Welcome everyone. It is so good to see so many familiar faces. We started on this journey over 15 years ago with our users and our creators and our technologists, and in the last 18 months, we've added many of you to our journey, and it's wonderful to see all of you. There's a lot of you out there as well online, a lot of our small investors, a lot of our Robloxians who have invested in the company, so it's just so wonderful to be together today. This is a journey. It's gonna be a wonderful journey. It already has been. It's a journey that we've been saying for 15 years is the creation of a new category. This is a creation of the evolution of the way people communicate, of the way we tell stories, and we're looking forward to sharing this vision with you today.
Now, there are some companies that focus on innovation. There are some companies that focus on execution. We believe we need to do both to get to our vision of a billion monthly active users on our platform. Today, I'm really excited because I believe you're gonna see both. You're gonna see some of our groups that are very tied to direct business metrics. You're gonna see a lot about what we shipped in the last year. You're also gonna hear every group talk about a vision for the future and very difficult long-haul innovation, many of which we believe will ultimately be necessary to build this new category. Thank you for joining us. We're on a mission to reimagine the way people come together.
This mission started a long, long time ago, all the way back when we first used to sit around the campfire and figure out how to tell stories. Telling stories has been a huge part of the human experience. We started to try to figure out, how can we tell stories when we're not around the campfire? We invented drawing, we invented cave art, we invented oil painting, and all of a sudden we started to see some magnification of this. How do we tell stories to a lot of people at the same time? We invented the written word, we started writing this down, we started distributing books, and all of a sudden storytelling could expand. We're always looking for better ways to share stories.
Along came photography, and all of a sudden a lot of us can tell stories even if we're not great artists. Over a hundred years ago, we put together image and audio. We created movies, which has become such an amazing and rich storytelling medium today and is still advancing all the time. There are two things we can't do when we go to a movie. We cannot jump in with our friends to participate in the movie, and we can't communicate while we're inside of that movie. That brings us to this new category of human co-experience, of which Roblox on your mobile phone is one example, where our amazing creator community that backs our technology supports amazing storytelling. Now, in addition to consuming content and consuming stories, we all wanna communicate all the time. This also started with the evolution of language.
Along the way, we started looking at ways to use technology to communicate at a distance. The mail system, for example, allowed us to share and communicate overseas and in towns, in different places. Even the mail system wasn't fast enough. We invented the telegraph to cut that 10 days down to immediate from coast to coast. We couldn't all use the telegraph, so along came the phone, and all of a sudden, at least with audio, we could communicate around the world. This has continued to advance. We were not able on the phone to register human emotion or to share human expression, so many of us over the last two-three years, we've been on video and audio together.
Once again, we believe and we think it's gonna show up over time. There is an evolution beyond this, which is immersive 3D simulation that just as prevalent as we feel phone and video is today. We ultimately will be what we use for a lot of our communication. What's interesting about immersive 3D simulation and what a lot of people experience on Roblox without necessarily knowing it is they're in the same place and they're together, which is absolutely amazing. A lot of what people notice on Roblox, even though they might not think about it, is we're able to do stuff together while we're communicating. For example, we can go explore outside, we can play hide and go seek, we can graduate from high school in a simulation much better than we can do on video.
We, you know, we feel this is a natural emergence of the next generation of both storytelling as well as communication. It's gonna happen, and our vision at Roblox is really to be civil ushers of this technology forward and to usher this in as it naturally happens. We're also very excited about our ability to innovate and drive many of the inventions that are gonna be necessary to bring this new category forward. This is very, very early. In this technology vision for us, we've been at it for 15 years. There are many, many more exciting inventions. I believe what you're gonna see today with our team as they come on board is just the amazing number of people we have driving invention within the company. I'm gonna talk about several ways we grow.
Before we kick it off, just a couple highlights. How are we doing, especially for some of our newer investors out there. We've continued to grow, both before the last two years, in the midst of it, and you're gonna see various ways we talk about our growth today. You're gonna see us talking about daily active users. You're gonna see how we translate daily active users into hours, which is engagement, and you're also, of course, gonna hear from Mike, our CFO, about how we translate hours into bookings. We're really excited about the format today, and you're gonna see a very logical connection between business drivers, retention, MAUs, going to frequency, which gives us DAUs, going to engagement per DAU, which gives us hours, and then going to bookings per hour, which gives us our bookings.
You're gonna hear from some of the people leading some of the groups that drive some of these things. Let's take a step back. Here's what I'm gonna cover. I'm gonna take you on a whirlwind tour of where we are relative to about a year and a half ago when we all came together and you joined us. This is exactly what we showed in our S-1 statement. This is. We've referred to this as our four dimensions of growth. Two to the fourth power is 16, I think. If we can double each of these, there's your 16x. This is really quite feasible. We've talked about being around the world. This isn't something we talk about. We're right in the middle of it.
We use the term all ages more than aging up now because this isn't something we have to do as well. You're gonna hear that we're right in the middle of this right now, and we are an all-ages platform. We've been talking a lot about ultimately this technology and this category for storytelling and communication supports a lot more than Play. Play is a subset. This gets into how we work together, how we learn together, how we connect with others, how we consume entertainment. It really gets into many, many ways, and that's why we think this is a growth vector as well, and we're gonna share some of this. Then finally, fourth in the row very intentionally because we focus on delight, civility, engagement, and growth.
You're gonna hear a lot about the richness of our economy and where that's going. Let's start off with around the world, and let's take a look at how we're doing. We're really, over the last three or four years, we've really just started showing up everywhere. We started in the U.S. In most countries now, we have a very significant presence of users. This is showing all countries with more than 5,000 daily active users. We have users in many more countries than this. This has been growing primarily organically. Most of our user growth here is driven by our awesome platform, amazing content from our creators, and good old-fashioned word of mouth, and it's happening everywhere. Let's take a look at a few countries that I think are really interesting. Brazil, last four years, 5x growth. No paid acquisition there.
Organic and continuing to grow and continuing ultimately to be actually a pretty good source of bookings as well as it gets so big. Couple other countries, both unique characteristics. India, one billion people. Last four years, 15x growth in India, purely organically, and doing this in very difficult infrastructure, very difficult mobile form factor with the exact same app we use in the United States, which is I think a highlight to our technical teams, how hard they have worked on app performance and on keeping our app lightweight. Japan, like South Korea, it's starting to go viral. 13x growth in the last four years. Interesting in that Japan is one of the top bookings countries for games and experiences, so a lot of good stuff to come. Now, how is this happening?
One way is both the amazing content that our creators have been creating. A lot of this content works around the world, coupled with our amazing technology. This is a partnership. Our machine translation technology, for example, we didn't have this till a few years ago. We experimented with it for a couple years. It's gotten better and better and better all the time. In Japan, for example, when our developers who do not know Japanese take their experiences, turn on automatic translation, so for people in Japan it feels like it was built for Japan, we see an 8% engagement lift.
Lots more opportunity here, once again highlighting the vision that when people on our platform build something. They're building it for every country in the world, they're building it for every language, and ultimately they're building it for also a wide range of devices at one time. Another part of our vision, let's take a look at our infrastructure. We, Dan's gonna talk to you more about infra today, but we have always had the vision that infra is a huge engine for not just cost, but for growth. The more efficiently we run our infra, the more money we can move to the developer community. High-performance infra drives growth. We know lower latency, higher performance is super important. Let's take an example. Data center in India, a huge commitment, but we believe directly correlated with a lot of the growth acceleration we've seen there.
We believe ultimately we're building a global 3D immersive supercomputer to power Roblox, and you're gonna hear a lot more about that today. Next up, talking all ages. When we started five, 10, 15 years ago, people definitely were correct when they said, "Yeah, Roblox is a younger person's platform." But let's look at where we are today. We've passed the point where the majority of the people on our platform are over 13, and you're gonna hear from Mike, we're gonna dissect this a bit by age cohorts. You're gonna see the amazing growth we have in 17 and up. One interesting thing about 17 through 60-year-old cohort relative to nine through 12, that's a much larger cohort.
When we do the math on the size of that cohort, the early place that cohort is today, and the growth rate, it creates really an interesting vision of the future. People always ask, "Whoa, what did you do to drive older players on the platform?" What we did is about 100 things, and a lot of them have things that we've been doing for a long time, quality of our game engine, performance, search and discovery that you'll hear about, and a lot of it you're gonna even hear about today as new things. Experience Guidelines. Some of the experiences on Roblox, all ages, some of them 13 and up, allowing more flexibility with our developer base. Let's take a quick look, preview of what you're gonna see from Anupam.
I don't wanna steal the show, but when a developer makes content for an older player, how do we find it? New content discovery automatically is something that has been a vision of us since 15 years ago. We always wanted a developer who creates an awesome experience, even if it's only for a certain slice of users, to have that get to the top of the charts automatically. This is how it works. New experiences that we detect have especially high engagement, even for a very specific cohort, could be older, could be a certain country, we want that to come to the top of the charts, and more and more it is, and this is really supercharging our efforts to be a platform for all ages. You're also gonna hear today about Experience Guidelines. We talked about this a year ago.
We shipped it on Monday. It's live everywhere. It's really exciting to start going on Roblox and seeing some experiences for all ages, some for 13 up. Here's a quick look at how it works. Developers fill out a survey, and we're starting to give parents control who want a lot of control to say, "For someone in my family, I only want all ages experiences," or, "I only want experiences possibly for older players." Another thing that's supercharging age up is our spatial voice thing. You're gonna hear a lot more about spatial voice, 'cause it's not just a thing, it's the way people are gonna ultimately communicate on our platform, and we're ultimately mixing immersive 3D avatar communication with the way to come together. Now, I'm gonna pretend, just for fun, we're a year or two in the future.
