identified the sources, I guess, across OpEx, but maybe simplifying a lot of those things between COGS, ITS, and R&D over time.

Does that, roughly speaking, translate to sort of 200-300 basis points per year? Is it a little bit more, or would you be willing to quantify at this point? Thanks.

Mike Guthrie (CFO)

That was a long question.

David Baszucki (CEO)

Good question.

Clark Lampen (Managing Director)

A good question.

Sorry about that.

Mike Guthrie (CFO)

That's okay. We will see leverage against pretty much all of the cost areas over the next 12 months. You know, we, we think we'll see a little bit of leverage in cost of goods sold, because we've.

... you know, slowed down hiring, leverage against our compensation expenses, because Infra, Trust, and Safety, we've slowed down a little bit there. We've already closed the gap pretty meaningfully on both of those two. Just to give you a few numbers, you know, in the first quarter, Infra, Trust, and Safety was growing at about 33% year-over-year. Bookings were growing at 23%. Then just last quarter, Infra, Trust, and Safety was growing at 24, and bookings were at 22. You can already see there's a lot of leverage that we've already shown, and obviously well on the way to seeing leverage in Q3. Same thing with personnel.

The headcount costs were growing far in excess of bookings in Q1, much less in Q2, and we've already taken steps so that we'll see leverage in, in Q1. We 2024. We really feel like all the cost areas, there is opportunity for leverage while we continue to invest in growing the top line. It will really depend on both a combination of how the costs roll out and how fast our top line grows, obviously. I don't really you know, we're not, we're not giving guidance on what the year is going to end up. We're just saying Q4 is, you know, we're a seasonal business. Q4 is back into double digits, and we should be able to run double digits for 2024 as a whole.

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah, and on the hiring, I just want to highlight we continue to hire a lot of people. The year-on-year incremental headcount, compensation costs will go down slightly. We do expect bookings in Q1 2024 to be growing at a year-on-year rate higher than the headcount compensation. The final thing, just to add, I said once again in my statement, is we do expect double-digit Covenant Adjusted EBITDA margins in Q4 and 2024 as a whole.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Brandon Ross from LightShed Partners. Your line is open.

Brandon Ross (Partner and Media and Technology Analyst)

Hey. Hey, thanks for taking the questions. Your beta with Meta Quest actually opened a few questions in my mind. One of them is: while we're on new platforms, is there any update on opening Roblox to other new devices and game platforms like PlayStation or Switch? Then I have a follow-up.

David Baszucki (CEO)

It's a great question. High level, we believe immersive 3D human co-experience should be on every platform. We, of course, have our eyes on those platforms, and stay tuned.

Brandon Ross (Partner and Media and Technology Analyst)

Okay. Then, Dave, it seems like in the past, you haven't shown all that much interest in VR. I could be wrong, but do you believe that VR now will become an important tool for accessing your platform? Does the Apple Vision Pro change your perception at all of how people will experience 3D interactive in the future? Then maybe if you could talk a little bit about, technically, how much more complicated it is to build for VR and AR and still create the same experience across all the platforms you work with.

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah. Hey, I tweeted a few weeks ago that we had 1 million installs on Meta Quest. There's a lot of good information in the comments there, where people who haven't used VR before are used to certain Roblox experiences on their phone or their computer, and they put on a VR headset, and it's like, "Oh, my gosh, this same experience is all around me. I'm deeply immersed in it, and it's the same experience I'm used to." We, we do believe it's a really immersive experience. Our strategy has always been that immersive 3D should be everywhere. We want the highest quality experience everywhere. We want a creator to make once and run everywhere. We've done a lot of work on performance and on human interaction, so those same experiences out of the box work on Meta Quest.

A lot of that work, of course, is the same work we would do on Apple Vision, just as a lot of the work we've done on Xbox would be the same work for PlayStation. We are, you know, really excited that some of the performance work we would do for Meta Quest reflects throughout our whole ecosystem. We're already pretty good at build once, run everywhere, and as you correctly note, there's a lot of opportunity for both immersiveness on VR and more platforms.