We're all used to getting alerts on our phones, but I'm gonna pretend I just got a 3D immersive avatar alert, and I'm gonna go over here, and we're gonna jump into a future avatar call with Kiran and Mahesh, who are two of the creators of our 3D avatar technology. Kiran, Mahesh, what's up? Thanks for jumping in to this real live avatar communication. How are you?
Hey, Dave. Nice to see you here.
Hi, guys. Take a look at this. I can finally move my ears.
Yeah, this is live on my phone. My phone is both watching me and listening to me, and we're starting to simulate my 3D avatar's response. Can you tell the audience a bit about what we're doing?
Yes. This is a new way to chat with your voice and avatar on Roblox using real-time facial tracking. It lets me truly express myself.
It works across all devices, mobile and desktop, and across all kinds of avatar styles and avatar accessories.
I think I need to change my beard right now.
That's perfect.
All right. Well, thanks for jumping in. That's completely live. That's on production Roblox right now. Thank you a lot, Kiran, Mahesh, for jumping in on this. We appreciate it.
Thank you. Bye.
All right. Okay. That's what the future looks like, and ultimately that'll be photorealistic. Ultimately, we'll use that at Roblox to connect with all of our distributed workforce. Ultimately, when we're in school, and we can't dissect a frog in real life, we'll come together to do that in a simulation. We believe you just saw a glimpse of the future, and that was a live demo. You're also gonna hear as we start bringing more older people on the platform, how to incorporate both our foundation of civility and safety, which has really been a cornerstone of the company, with something older people on our platform absolutely want, and that is more freedom. As we build out our AI systems and our ML systems and our cohort.
Finally, you're gonna hear a bit of a vision today about a vision we've had all the way since we did our iOS and mobile devices, where the future is everywhere. Our belief is strongly held that immersive 3D multiplayer simulated avatar in the cloud digital stuff is a new format that goes on every device. Different camera controls, different UI, different levels of immersion. You saw me on my phone. We play on our laptops. This includes VR. It ultimately includes the living room. It, of course, includes game consoles. It includes a lot of devices, just like HTML now goes everywhere with pinch and zoom on the iPhone. You're gonna hear from Dr. Morgan McGuire, our chief scientist, about the vision of our simulation engine. I'm gonna show you the spec for the future. It's quite simple.
This is our engine spec. Simulate reality at mega scale, both visually and acoustically to the point where we all feel we're going to that concert together. We can talk to the person next to us, it feels photorealistic, and we can wave across the stadium interactively at other people in the stadium. That's a pretty tough spec, so that's a lot of research. That's a lot of invention. We believe a huge part of our company has to be driving this innovation and invention. We talked about connecting people around the world. We've talked about all ages. Let's talk a bit about our vision of playing, working, learning, connecting on the platform. Traditionally, this is gonna supercharge our creator base, and we've started with a huge community of creators, really around the world that are powering play.
Our creators more and more are starting to power education, they're starting to power music experiences, they're starting to power brands. As we build our technology, we're building a huge ecosystem of people making their living on our platform as well. One category that's really near and dear to me is education, and I wanna share a little bit about the vision of education on Roblox. We're gonna use two examples. The first example we're gonna start with is FIRST Robotics, an educational partner who realizes that around the world, not everyone has access to all the parts and pieces and tools needed to build a robot club. What have they built?
They have built a FIRST Robotics robot creation simulation, and what's amazing about this is many people around the world now have access to being part of a FIRST Robotics robot club, and unlike the robots we maybe have made when we or our kids were in a robot club, you can ride these robots. It's showing the vision that what we do in immersive 3D ultimately can go beyond reality in certain cases. Another example that shows off really the platform nature of Roblox that I'm really, really excited about is the notion that not everything has to happen in Roblox Studio. Millions and millions and millions of people learn to code in Roblox Studio, but it's much bigger than that.
What CodeCombat is starting to show is that an experience built in Roblox Studio, just like what we think of as a game or a social experience, can be a place we learn to code as well. We're gonna see more and more distributed educational apps on top of our platform. Christina's gonna come on board, later today and talk about brands. Brands are driving amazing engagement with our older audience, and they're also finding really the next way to connect with their fans.
Just as brands have connected on TV, just as they've connected with banner ads on the web, just as brands have connected with video, we believe the future of the way brands connect is gonna be immersive, experiencing a brand, and we'll talk a bit about that as well. Now we come to that fourth circle, vibrant economy, highlighting once again everything we've talked up till now is about driving growth, engagement, delight, civility on our platform. There is amazing headroom in our economy to add economic rewards on top of our current DAUs and hours. Let's take one thing that Anupam is gonna go through with today. That is the efficient frontier for discovery. Where we are today, we have never incorporated any economic signals in our whole search and discovery platform. Now, we wanna be careful.
There's a certain purity to that, and we wanna be very thoughtful about it. We have many developers who may have equivalent engagement, equivalent playtime with one of those experiences monetizing ten times as much, and we do want to take that into account when we think about discovery. The efficient frontier is really a nudge to being thoughtful about what is the optimal mix for long-term enterprise value, looking out five years of how we do discovery to mix engagement and bookings ultimately. Here's how it looks as well. Very similar to bubbling up new content. Some of these experiences currently are much more economically active than others when we do discovery. We're gonna give them a little nudge in discovery. We've already done this to a small degree so far, and it's had amazing return.
There has been a vision for over, I think this vision's been around for 15 years, of what is the next ad format? What's gonna happen beyond video? Is there gonna be a place and time when people can put 3D ad units throughout what we might call the metaverse and run these through a traditional ad server? Can a new movie for one day project brand advertising everywhere, the day before their movie? Can a brand who has an amazing 3D experience that brand wants to have millions of people visiting, can that brand consistently bring people who want to experience that brand to their experience? We're not talking getting in your way. We're not talking, you know, blocking you. We're talking native immersive things that a lot of the people on our platform are really excited about.
A brand, for example, Vans, and this is what it would look like in action. Manuel is gonna share a lot more about this. This is a 3D ad unit. Today it says Vans. Tomorrow it might say Nike. This is a 3D ad system where we can change based on bids, but these are now 3D portals, and this will be ultimately an ad unit with amazing available volume within that 4.7 billion hours we have on our platform that we can dynamically route. The other thing you'll hear about a little from Manuel, I'm gonna go quickly through it, is really we have just begun optimizing our economy. Our whole economy is moving to UGC. Most of it already has. Optimizing for scarcity, for rare items, we've just begun there.
This is a very rare item on Roblox. It's called the Domino Crown. We made it, and so we've been able to control scarcity. These items go for $20,000. Allowing our creator community to do the same thing. Ultimately, this is what it'll look like. We will have rare items not made by us, and doing this in a way that's economically makes sense is a huge, huge opportunity for us. Once again, Manuel will share that with you. Finally, let's do a quick check-in on our creator community. We had our developer conference here last week. It's the only reason why we have just such a huge space for you. We used it twice. Creator community's grown amazingly. When we started our developer conferences a few years ago, mostly U.S., Europe.
Last week we had Croatia, Finland, Philippines, Turkey, Venezuela, Argentina, people really from around the world. Arguably one of the most creative gatherings of 1,000 people anywhere in the world. You're gonna get a few fun stats from Nick today as we dive into this. We, three or four years ago, developer number 1,000 was not making a living on our platform. Developer number one through 10 were not running studios with upwards and over 100 people. This economic engine has kept growing, and I wanna highlight it hasn't just been people on the top. This is the aggregate growth rate over three years of what our developers are earning on the platform. You can see the acceleration in the long tail. Nick's gonna talk to you about creation. Two big themes you'll see.
One is how does a 500-person team work on Roblox? There are already 500-person teams working on movie special effects. How does that work on something like Roblox, where they're building an immersive 3D experience? You're gonna hear about that. You're also gonna hear a lot about what we call creation everywhere. What creation everywhere means is in addition to all of the tools artists use to build the items in our UGC catalog, and by the way, there are a lot of artists building UGC items right now. What creation everywhere means is how do we all create? How do we take Roblox to the point where all of the creation we routinely do in our daily lives, we can do that digitally as well? My daughters use sewing machines. They love to build their own clothes.
They're not going to use a 3D modeler to build Roblox clothes, but if they could use a sewing machine inside Roblox in a Roblox create everywhere experience, they're gonna start creating on our platform as well, and not just creating, but ultimately selling inside Roblox too. We have a big show for you today. We're gonna talk a lot about innovation. I'm hoping you see both execution excellence for those of you that were here last year, hopefully you'll come away and say, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe how much we've shipped in the last year." Hopefully you're also gonna say, "Oh my gosh, there are I'm getting a glimpse of the big inventions that we have for you." Here's the agenda. You're gonna get a bit of a view also as far as how we run the company.
The breadth of what we're doing is really broad. Arguably, we're running a cloud infrastructure company. Ultimately, we are running a game engine developer environment company. Ultimately, we are running an economy. You're gonna get a hint of the architecture we're using to run the company, and you're also gonna see the nice balance, I believe, between heavily engineering-oriented as well as connecting with brands and consumers. Four of the people you're gonna see today weren't here a year ago, and it shows the velocity of the hiring we're doing with absolutely top-tier talent. A couple other highlights. With Raj, with Anupam, and with Manuel, you're gonna see really groups that are directly tied to our business metrics. Our user group really drives frequency retention. Our growth group drives, for those DAUs, engagement, connecting with great content. Our economy group drives monetization.
For every hour in a growing environment, how do we drive bookings per hour? You're also gonna see a lot of invention and creativity up and down the stack, and then we're going to take all of that engineering, both tactical as well as visionary, and wrap it together when Mike Guthrie, our CFO, comes on board. It's gonna be awesome. Thank you. Great to see all of you. Leading off the next section, I'm going to invite Manuel Bronstein, our Chief Product Officer, to start making some introductions. Thank you.
Thank you, Dave. All right. Good morning, and thank you Dave for the introduction. I'm Manuel Bronstein, I'm Chief Product Officer at Roblox, and I'm delighted to be here with you, this morning. As Dave mentioned, you're gonna hear today from our user group, our growth group, and I'm gonna come back also to talk about the economy. These groups are responsible for the innovation that happens around how people interact with the Roblox app, how people discover new content and experiences on the platform, how people connect and communicate with each other, and how we help the ecosystem, monetize. Collectively, as Dave mentioned, these groups are responsible for user growth, they're responsible for frequency, they're responsible for engagement, and they're responsible for monetization.
You will hear each of these leaders speak about their vision, their core metrics, and some of the elements of the roadmap and the work that they're doing in the next few months. I wanna bring over Rajiv Bhatia. Raj is our VP of Product for the user group. He's new to the company. I used to work with him. He's amazing, and he's gonna tell you all about the user group. Raj, welcome to the stage.
Thanks, Manuel. Good morning, everybody. I'm Rajiv Bhatia. I'm the VP of Product for the user group. I'm really excited to be here this morning to share more about our work to welcome a billion users into Roblox and to provide them with an amazing experience that keeps them coming back for more. Our focus in the user group is to expand our audience through access and signups and to provide them with a high-quality, immersive social experience that increases their frequency and retention to the platform. We've got three main investment areas that you see on the screen, and we're gonna talk about some exciting innovations across all of them. The first is our app platform, the starting point for all users into Roblox across all the devices and platforms that they use.
The second is our social and communities portfolio, where users establish meaningful connections with their friends and communities. Our communications features, where our users meet to talk, exchange ideas, and coordinate their activity on and off the platform. Dave touched on this, but I wanna visit it once again really quickly before we jump in. Grounding in the ecosystem and use cases we're starting to see on the platform, over the last couple years, we're really inspired by what we're seeing. We continue to enable the cutting edge of 3D immersive play, but the number of people coming to the platform for new immersive experiences is exploding. Fashion drops, concerts, and whole museum exhibits are emerging on the platform. Play, connect, learn, work, all of these human activities have historically evolved, moving through the mediums of text, audio, video, and now onto immersive 3D.
With these new mediums, new forms of communication, and this explosion of new use cases, we're simulating more and more experiences that represent real-world experiences. It's only fitting that the platform must be accessible from any device and work everywhere that our users are. Along those lines, I'm super excited about this week's launch of our new universal desktop app on Windows, the Microsoft Store, and Mac desktops. This is expanded from our iOS and Android coverage of the universal app. Until now, our desktop users have discovered experiences, chatted with their friends, even edited their avatars, in a web browser separate from where our experiences are, where they consume our experiences.
The universal app is built with the same architecture and infrastructure as our iOS and Android apps, and it's a massive upgrade for the 30% of people that use desktop to access Roblox. These users now enjoy a high-quality, high-performance UX that is natively 3D, and it's built atop a Roblox game, a Roblox game engine. An example of where this shines is our avatar editor. On the desktop app, the editor is now immersive, smooth, responsive. It feels like you're actually there, and we're excited to see other 2D interfaces that we can imagine in this 3D future. I'm also really pleased to report that we have super positive metrics here.
For the users that are on this new desktop app, and to remind you, 30% of our users are on the desktop app, we're seeing total play time, frequency, and retention on the rise. With that common code base, the improvements that we make here scale to more and more platforms. We all know that investing in performance leads to growth. A quality user experience means a better experience for users. We see improvements to frequency, retention, and monetization anytime we invest in core quality and performance. Over the last six months, as you'll see on the screen, we've reduced app time significantly, and this is something that we're very proud of. These improvements also have an outsized impact on growth, global growth markets, as the benefits are outsized on cheaper devices and slower networks. Dave spoke earlier about our growth in India.
The universal app and the raw performance unlocks we get from its refinement make that possible. That investment is also consistent with our vision to never bifurcate the app, so all users across the globe use one app that we're building. This is just the beginning, and we have a lot more interesting work planned here. So where's our app platform going next? We want everyone to be able to access Roblox, and while we're available across many platforms and devices today, there are platforms that Roblox doesn't yet support, many devices and platforms that our current users and future users are on. We wanna meet our users where they are. In the past, content was rolled out and consumed centered around ownership or platform choice. Fast-forward to today, users don't care about that.
They wanna be able to access their connections, their content, and their experiences wherever they are seamlessly from whatever device they have. That's the end state that we're driving towards, Roblox being available on the multiple devices in our users' lives. We're excited over the next quarters to bring the universal app to consoles that we don't yet cover and to emerging form factors such as VR. We're really excited about the future that's unlocked with the universal app available everywhere. With the universal app and platform expansion we have planned, we enable anyone with a device to participate in the digital world. Next, we wanna make sure they have meaningful connections to share in the experience.
As we talked about before, with all the experiences that are built on Roblox, people are coming together not only to engage with content, but to co-experience and hang out with each other in games, in concerts, on the couch, in the office, just like we do in real life. In the month of June alone, 475 million friendships were created on the platform. We've seen that when people connect with real-life friends, their experience is enhanced, and they come back for even more. What we've observed on Roblox is that when people connect and co-experience with a real-life friend in the first week, they have a 60% higher retention rate on the platform. As Dave shared, our audience is aging up. Over half are 13+.
We have a great opportunity in taking our social and community systems to the next level, and we're well on our way. Imagine a bunch of friends hanging out at a coffee shop, and one of them hears about Roblox for the first time. They download Roblox and start playing, but they find it very hard to find their real-life friends. We're now making it possible to find and invite their real-life friends on Roblox via phone book contacts. Our users, with their permission, are making their real-world names available, so they know who they're connecting with to form an even stronger social bond. To date, Roblox has understandably approached this area with caution, given our focus on civility and safety. The platform, in spite of this, has continued impressive growth. Our audience is aging up, and now it's time to invest here.
What you see on the screen is a run-through of our new contact importer feature. Notice how the real names in the user's phone book carry into the invite flow to add that real-world context. After the import, if your friends are already on Roblox, you can add them very easily with one click. If they're not yet on Roblox, this flows seamlessly into an SMS invite flow. This experience is live, and it's set to roll out more widely in the coming months. Next, to make it even easier for people to find other like-minded people on Roblox, we're bringing friend recommendations to the homepage.
Our sophistication around matchmaking, the same system that we use to pair people when they go into games together, improves every day, and opening this up to friend recommendations on the homepage is going to ensure that people find meaningful connections to co-experience with. We're currently testing out this experience as well, and we expect it to roll out by end of year. I'm really excited for this one. We've all had that moment, where we discover an amazing spot in the world, be it a game, a concert, a podcast, a park, and we just wish a friend could be there with us. This happens all the time in Roblox. People discover a new experience or one that's been around for a while, and they just know there's a friend in real life that would love to co-experience that with them.
We're making this a reality on Roblox, and users will easily be able to invite their friends into an experience using whatever social channels they prefer. In true Roblox fashion, we're going to give developers the ability to embed this into their experience, and they'll be able to customize it in ways that are appropriate for the experience that they've built with the creative and the messages that make the most sense. I wanna call out that we're gonna be taking a very intentional platform approach to this. These invites must be appropriate, they must be throttled, contextual, and meaningful and not be spammy. We're implementing very real guardrails to safeguard our users' experience to ensure that these are high utility and high relevance.
Last but not least, Roblox would not exist without the communities that gather, create, and co-experience. Recall last year that Guilded and their talented team joined us, and we have big plans for integration. I was really happy to be here at RDC over the weekend and met with a bunch of creators and developers and heard from almost all of them that they want to build their fan base and connect with them. I'm really happy to see that we're going to be giving them that ability to do it in the Roblox ecosystem, not only in 2D but also in the 3D immersive environments and with the great social and communications features that Roblox is known for.
In these communities, developers will be able to communicate updates, and events, request feedback, poll their users, collaborate on new requests, and there'll be more to come in the coming months on this one. Great. We're working on getting everyone with a device into our immersive environment, and they've got meaningful connections. Naturally, they're going to want to communicate with each other. Enabled by some great technical breakthroughs and a growing 13+ audience, we're at that exciting juncture where we're building the future of immersive communication. Communication is the underlying thread that will bring a billion people together on Roblox. Frictionless, highly accessible, and engaging communication will lead to higher frequency and audience growth. We envision a future where people can have very real conversations even when they may not physically be in the same room.
What's missing from texting, voice alone, from 2D flat video is the emotion, the body language, and the expression and the feeling that you're together. We can provide that on Roblox. The first step towards this vision is helping 13+ users communicate more freely. Dave previewed this earlier, but today over 72 billion messages get sent on Roblox every month. Given our focus on civility and safety, our platform has leaned more restrictive, resulting in a lot of conversations getting filtered out for 13+, just like the one you see on the screen here. I'm really happy to say that we're changing the game here for verified 13+ users, and we believe that enabling this group of users to communicate more freely will result in them coming back to Roblox more often for more of their communication activities.