Brandon Ross (Partner and Media and Technology Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Cost from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Matthew Cost (Executive Director and Equity Research Analyst)

Hi, everybody. Thanks for taking the questions. I have two. Maybe I'll just revisit DevEx for a second. You know, it stepped down to, like, 21% of bookings in 2Q, down a little bit from 1Q. Given your expectation of $800 million of bookings, or excuse me, of DevEx for the full year, it would imply that as a percentage of bookings in the second half, that it would have to step up, depending on your bookings assumption, you know, two points, maybe even three.

I guess I'm, I'm wondering, you know, given that it's a formula that the DevEx payouts are based on, and you have gift cards offsetting, you know, some of the, some, some of what's happening in the second half, what changed in 2Q, and then what's going to change in the second half to kind of cause that ratio of DevEx payouts to go up? I have one follow-up. Thank you.

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah. Yeah. I want to go high level on this, we believe over time, more and more ways creators earn money on our platform. Traditional DevEx, engagement-based payouts, we have advertising coming, potentially subscriptions and other things. This is going to be a very rich ecosystem. We've also highlighted that by Q1 of next year, we expect year-on-year bookings growth to be faster and greater than cost of goods, than infra, then headcount. That leaves either cash generation or DevEx, that puts us in this wonderful place to balance really how much cash we generate versus how much we distribute to developers. At a high level, the more we drive to this, the more opportunity we have for both earnings and DevEx. With that, I'll kick over to Mike for detail on this.

Mike Guthrie (CFO)

Yeah, just on the quarterly and timing, just look at 2022 as a year, DevEx rates were 23%, 22%, 22%, 20% in Q4, 24% in Q1. The timing of prepaid cards does in fact, affect the payout ratios back to 21% this quarter. That number, if you consistently look over time, it's moving up and it's moving in the, you know, 22%-23% range. Again, 24% in Q1. It's gonna be in that-- it's, it's not entirely formulaic because you do have engagement-based payouts on top of the normal formulaic piece, and to Dave's point, other things that developers can also participate in over time.

It, you know, the number will fluctuate 100, 200 basis points, quarter to quarter sometimes. Overall, you know, so what it, it implies that we're gonna, again, be a bigger business in the second half than we were in the first half, and it implies a good, healthy payout ratio for our developers, which is ultimately, we're always investing in the developers.

Matthew Cost (Executive Director and Equity Research Analyst)

Great, thank you. Then just on, on the, on the AI model, there's a comment in the, in the shareholder letter about creating a multimodal generative AI model. You know, Dave, you were talking the prepared remarks, about, you know, how efficient you're able to be on the AI side. I guess from a headcount and infrastructure perspective, are all the investments, you know, if not in place, at least in the plan, in order to create those, those AI models that you're gonna need to go to the next generation of, of what the platform is gonna be capable of? Could we conceivably be in a position where as you try to build these tools, it requires maybe more investment, and, and that's a worthwhile thing to do?

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah, I, I wanna highlight that right now we have a lot of people working on AI internally already. We have a fairly significant team. It's, it's a fairly significant team, considering, once again, the scale of what we're doing. We're running 70 different vertical training models right now, and we built fairly significant tech on the trust and safety side. You know, I, I don't wanna comment on the future opportunity there. We're always open to things. Right now we're, we're still on track to have our bookings expense beat our headcount expense in Q1 of 2024. We have a, a really great sophisticated AI team already in place.

Matthew Cost (Executive Director and Equity Research Analyst)

Great, thank you.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of Omar Dessouky from Bank of America. Your line is open.

Omar Dessouky (Research Analyst)

Hi, thanks for taking the question. You launched UGC Limiteds in April. I was wondering if you could update us on your commercial learnings thus far, and I'm particularly curious if you saw a corresponding increase in the mix of subscriptions. I have a follow-up question.