We'll be releasing this freer version of chat for US users 13+ in the coming months. Toward our vision of immersive communication, voice is a massive step for us. Voice allows people to express themselves in ways that they want, in ways that feel real. Our technology for spatial audio allows people to experience that real immersive 3D sound around them, just like in real life. This rich way to communicate will during co-experience increase the utility and frequency of the platform. We started testing voice earlier this year with our verified 13+ users who are also phone-verified and have been hard at work at building out and refining our moderation and safety capabilities. The initial results are incredible. We have 87% of users opting into voice.
On average, they're spending about 90 minutes a week in voice, and we have close to one million voice-enabled experiences live on the platform today. We're excited to announce that we'll be rolling out voice broadly to all verified U.S. 13+ users by the end of this year. What's next here when we combine all these access, aspects of communication, text, video, immersive 3D together? Well, you saw Dave's demo earlier, and that's the direction that this is all heading. Using whatever device you have with a camera and mic available, we're able to deliver a real-time, 3D immersive, emotive experience that seamlessly combines into a radical new form of personal communication. People are going to love this, and given it's gonna be available anywhere users are, we'll start to see high-frequency, spontaneous interactions complementing the deeper co-experience sessions we already enjoy on the platform today.
Before we leave you, I just wanted to remind everyone that people are coming together to play, to learn together, to connect. We're enabling a world to access Roblox from anywhere. We're enabling them to create real meaningful connections and communicate in ways they never thought possible. I'm super excited about the headroom we have around DAUs and MAUs with the plans that we just covered to reach a wider audience and increase their frequency on the platform. Thank you very much. I'd like to next introduce Anupam, who's our VP of Engineering for Growth. Thank you all.
Good morning. I'm Anupam Singh. I'm the Vice President of Engineering for Growth. I'm going to talk about how to take those communities of users that Raj talked about and connecting them with the right content. As the growth group, our main focus is engagement hours per DAU. We have to increase engagement for every daily active user that come to Roblox. Now, that sounds a little abstract. Let's make it into a real opportunity. When you come to Roblox, the first thing you see is our homepage. On any given day, you will see that we have 229 million user sessions being initiated through the Roblox homepage. This gives us the opportunity to show them 1.2 billion options, which we call impressions.
Every rectangle on that homepage is a piece of content that could be given, that could be used to connect our users to some amazing content. We break this innovation down into three pillars. The first pillar is engagement. We already mentioned that. You heard from Dave about balancing monetization and engagement. Finally, as a creator, if you want to find your audience, the growth group and our innovation is there to help you. Let's start with personalization. What does personalization mean? You heard from Dave about our growth in Japan. The way we look at personalization is to generate unique pieces of content, to connect people with unique pieces of content. Here you see that the user from Japan, a female user, 25-year-old, has a completely different homepage than a U.S. teen.
As a matter of fact, out of the 14 experiences that we are recommending to a Japanese user, 12 of them are different from the United States user. How do we do this? First, we take the signals that we all are accustomed to, age, country, gender. This is very common in internet properties. But Roblox, unlike video, unlike a webpage, is a very unique, immersive experience, and that's where we start adding new signals. So take the current homepage, or take a homepage that was generated with age, country, gender. We add new signals, playtime, frequency. And within playtime, because it's an immersive experience, we have a lot more signals underneath. Now, to consume all these signals, we have to continually iterate over our innovations in the personalization engine.
We've introduced a deep neural network, a machine learning engine that can consume signals at very quick rate, that can continue to learn day in, day out. Now, you might be curious, what's the impact of this hyper-personalization? Let's say you're a new user. Let's say this is your first time on Roblox.com. You come to our homepage. Our goal in the growth group is to get you to interact with an experience in the first few minutes of getting to Roblox. In the last year, we've had 30% improvement, where in the first few minutes of a user showing up on Roblox, we have gotten engagement with at least three experiences. Now that we have the user inside, now that we have the user engaged, what next? Dave mentioned this balance between monetization and engagement.
In the last few years, if you look at the X-axis on this picture, our engagement has grown. It's gone through the roof. We now have the ability to balance engagement with monetization. If you have two experiences that have the same level of engagement, our personalization engine is able to make that trade-off using signals without any intervention. How does this work? Again, we go back to our core innovation, which is the personalization engine. We add a signal related to monetization. This one signal is actually many small features of how much Robux were spent in that experience. How many days did it take you to spend that Robux? You'll see that we actually are able to change the ranking in our homepage. We got the users, we got them to engage, we have balanced monetization.
You will see that Nick is going to talk about creators. Let's say you decide after coming here that, "Oh, I wanna make some amazing content on Roblox," and you want to find your audience. Let's say you find that audience in the first day or so. Every one of our creators asks us this question, "So how do I go up in the rankings? How do I get my content and connect to the right audience?" Well, our creators don't have to do anything. As soon as we see engagement with a piece of content, our neural network picks up these early signals. As a matter of fact, every day we consume 45 TB of this signal data to create the homepage for our users. When we see engagement, those experiences are popped up into our homepage.
Now, these three experiences that you see, DOORS, Evade, and Race Clicker, are experiences that were built only four or six weeks ago. Within four or six weeks, they have been able to get millions of daily active users. DOORS is my favorite. It's got a lot of jump scares. I encourage you to go play it. It's beautiful. It's awesome. As soon as our system saw engagement, in the first few days, we were able to give it more and more and more audience, to the point that within four weeks, this experience was able to get five million daily active users. That's not just one experience.
We had that for Evade, we had that for Race Clicker, and then the system keeps working to the point that in this just last year, every month we have surfaced up to 20 new experiences on our homepage. Imagine every few weeks we're able to get new pieces of content, connect our audience with amazing pieces of content. Just in this year, we have had 65 new experiences show up in the top 150. That's the power of our personalization engine. Just to recap, what is growth at Roblox? Number one is engagement. Number two is balancing engagement with monetization. Number three is getting creators, new creators to connect with their audience quickly. Thank you very much, and I would like to bring back Manuel, who will now talk about economy.
Good job. All right. Thanks, Anupam. I'm glad to be back to share with you about the Roblox economy. Since before I joined the company, I was very fascinated by the sophistication of the Roblox economy. This economy powers a vibrant and growing community of creators all over the world, and creators of all types. In any given day, millions of creators create assets, avatars, experiences, models, and plugins, and they publish their creations to hundreds of millions of users all over the world. These users then buy Robux that they use to self-express, to progress in experience, or to invest in their avatars. Creators, in turn, earn those Robux, and they could decide to spend back in the platform to reinvest in their experiences, or they could exchange these Robux for fiat currency to help them grow their teams and their earnings.
Roblox captures value from this economic activity, and we use that to reinvest on our platform, our people, our infrastructure, and to build on our vision. We're seeing great momentum in this economy. In the last 12 months, we paid out $580 million to the community. That's a 29% increase year-over-year. Just in the month of June, 2.7 million creators were able to earn Robux on the platform, and that's a 123% increase year-over-year. Earlier, Dave showed you a slide that was covering how different creators of experiences were increasing their earnings over time. The same is true for the people who create items and assets in the marketplace.
As you can see from this slide, the number 10 ranked creator earned $815,000 for a 72% CAGR over the last two years. The number 100 creator of assets on the platform earned $73,000 for a 639% CAGR. More and more people are able to earn more and more on the platform these days. For our economy, the core metric that we use is bookings per hour. It's the best way to connect economic activity to engagement on the platform. If bookings per hour were flat, our total bookings would just grow with engagement. If bookings per hour growth, as it has happened over the last years, you get the compounded effect. You get engagement growing, you get bookings per hour growing, and therefore you get total bookings growing.
As you can see in the graph, since 2019, we have had significant growth that accelerated during the peak of the pandemic, but it's still above, you know, the baseline of 100%. It's important that we don't just look at this blended number. If you think about the platform, as the platform scales with more users and more markets, the spending profiles of different users aren't the same. You don't monetize the same way in all geographies. Not all experiences monetize in the same way. Not all users, age, gender, device, monetize in the same way. So we methodically look at this data to make sure that we're driving the right parameters in the business.
The work that you heard from Anupam on improving discovery and efficient frontier and monetization, as we age up the platform and the work that the economy group does that I'm gonna share with you, helps increase bookings per hour. Today, I'll share three tracks of the economy that we use to improve bookings per hours. First, continuous improvements in our systems. Second, the evolution of Marketplace. Third, immersive ads. Let me start off with continuous improvements. This is the work that we do on a regular basis to improve our system. Think about how we improve payment flows, personalization, category expansions, and more.
Each of these optimizations may add a few percentage points or 10 percentage points improvements in bookings per hour, but compounded, as we do many of them throughout the year, you get a great impact in the economy of the platform. Let me share some examples. For example, in the last six months, we tested and introduced smaller Robux packages on Android. This was targeting countries with lower purchasing power, like Mexico, Brazil, India, and more. By doing that, we have a positive impact on payer conversion and in bookings per hour. Another example is the work that we continue to do on personalization. This will be an ongoing effort and a long-term investment on the platform.
What you try to do with personalization, as Anupam mentioned, is you try to add more signals to the system so that the recommendations that we can make for users are better. For example, we can look at a user who tried on an item and didn't acquire it, and that's a signal that goes into a recommendation system that makes it better. As we continue to expand the product, we add more personalization to every category and every surface on the platform so that we can get better recommendations and improve bookings per hours. The last area that we started improving was adding more categories of content into Marketplace. Our goal is that every user and every category of content is created by the community.
Very recently, we added layered clothing, and we had more than 7,000 items created by the community, and those items have been acquired by more than 100 million people on the platform. In the very near future, we're gonna be adding new heads with facial expression so that people can acquire them in Marketplace, all of these created by the community. Beyond that, we're gonna be adding user-created animations and user-created bodies as new categories of content that people can purchase in Marketplace. In the future, we're gonna be working on a few other things. We will continue to improve personalization on Marketplace. As Anupam mentioned, we look at the efficient frontier. In the past, a lot of our optimizations in Marketplace were geared towards improving engagement. Now we're adding more and more monetization signals to balance and find that efficient frontier between engagement and monetization.
Signals like the expected revenue that an item can generate, or for example, how much Robux a user has in their wallet could influence the recommendation. If you look at their spending activity, you can actually continue to tune the recommendations to do better serving for those users. The other cool feature that we're working on is the shopping cart. You know, if you go to the Avatar Store, and you buy one item, and you try it on, and you get it, and you like it, that's cool. But what we wanted to do is make it very easy for people to go and try on multiple items, find their entire look, their entire fit, combining things. As they're trying on these items, we can give them recommendations of items that actually match that fit and that look.
When they're done, they can press the button and buy four or five items at the same time. All of these things will continue to improve bookings per hour. Now, let me move on to the next category, which is how we're evolving our Marketplace. Our transactional economy is thriving. If you think about Roblox, this is a marketplace and a platform where items have true utility. Think about it. Millions of users come to the platform every day. They spend billions of hours every month. When they acquire an item on the platform on Roblox, they can show it off. They can actually let everybody see what they bought. They can use these items inside experiences. They have true value and true utility. These items and these transactions power this amazing community of creators.
As mentioned earlier, our Marketplace is thriving, and you can see how two things are happening. First of all, we're growing the amount of money that every creator makes, but we're also growing the number of creators that are monetizing on Marketplace. Now, how do you take something that is really good, and how do you take that to the next level? Well, the first thing is we wanna open up Marketplace for more and more creators. As you can see in these slides, more than 92% of the Marketplace revenue is coming from user-generated content created by our community. For the new categories, like layered clothing, 98% of those the content in those categories is being created by the community. Our goal is to make it such that every user in the platform eventually can publish, can sell their items, and can earn.
The second way in which you improve this Marketplace is by bringing true market dynamics that resemble more the real world, like guaranteed scarcity or like trading and reselling, a self-optimizing publishing fee, and free promotional items. I'm gonna cover each of these so you get a better sense of all the innovation that is gonna come to our Marketplace. Let's start out with the scarcity. Scarcity allows for the creation of limited items or collectibles. Brands, artists, creators on our platform can offer time-based or quantity-based limited items. When you have that, these items then will accrue value over time because they become more coveted. Now, when you have collectibles, when you have limited items, you can then bring to the platform trading and reselling.
You can create a secondary market where users can then take those collectible items or those limited island items and sell them or trade them for a gain. The cool thing that we're gonna be doing too is that the creator of the original item will continue monetizing in secondary and tertiary transactions, and that's gonna create a more vibrant economy on Roblox. Now, the other part that is super important for us is that as we continue to open the Marketplace to more and more creators, we wanna make sure that we ensure that we have a healthy pricing in Marketplace. More creators come in, more items come in. How do you guarantee that pricing is gonna continue to evolve in a positive way?
We're building a system that will help determine the publishing fee of a given item based on the item type, the quantity, the price, and other parameters. As you're creating new items on the platform, you're gonna get a publishing fee, and in the future, we may suggest a recommended price so that you have to not do the guesswork on how do I charge and how much do I charge for this jacket or these virtual shoes. When you do something like this, it's gonna help us to create new use cases in Marketplace. For example, adding promotional items. Promotional items are items that are free to the user, but the publisher of the item is paying for them. Creators could use promotional items to bring users into their experiences. Think about acquisition cost.
Brands can give away promotional items to promote new products or marketing campaigns. We think that the combination of all these elements, of a scarcity, trading and resale, publish, a dynamic publishing fee, and of course, the free promotional items, is gonna take Marketplace to the next level. While we have a huge opportunity in the transactional economy, we don't wanna stop there. We want to invest in the next revenue source for our community and for Roblox, and we're excited to be working on immersive ads, as Dave mentioned earlier in his presentation. What are immersive ads? Immersive ads are ads that are built natively from the ground up for 3D immersive shared experiences. We want these ads to be fun. We want these ads to be interactive. We want these ads, of course, to be safe.
We want these ads to be non-obtrusive, and we want them to be privacy-respecting. With more than 58 million users coming every day to the platform, spending billions of hours on Roblox, brands, experience creators are looking for novel ways to reach these users and interact with them. One important thing about ads is that we're gonna be honoring our safety, culture, and DNA, and immersive ads are only gonna target users above the age of 13. Let me share the demo, and you saw this from Dave's presentation. The first format that we're talking about is called Portals. Portals will allow advertisers to place an ad inside an experience and move traffic or funnel traffic into another experience. Think about hyperlinking but way, way cooler and more modern.
A user will see a portal that may have video or a static image that is promoting the destination. They would walk inside the portal, show up in the new experience, and they could easily come back to their previous experience. That's very important for experience creators. We have a value at Roblox, which is respecting the community. That means that we wanna put developers in control, that whether they wanna place these ads on their experience is gonna be their choice. Where do they place them in their experience is their choice, and we're gonna give them other parameters to control. At the same time, we will report metrics to them, payouts and key metrics for their ad impressions. We will also be reporting to advertisers.
One cool thing that we're working on, a very cool innovation is, how do you define a viewable ad impression in a 3D immersive world? How do you know that someone is looking at the ad? For how long did they look at the ad? Those are the kind of things that our teams are working on to put these systems in place. I'm super excited that we're gonna be preparing for a developer testing by the end of this year for Portals, and we're gonna be launching sometime in 2023. As you look into the future, Portals are just the beginning. When you start talking about immersive ads, you know, creativity starts to flow.
You start thinking, "What are all the cool things that we can do here?" You have an example of one format that we're thinking for the future, which is an innovative, an immersive and interactive billboard. Imagine that you're walking inside an experience. You see a billboard with a lot of items that you wanna acquire. You touch that billboard. You can actually see the items in a carousel, try them on. Pay for them, and you didn't have to leave the experience where you were at. This is gonna be very powerful for people who wanna sell inside very popular experiences, and we're excited also to bring this one into the future. In conclusion, we have a huge opportunity in front of us. We have just scratched the surface of what it means to build a thriving and monetizing economy in these three-dimensional immersive experiences.
With our focus on efficient frontier, we will be balancing engagement and monetization, and that will help us continue to optimize our business. By supercharging our transactional economy with the evolution of Marketplace, we're gonna take it to step up, and it's gonna have a compounding effect. With advertising and new immersive ads, we're creating a new category, a new source of revenue for Roblox and for our creators, and a new business overall. It's gonna be very excited to see all these things line into the future. Now I want to introduce Christina Wootton, who's gonna be chatting about brands in Roblox. Thank you.
Good morning, everybody. I'm Christina Wootton, VP of Partnerships at Roblox. Excited to be here with you today to talk about future of brands on our platform. Now, last year, I said every brand will have a Roblox strategy in three to five years, and I've never believed this more than I do today. We speak with brands and talent every single day. I've worked with them for many, many years, and I have never seen them so excited. They're brainstorming, they're collaborating. What I've seen in production right now, it will blow your mind. This is a new frontier for brands. It's a seismic shift, and I hope everybody's paying attention. Every day you see new articles coming out highlighting the importance of the metaverse for brands. In 2030, metaverse spending will total $5 trillion.
This is where people are spending their time, and if CMOs and agencies don't pay attention, and if you don't engage this audience now, you will not be relevant to them in the future. When I say this audience, you may be thinking just Gen Z, but I'm talking about all ages, whether you're 16, 26, 60 years old, you're gonna be spending time on this platform and doing things together. Every day, millions of fans come to our platform to engage and interact with their favorite brands, and brands are trying to figure this out. It's early, but some of the leading brands that are on our platform right now, you're seeing here, they're innovative. They believe in the value of this platform because it's more than just reaching an audience, it's about building a community. These brands are bringing new users to the platform.
They're promoting their activations off-platform with their marketing channels, so they're bringing their communities and their amazing IP, and they're creating persistent experiences. All of this is driving traffic. This is driving expansion across all ages to our platform. This is driving engagement and economy. This is a massive opportunity, especially with what you saw from Manuel with immersive ads. When you come to Roblox, you may think that you go and you choose a game, but really what you're doing, you're looking for where your friends are, and you're virtually teleporting to them, and you wanna engage with your friends, you wanna engage with your favorite brands. This will further enable that. Our partnerships team focuses on these main verticals. Fashion, beauty, music, entertainment, and sports.
We're talking to some of the premier brands and some of the premier talent in each of these verticals, sharing the opportunity and just brainstorming with them. Brands do not have to work with our team to be on the platform. We're already organically seeing them connect with developer studios and digital fashion designers, and every week you're seeing, sometimes daily, new launches on the platform. We're gonna further enable this. We have tools like our Talent Hub, where developer studios and digital fashion designers can create a profile with more information on their studio, their capabilities, the experiences they've already built. Why is this so important? Our community have been on the platform for over a decade. They are the experts in this, on this platform. They know what resonates well.
When a brand connects directly with them, they know how to authentically bring this IP to life. I wanna emphasize this is so much more than gaming. On Roblox, you can do things like bring physical to digital. This is happening right now. This is Karlie Kloss coming off Carolina Herrera's fashion show at New York Fashion Week this week, and her limited dress available on Roblox almost immediately. We have Tommy Hilfiger. He had his fashion show this week at New York Fashion Week as well. There's a virtual portal between the actual runway show in New York to their experience on Roblox. The models are coming out. You can watch it. No matter where in the world you are, you're experiencing this. This is really the value of the platform, is that brands can take physical to digital.