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah, I'll tell you, right now, limited UGC is the long-term vision. Right now, it's a smaller proportion of our marketplace. One could say that UGC Limiteds is more accurately near the economics of the real world as far as scarcity, as far as cost of goods sold, as far as creating really a rich and vibrant economy. We do expect ultimately, for every cohort, every type of asset to follow this pattern of more similarly mirroring the real world. The pricing on UGC items is 3x, the non-UGC or non-limited pricing, which is a really, really good sign. It's a good sign that we're moving in the direction of strong economic theory, supporting how we build a virtual goods marketplace.

We'll be rolling out, expansions of this over the next two quarters, and ultimately it's our long-term direction.

Omar Dessouky (Research Analyst)

Any, any comment on the effect on, on premium subscriptions? Because from my understanding, you have to have a premium subscription in order to participate in the trading.

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah, I, I believe we may be referring to, to be a creator, and we're, and we're using that most likely more as validation of user account. We'll have to check on that. I want to validate that, but we're not requiring subscription necessarily, I think, to buy UGC Limiteds, and we'll check with the team on that.

Omar Dessouky (Research Analyst)

Understood.

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah, we're not trying to-

Omar Dessouky (Research Analyst)

And, uh-

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah, just I wanna clarify, we are not trying to drive subscriptions with UGC Limiteds.

Omar Dessouky (Research Analyst)

Got it. How much do you think UGC Limiteds could influence the trajectory of monetization in your core markets in the next few quarters?

David Baszucki (CEO)

Hard to say. We are doing experiments once again through every cohort, trying to optimize mirroring of, of real life. All of the, the projections we talk about, as far as bookings, versus expense and Q1, really headcount expense, acceleration, or not acceleration, but really bookings beating headcount expense. I don't believe we have huge gains from this built in. I believe we have a lot of upside there.

Omar Dessouky (Research Analyst)

Thanks a lot, Dave. Appreciate it.

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yep, thanks.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from the line of David Karnovsky from J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.

David Karnovsky (Managing Director and Head of U.S. Media Equity Research)

Hi, thanks. Dave, I was wondering if you could discuss for, and I know it's early for games that have added advertising units, how that's impacted the overall experience. Is it purely additive in terms of monetization? How does it impact engagement? Then your shareholder letter noted, giving measurement and attribution tools to brands. Wanted to see if you could unpack that a bit. How much targeting you think you can provide for marketing purposes?

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah, two things to unpack. One is, developers have a lot of analytics right now on our platform, and they're opting in to these ad units, once again, to the tune of 19% of the top 100. We're, we're optimistic that these types of ad units are native, immersive, non-blocking and additive. We're not talking things that prevent you from playing or pre-roll or things that get in your way. We're talking about ad units that somewhat simulate the real world. We're walking around, we can see a portal to go to one of our, you know, brand experiences, and then people have a back button, and they can come right back. We're really optimistic about this. I, I would say, can you just highlight once again the second part of your question?

David Karnovsky (Managing Director and Head of U.S. Media Equity Research)

Yeah, it was just about in the shareholder letter, you talked about giving measurement and attribution tools to brands. Just wanted to see if you could discuss that.

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah.

David Karnovsky (Managing Director and Head of U.S. Media Equity Research)

You know, what level of targeting-

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah

David Karnovsky (Managing Director and Head of U.S. Media Equity Research)

you are willing to give.

David Baszucki (CEO)

We're, we're building a full ad marketplace for this new type of ad unit. Brands will have, within the constraints, of course, of safety and civility on our platform and PII rules and COPPA rules, and all of those types of things, as well as our own vision, the ability to, I think, thoughtfully do some targeting. We're not gonna be doing this for you 13s on the platform. This is all for 13 and up. We are already seeing signs in certain areas, for example, 17 through 24 female, of strong demand, potentially being greater than supply for these ad units.

David Karnovsky (Managing Director and Head of U.S. Media Equity Research)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Your next question comes from a line of Matthew Thornton from Truist Securities. Your line is open.