They can create digital and then have that influence what happens in the physical world. We're seeing this with products aren't even out yet, but you're getting feedback from your consumers and fans before that. Before movies and shows are in production, you're storytelling with your audiences, you're building community. You're also allowing people to self-express, you know, using your IP and sharing experiences. This is really enabling brands to push creative boundaries. There's a variety of ways that brands are engaging on the platform. Typically, they start with virtual items. You wanna enable your fans and audiences and consumers to express themselves with their favorite brands, and you've seen this with Nike, NFL, Warner Bros., and so many more. They're actually collaborating with our developers. Our developers, we have millions of experiences on the platform.
They have a built-in audience, so brands are easily able to integrate their IP into those experiences. We also have limited time events. You may see this with concerts and launch parties, where it could be live for two-four weeks. But no matter what path brands are looking at, they're all with the long-term goal is a persistent experience. The reason why is they see this as their next immersive three-dimensional social channel. Where you may see seconds on average spent on a post on social, other social platforms, you're seeing five-10 minutes on average with each of those visitors, and really engaging with them. You're getting real-time feedback, you're co-creating together, and this is what's gonna be happening more and more. Over the past two years, we've seen over 100 brand activations, and we are just getting started. Self-serve is growing quickly.
Brands are connecting with developer studios, and they're creating persistent experiences on the platform. Our immersive ad ecosystem is going to really drive this and support this, and this will continue to drive more traffic, engagement, all ages, and our economy. As we scale this, we'll be working more closely with developer studios, but also digital agencies, as they wanna recommend us to their, to all of their partners. I just wanna take a moment and have everybody realize how special and unique of a time this is right now, and I'm so excited to be a part of it. Brands are trying to figure this out. When the web came out, they built a website. That's how they were engaging with their audiences. There was social media, and they were hiring internal teams.
How are we gonna, you know, work on our social media strategy?" Right now, this is a revolution is happening, and we're all part of it. Brands are trying to figure out how do they more intimately engage with this audience, and millions of people are coming to Roblox right now to engage with their favorite brands. Just like they all have a website and a social channel, every brand will be on Roblox, and it's no longer a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Thank you very much. I wanna introduce Dr. Dan Sturman, our Chief Technology Officer at Roblox.
Nice job. Hello, I'm Dan Sturman. I'm the Chief Technology Officer at Roblox, and I'm going to take you through a few things. First, just wanna summarize. You just heard about user growth economy. What we're gonna go into now are kinda the underpinnings, the foundations, the way we create content and deliver it to users, kinda behind the scenes, but they're equally important. I'm gonna take you through safety and infrastructure. It's gonna be our pleasure to have Nick Tornow, our vice president for creator, take you through the creator ecosystem. Our Chief Scientist, Dr. Morgan McGuire, take you through some of the really cool tech in our engine. With that, I wanna jump right into safety. We have this incredible community on Roblox, 59 million daily actives. We're trying to grow to a billion users.
It's people of all ages from, like, kids to grandparents, and I'm always amazed how many. Like, I meet my dad's friends. They're like, "Oh, I know Roblox. My grandkids are on that," right? There are a lot of grandparents on the platform. It's really an all-age platform. Not just that, they're from all parts of the world. They're in all sorts of different contexts. They could be with total strangers just enjoying an experience. They could be with close friends. They could be with family members. They're playing, they're working, they're hanging out, doing all sorts of different things on the platform. Behind all this, we need to make this platform stay civil. It's so important to this incredible community having so much engagement.
You wouldn't have this much diversity and engagement on the platform if it wasn't a place people felt was, like, sane and they could enjoy themselves and they could be themselves, and that comes down to keeping it civil. This has always been a big differentiator for Roblox and one of our core value propositions, something we think about all the time. How do we approach safety and civility on the platform? We do this kind of in three key areas. The first is content safety. As you've seen from Dave's talk, as you'll hear when we talk about engine and creator, content on Roblox is quite different. It's 3D, it's interactive, it's social. It's our job to make sure all that 3D content is the right sort of content to have on the platform.
For example, we don't allow objects that are intended to show hate towards a particular group, right? Makes sense. We gotta figure all that out in real time and ensure the content stays safe. Next big bucket is communication. Roblox is inherently a social platform, and we need to keep that communication open, communicative, but civil, right? We don't allow profanity or most forms of profanity, so we're starting to loosen that a little bit for 13+, but definitely not bullying. We don't want people to come and feel attacked on the platform. That is not going to drive engagement. What drives engagement is that you're having these great conversations with people you find really interesting, and you're having a lot of fun. The last big area is around user, and this is really about protecting your account login.
I can't stress enough how important identity is on this platform, and the kind of physical realization or identity where it all comes together is in your account. You don't wanna lose your account. It has all the avatar items you've built. It has all your social connections. It has your money. It has your Robux, right? We need to make that account incredibly secure, but at the same time, do so in a way that it doesn't feel like you're logging into a bank. You're logging into Roblox, right? You don't want it to be like this massive multi-factor authentication thing. It's gotta be really smooth and really secure at the same time. We're doing this, and we're doing all of this at scale, and the way we manage scale is through two main techniques.
We have human moderators, but we try as much as possible to automate these processes and do detection, and that really requires a lot of sophistication in how we look at content from an automation point of view. The scale is significant. You know, 500 billion communications on the platform. This is from the first of the year till September first of this year. That's a lot of chat going on, and we gotta know that communication's safe, again, of all ages. 425 million reach outs to our team around issues on the platform or possible flagging of content. 470 million experiences reviewed or re-reviewed. Every time one of our creators submits something, we need to make sure it's safe, and there's a lot of that going on, and they're constantly iterating.
We gotta keep up with that. 138 million assets analyzed. So an asset for us, it could be something as simple as a 2D graphic, but it's usually a 3D object, an audio file. We need to make sure all of those are exactly the sort of content we want on the platform. From a login point of view, almost three billion logins over this time period this year. How do we know we're doing a good job? We do this through some core metrics. We got three of them that are really important to us. The first is what we call the content safety rate. This is how close are we to that ideal that every piece of content is 100% right on the platform.
Communication safety rate is the parallel for inter user interaction, whether that is chat through text or as you saw with voice, people talking to each other. We need to do all of this efficiently. Efficiency is around speed, it's also around cost, but it's ensuring that we're really pushing the edge on that moderation automation so that we can do this fast, quickly, and cost effectively. I wanna call out, while cost is good, as a running business, we wanna do this well, it's also important 'cause the faster we do this, the better we do this, the faster the turnaround, that drives engagement of our users. They don't wanna sit around and have chats, for example, unnecessarily blocked. That's no fun for anyone. The efficiency goes to two goals.
It goes to, yes, cost, but with that comes incredible efficiency and then engagement. I'm gonna take you through a few examples of the sort of work we've been doing, and I'm gonna start with one of my favorites. This is around content safety. I was recently asked by a group of our interns if I could put aside the CTO job and just go work on any one project, what would I work on? This would be it. I think this is just scientifically incredibly interesting and really important to our users. This is how do we take all this content, these experiences we get, and figure out if they're okay. It's completely novel, and I think we're the best in the world at doing this. 'Cause remember, these experiences, they're not just like a graphic like you would have in the web. Is that okay?
That's a hard job, but it's been dealt with before. It's not a video where you can get a whole bunch of videos, people watch them and like train a pretty straightforward CNN ML model to like figure out if that's working. We're dealing with 3D worlds. There are many perspectives in that world. You could be anywhere in the world, and there's code behind all of them. If someone's trying to be devious, you can do a lot of devious things with code. We've been watching all this. We've learned so much about this, and we have models that despite this complexity, can understand the patterns behind behavior that is appropriate and not appropriate. It's something we've gotten very good at.
We've gotten so good at it that our latest models don't just flag a significant amount of this content automatically without a human reviewer. We're so confident in that call that we can take automatic action so that content appears on the platform and is gone in a matter of seconds. We're getting really good at this, and so we're gonna continue to push. I think you're gonna find Roblox is the best in the world at this sort of 3D content moderation. Another area we're very focused on goes to this user communication. I wanna take you through just briefly the things we're doing with the chat filter. You saw a brief example before, but I wanna explain what chat filtering is.
If I'm typing to one of my friends, what we will do, if something's inappropriate in that chat, we don't necessarily drop the whole chat. You don't get banned from the platform. We just kind of X out, kind of the text equivalent of bleeping out inappropriate pieces of the content. A good example I wanna use here, with users under 13. We're very careful with numbers. Why? 'Cause numbers are a good way to give away ways to contact someone in real life, and we wanna be really careful, with that age group and that domain. While we don't want you to put a phone number up there, one friend saying to another, "Hey, can you lend me 20 gems so I can go buy the silver crown?" Right? That's totally okay. If we X out that 20, it's really frustrating to those users.
How do we tackle this? What we're doing now is, well, we say, "Well, what do humans do?" Humans go, and they can get the context of what's going on. That's where we're going with our automation. We're using advanced natural language processing models that look at the whole context of what's going on and make decisions based on that context. They can understand the difference between a phone number and, "Oh, I want 20 gems." These models are working so well that this year we've actually reduced the amount of filtering we've done significantly by a quarter or more, while at the same time improving safety as we look at that exposure rate. We're really happy where this is going. We've done this in English. We've done it in a number of key languages, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German.
We think we have another 25% to go in English just this year. I wanna talk a little bit about how we protect that precious user login that's so important to the engagement of our users. Here's our vision for this. It's gonna be frictionless and the most secure login on the planet. Like, we want both of those at once. How are we gonna do that? Well, here's kinda the picture. Imagine you come to Roblox, you've never used Roblox before. You install it. It's a real smooth install of that universal app we just talked about. You then just pick a username or define one on your own if that's what you wanna do. From there, we know your device is now secure. This is a safe place for you to log into.
You just start using Roblox. As long as you're on that device, we know it's secure. At some point, you might wanna switch device, in which case maybe you've given us a phone number, maybe you've given us an email, maybe we have your biometrics in a way that's secure and privacy safe. We use that to authenticate the next device. You're never stopping. You're never trying to remember passwords. We know increasingly, not just Roblox, everywhere, passwords are increasingly hard to remember, never long enough, appear on the dark web, are overused. They're not the best solution to this approach. We're driving to this other world where it's just gonna be frictionless and secure. We think by doing that, again, it's just gonna drive engagement. Where is this all going?
I mentioned before how diverse our community is, and we think our safety models have to be equally diverse. Today, we do some things around 13 and under, 13 and over. When we first rolled out Voice, that was age-verified 17 + just to start from a safety point of view. We see taking these communities and we understand these communities, each will have, to some degree, their own safety standards, sometimes defined by Roblox, but often, just like in real life, defined by the community you're in. Imagine two teenagers in real life. The way they behave at the shopping mall versus at school versus in their own home, very, very different. Only in one of those three places is it okay to blast your music at top volume, and that kind of assumes your parents aren't in the house as well, right?
I have some teenagers, so I'm familiar with this. That sort of context can be really important. It's gonna get even more complex. Am I in the United States? Am I in Europe? Am I in the Middle East? Am I in China, right? What does that all look like? We wanna build personalized safety systems that understand not just the content, not just the communication, but what is the broader context those are in, and the ultimate version of this is we personalize it. We learn about you and your context and what you're comfortable with, and in a sense, that model follows you around and ensures you only see the content you're okay with, right? That's a long time coming. That's multiple years away, but that's the vision we're driving towards, and the automation I talked about here is all in line with that direction.
Just to sum up on safety is one very much of our top priorities and one of our core values at Roblox, and we're driving to make this the best safety system in the world by being smarter, using efficient automation that both makes us more efficient from a cost point of view, but also makes things faster and drives engagement, so the safety system is just behind the scenes and not in your face. We're doing this across content, communication, and that precious user login. That's safety. I'm now gonna jump into infrastructure before we go over to Nick and Creator. Our infrastructure system is primarily owned and operated by Roblox. We do use some public cloud, but the majority of what we do is on our own data centers and worldwide grid.
This is important for us because our requirements are very unique, and they're something we feel that if we build ourselves, we'll deliver the best possible product to our users. Remember, we're doing 30 frames per second, 60 frames per second graphic 3D immersion. How we connect to the user, how we manage that flow of data to them is very unique to Roblox. Just using off-the-shelf sets of data centers and so on has not been the best solution for us. In particular, we need to be able to do this in a way it scales, of course, every large company wants to scale, is reliable within this context, performs well in this context, and again, optimizes cost. Cost is important again for two reasons. One, we're running a business. That's important.
Two, the more we control the costs here, the more flexibility we have on how we reward our creators and ensure those dollars can go into their pockets, making it possible for them to go create even more awesome content on the platform, so we get this virtuous cycle. One way to think about us is this really specialized, unique revenue model behind a 3D cloud provider. That's how we think about ourselves, and it's, as I go into some examples, you'll see that's how our users use us. Our measurement and infrastructure are two core metrics. One is around our uptime, ensuring that we are up and serving our users and serving our community, and the second is cost per engagement hour. I'm gonna start by talking about how we scale, and particularly how we scale at the edge.
I talk about the edge a lot when I talk about infrastructure because this is where so much of the magic is. We know where our users are, and that connection from device to our edge data centers is so important 'cause that's really gonna determine the speed at which you experience Roblox. Like I said, there's a lot of interaction. These experiences are all multiplayer. Stuff's happening all the time. If that gets laggy, the experience is just a lot less fun. We're always thinking about our edge here. We also have what we call core data centers, and this is where all our data processing goes on. It's where all our core APIs are managed. All that safety work I was talking about, that all happens inside the core data centers.
On edge data centers, going back to 2019, we had a modest rollout at 16 data centers, about 7,000 servers on the edge. One thing I'll mention also, these edge data centers, they're mostly stateless. They run these game servers. Morgan's gonna take you through in more detail what is actually going on and why this way of serving 3D content is such an advantage for Roblox and something we do very uniquely. If you fast-forward to 2020, we're now at 19 edge data centers. You start to see we build another one in Asia in particular. We're at 10,000 servers. Go forward to 2021, 23 edge data centers, building more of them, 12,000, almost 13,000 servers at this point.
Fast-forwarding to today, we're at 24 edge data centers, 15,000+ servers on the edge, and Dave called this out before. We're very proud of what we did in India. By dropping an edge data center in India, we dramatically improved the latency to those users, and we saw a corresponding jump in engagement in that country. I mentioned our core data centers. This is where all our key data processing goes on. We now have two. One of them was built just last year. One is in Chicago, Illinois, the other in Ashburn, Virginia. This is where we store all our data in conjunction with using some data capabilities from the cloud providers. About 118 PB of data in our systems. 60,000 servers in the core systems. Then one of our biggest leverages is on the network itself.
I keep talking about how important performance is, but also scale, reliability, cost. All these things come together better when we're able to lay down our own fiber network. We've been doing this consistently, and it's driven incredible results. We manage over 3 Tbps of traffic through Roblox's network, and this, we do this at a level we think of much higher reliability and definitely better cost than we could do over the open internet if we were doing standard transit. We've grown this over 250% since 2019. Take it from the other point of view. What does this look like to our creators? This is what's so awesome about Roblox. All they see is a view like this. This is Roblox Studio.
Nick will take you through a little bit about Roblox Studio, but the main points are here. It's some simple Lua scripting, and it's some 3D object creation. They have no idea this entire complexity is backing them. They have no idea that we might take this experience and scale it to one million concurrent users worldwide or even more in the course of a day. They get this really simple, "I'm just gonna focus on my creative ideas," and then we do the hard work through this infrastructure of deploying it worldwide and ensuring the performance is there. They don't have to tweak that. Wanna mention reliability a bit. This is something that's really been a focus for us over the past year. I'm gonna talk about our core data centers 'cause like I mentioned before, our edge data centers are stateless.
They're a little bit easier to recover. We can failover between them in a pretty straightforward manner. What we've been focused on lately has been the core data centers, and a year ago, we were at a point where we were singly homed in that Chicago data center. We realized this was an exposure. It wasn't the right way to serve our users. We've since moved to Ashburn, and I'm very pleased to say we're now at a point where we can manually failover if we have to from Chicago to Ashburn. We have. They're two duplicate systems. We wanna go beyond that. We're moving this direction of, that we're calling active-active cellular data centers. I'm gonna unpack that for you, what it means. It's a very kind of technical-sounding term, but it's really not that complex.
Active-active means both data centers are serving traffic at the same time. This is where we wanna be over the course of the next few quarters. So the idea here is if we lose one data center, it's not a manual failover. The systems just self-calibrate, self-correct and failover to the second data center. So you're talking order of milliseconds, much faster than a human being could do it. The cellular part of this is taking these large data centers we've built and breaking them into smaller failure domains that are as isolated from each other as is possible physically. In doing that, it means the unit of failover is much smaller, which will speed up failover, make it much easier to do, have less noticeable impact to end users on the system.
There's another benefit of this approach as well, though, that in the quest for reliability, which this gives us, it also drives efficiency. I'll walk you through a quick build to kinda give you an idea of the math behind it. I tried to keep this pretty straightforward, but only to understand where we're going. If we talk about where we're at one data center, we'll call this the base case. We have no redundancy. In this layout here, we're saying we have 100 servers just for illustrative purposes, and we say they're in data center A, but you can imagine that being Chicago for us. We have 100 total servers. 100 of them are actively serving traffic at peak. We have nothing in reserve. That's great. It's as efficient as we could be. If you have a failure, that's not so good.
You lose all those active servers, and you're down. We built Ashburn. That's the two-data-center model, and this gives us the redundancy we've been talking about. We have 200 total servers. We only need 100 to serve our traffic at peak. This is great. We have that resiliency. If we have a failure, we lose 100 of them, but we just keep chugging along. Challenge with this is if you see the dollar per player hour, that doubles for that. We're using twice as many machines just so that we can be safe. That's not ideal. I'm gonna go to three data centers to show the trend, but you can imagine how this gets better over four and five. Now let's say we have three data centers, and we can make these any size we want.
Now we have them at 50 servers each. They're not quite as big. We have 150 servers total. We still only need 100 to serve the traffic. We have 50 in reserve. If we have a failure, we lose the reserve, we keep serving, but now the cost only goes up by 1.5 over the non-redundant base case. As we go to four and five data centers, this gets better. In fact, I have a little graph for you here that kind of shows where we are. We spent a lot in the past year to build out this redundant data center. This is kind of the peak from a cost-performance point of view.
We're gonna be getting better as we move to three, four, possibly five data centers over time, and it really starts to take the edge off that while ensuring really good redundancy, really good failover. Wanna talk a little bit about performance as well. I mentioned the India example. We have seen consistently when we improve latencies to our users by putting edge data centers in place, and this is all latency versus time here, we see jumps in engagement. We've seen that in India. We've seen that happening in Japan, things getting so much better there. We've seen it in the Philippines. We've even seen that in Egypt, that as we put these data centers in positions where their network connectivity is much better, we see that come through better performance, and that leads to better user engagement.