Matthew Thornton (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, good morning, David and Mike. Maybe two, if I could, one on AI and one on ads. On, on AI, I don't know if this is for, for Mike or not. I think you guys have got, you know, thousands of Infrastructure and Trust & Safety headcount on the platform at current. I think that's an area where you could certainly point AI to drive efficiencies. I'm curious if you have any color or thoughts on timing of attacking that and what that impact might look like from a margin lift perspective. Then just second on, on ads, as we think about the back half of the year. It sounds like we're gonna get a lot more color here at the Investor Day in November, which is, which is great.

As we think about the back half of the year and into next year, how should we think about, number 1, just, you know, the biggest friction points that you see that you still need to unlock to kind of, you know, grease the wheel for, for, for acceleration there? Or said differently, maybe milestones we should look for in that ad business. Then a follow-up to your prior commentary on ads. I'd be interested to hear what developers are opting for in terms of ads, portal versus billboard. If you have any kind of splits, there would be, would be great. Thanks, guys.

David Baszucki (CEO)

Okay, yeah. Two things. One is, we'll give you a little hint here that we've indicated our year-on-year bookings growth is going to be faster than our Infra costs in Q3 of this year. Infra includes all of our infrastructure, hardware. It also includes costs for Trust & Safety. We'll also say that all of our asset review pipelines are moving more and more to higher quality and lower cost with AI acceleration, all five of those pipelines I mentioned. On the advertising thing, the thing to watch for us will be, we're not going to give a date, when we fully float the advertising market, so you can see true pricing out there. We're excited about it because we're seeing supply demand really being interesting in some cohorts.

As far as portals, of the 19% of the units that we've placed, I believe most of them, I think 12% or 13, I'm looking. It's about 12%. Great. 12 of the top 100, I'm grabbing the data. Yep, cool. 12 of the top 100 are placing portal ads. Do I have the right data there? 10-4. Thanks. Now I'll kick it over to Mike.

Mike Guthrie (CFO)

Yeah, thanks, Matt. On, on friction, again, maybe just I'll keep it high level for a second. Ultimately, in my mind, it's the total volume of, of brands that get engaged on the platform. Brands today, agencies, working with agencies and working with us, how many of those brands are building and engaging on the platform? We noted there's over 200 brands that have engaged with us at this point. That's a double over last year. That rate of growth and that rate of adoption is really what makes the platform a rich and open opportunity for advertisers. That, that's the number I track almost more than anything. I don't think it's, it's technology. I think it's, it's the volume of brands and agencies that are working with us and getting their content onto the platform.

That's really what I look at.

David Baszucki (CEO)

... Yeah, then one final thing, the, the unlock, when I say self- when we say float pricing, the complimentary unlock there is everything we're doing is completely self-serve. We're not building a hand-holding platform. We're building a platform where any brand on their own can come and start using our platform for portal and image ad.

Andrew Crum (Senior Analyst)

Appreciate the color.

Operator (participant)

We have time for one more question. Your final question comes from the line of Tom Champion from Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Speaker 12

Hi, this is Jim on for Tom. Thanks for taking the question. I guess one for Dave. You mentioned some detail around decreases to the premium payout program. Can you just touch on that a little bit?

David Baszucki (CEO)

I'm trying to think. I, I don't think we've mentioned any detail around that. Can you, more color on that?

Mike Guthrie (CFO)

I think we've addressed premium payouts on the call.

David Baszucki (CEO)

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Mike Guthrie (CFO)

What was the comment?

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah, we've been talking about DevEx and also engagement-based payouts. We haven't announced any changes in either of those programs.

Speaker 12

Okay, great. Then I guess just one more on the developer exchange fee. Is there anything we should keep in mind with respect to, like, FX here for, for payouts that are going to non-U.S. dollar developers?

David Baszucki (CEO)

Yeah, I'll, I'll chime in. I believe we pretty much normalize everything to the U.S. dollar in all of our payouts and do that, that in real time as we pay out.

Speaker 12

Okay, great. Thank you.

Stefanie Notaney (Senior Director and Financial and Corporate Communications)

Well, thank you for joining us today. That's a wrap for us. Rob, you can close it out.

Operator (participant)

Thank you, and that does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.