Better user engagement, that means better user retention, and better user retention means better user monetization. They're all connected. We're doing something that, yes, we have to spend to put an edge data center in place, but we're almost always getting that ROI very quickly in the form of how our users behave, their loyalty to the platform, and how the system monetizes. With that, I wanted to give you that quick view into our infrastructure vision and where we're going. Again, we are taking the somewhat unusual path of focusing on building our own infrastructure.
We're doing this because we're seeing that only by doing that can we, in the long term, get the scale, reliability, performance, and cost that we think we need given the unique workloads we have at Roblox, and given our unique relationship with our creator community. How we're being this cloud provider, we really have to be incredibly efficient so that they can be successful. With that, I want to thank you. I'm gonna in a minute turn it over to Nick Tornow. First, we have this really cool video that's gonna give you some insight into what our creator community is like.
These are just shapes. Or are they? Look deeper. Beyond the curves, beneath the edges. They could be best friends. Mortal enemies. Notes in a symphony. The greatest set ever played. Are they this season's look on the catwalks of Milan? Explorers unraveling the mysteries of the universe. Daredevils. Racing toward the future. To all of us, these shapes are what we make them. They're the building blocks of our creativity. The foundation of our art. The reason we come together. We are the shapers. The architects. The innovators. Is ours for the making.
Wow, that was amazing. You know, as Dave mentioned earlier, just this past weekend, we had our annual Roblox Developers Conference in this very forum, and as I watch and listen to this video, it's almost like the passion and energy of our creators is still echoing through these halls. Even though today is perhaps a more formal event, I'm very excited to be able to share with you why this is such an important time for our creators and also for Roblox as a company as a whole. My name is Nick Tornow.
I'm the VP of Creator Engineering here at Roblox, and today I'm gonna share with you how we are building and supporting the largest experience creation community the world has ever seen, and how, with investment, we believe we can dramatically increase both the number of creators on the platform and the quality and breadth of the content that our users consume. In Creator, our vision is to allow creation of anything, anywhere, by anyone. If you can imagine it, you can create it on the Roblox platform, and we're well on our way. Every day, hundreds of thousands of creators publish more than 60,000 experiences onto the platform. Over the last five years, more than 12 million creators have earned more than $1 billion. As you've seen earlier in the presentation, there's a tremendous amount of growth in the platform. This is creators earning Robux per month.
You can see dramatic increases here. You have also seen that even when you split this by the top 10, top 100, and top 1,000 creators on the platform, there's growth in each segment, and the growth in the top 1,000 is more than 4 times the rate of growth of the top 10. Now, I just wanna underscore what this means from a creator ecosystem perspective. What this means is that we have a more diverse, a broader and more diverse group of creators building on this platform. They're creating a broader and more diverse set of content for our users, and that's appealing to a broader and more diverse set of users for us as a company.
This is a big deal, and we believe we can continue this trend by making it easier and easier to build on our platform, to make it easier and easier to introduce new types of content to the platform, and by surfacing to our users the content that they will love. I wanna take a step back here very briefly to just describe how all this works. Roblox is a vertically integrated platform. We have a global set of data centers. We have POPs and a network that connects them all. On top of this, we have an identity and social graph system. There's a multiplayer engine, which you're gonna hear a lot more about soon, and we have cloud APIs. We have a huge audience consuming and working on this platform, and then our creators build on top of this.
What this means is that our creators get a lot out of the box. I call it the Robox, and that is not an official term. Some examples of what creators get here are things like distribution, analytics, safety, security, and so much more. What does this leave for our creators to do? Well, they can focus on creation. They can take the things in their mind, put them into Studio, and with a single click of a button, they can publish it on top of this platform. We'll distribute it globally across different platforms like iOS, Android, Mac, PC, and console, and we'll show it to users. We'll watch how the users engage with that content. We'll analyze it with our analytics system. If needed, we'll scale the system. If needed, we'll do financial transactions.
At the end of the day, what comes back to our creators is earnings and feedback. They can use the earnings to grow their team, maybe build a whole company. They can use the feedback to make their creations even better. Again, with the single click of a button, they republish the next version of their content on top of this platform, rinse and repeat. Everyone wins. Now, in addition to the tool chain and the vertically integrated platform, we're also building a community. Now, having a vibrant community is good for us as a company because we get lots of input, ideas, creative energy for what we are doing with our platform. It's also good for the community itself. They help each other.
They help each other with information, and very importantly, and I'm gonna talk a little bit more about this, later in the presentation, they help each other with tools and technology, and this is increasingly important as we build more and more advanced worlds. This is facilitated by our Creator Marketplace product. Again, I'll talk a little bit more about this a little bit later. Of course, it almost goes without saying, but this is all good for our users who are getting more content, better content from this large community. When they come to Roblox, they can find amazing things for them. Now, nurturing all of this, we have a robust and tightly integrated dev relations team.
We have creator events like RDC, which we were just speaking about, and we have programs to encourage new and innovative work on our platform, like our Game Fund and our Education Fund. Our broader vision in Creator is broad and compelling, will allow creators to build mega-scale lifelike worlds, built by teams of from one person to hundreds, and working in the way that best suits them. Today, we're gonna talk about each one, what we've shipped in the last year, what we're shipping in the next year, and what lies beyond. We delivered a lot in 2022, and I'm just gonna highlight three key areas. First up, I wanna talk about Studio. So if you think about how we will create mega-scale lifelike worlds, we're gonna need great tools. Every day, hundreds of thousands of creators use our Studio product.
This means when we introduce new features and capabilities on our platform, and we build them into Studio, it gets in front of our creators, this large creator community, very, very quickly. They can turn around and publish these new amazing capabilities to our users almost overnight. As such, Studio is a point of dramatic strategic leverage for us, and we invest heavily in making it great. In fact, we believe it can be the largest development environment in the world. Now, we're constantly innovating on the service, on the surface with regular releases, but I just wanna highlight a few recent ones.
Right now, we're rolling out some major enhancements to the design of Studio, and that includes new iconography, high-DPI images for high-resolution displays, and customizable widgets like ribbons and dockers so that creators can easily customize their workflow and be more efficient. All of this makes creation on the platform easier. Second, a key part of work on Studio has always been its collaborative nature. This year, we made collaboration the default way that creators interact with their experiences. If you create a new experience in Roblox, it's created on the cloud. Studio connects to the cloud, and you work there. Now, with a single click of a button called Collaborate, you can invite your friends, any connections you have on Roblox, to co-create with you.
This is incredibly important as we think about larger and larger teams, larger and larger worlds that will increasingly be built by large groups of people. We wanna make that on-ramp from one to two to hundreds as easy as possible. All right. Next up, as Dave mentioned in his kickoff, our vision is to connect everyone around the world, all countries, all ages, all types of things we would do. Now, the Studio tool that we were just talking about and our cloud APIs support this. However, it's also important for us that the platform remains very safe. We're gonna have increasingly diverse sets of content deployed upon the platform, more and more types of content. We want it to be safe.
We want people to know what is in an experience before they enter, and we want parents to be in control of what their kids are able to see and experience on the platform. This is what Experience Guidelines is all about. In Experience Guidelines, we have some additional information on every experience that shares a preview of what you'll see and what you'll experience when you enter this experience, if you so choose. Additionally, there's age guidance, and you as a user can make a decision, an informed decision about whether you want to enter into this experience. As a parent, you're provided with granular controls about what you want your kids to be able to do on the platform.
Now, this is a really foundational and critical investment for the company because it lays a structured framework for us to bring in even more types of content into the platform and do it in a safe way. All right. I mentioned Game Fund a little bit earlier in the presentation, and just to reiterate, we're constantly building new and amazing types of content into Roblox, and we want to find ways to get that in front of our users fast. We look for creators that really want to adopt quickly, get it out in front of our users quickly, and we partner with them, and we help them make that happen.
Now, some examples of things you'll see in our current crop of Game Fund games would be things like enhanced graphics, social capabilities, and importantly, we also have some large studios that maybe traditionally haven't built games on Roblox coming to the platform. This is really leveraging a lot of our tools that make it easier for large teams to build large games on Roblox. Behind me, you can see just a brief sampling of what is coming from these new experiences in our Game Fund program, and we couldn't be more excited about getting these in front of our users. All right. Shipping over the next year and building on the steps that we already talked about, we're shipping a lot. I just wanna highlight three key areas. First up, let's talk about packages.
Packages are the way that creators share content. Now, if you think about like a very complicated experience, perhaps like a city or something like that, city would have, for instance, cars, buildings, streets, so much more. You'd want creators to be able to focus on making amazing cars, other creators perhaps to focus on making amazing buildings, and someone maybe is doing city planning higher up, hopefully. Basically, what they'll do is they'll put parameters on, for instance, the car where you could change the color or something like that. There's a higher level interface that's produced on top of these building blocks. This is how systems within the Roblox platform will become more sophisticated over time. I wanna note that packages can contain packages.
Perhaps an experience started as a city builder, but later they wanted to build it out into a whole region. They could make the city a package. That would be a package which contained other packages like those buildings and cars. Again, there would be a high-level interface on that city, which would allow you to configure it, perhaps the population or percent urbanization or something like that. This is really amazing within the context of large teams building great experiences. It gets even more interesting when you think about our large creator community. Earlier, I mentioned our Creator Marketplace. Packages are the way that content is shared on the Creator Marketplace.
It's important to note, I think, that when creators put content on the Creator Marketplace, they can. It can be free, but they can also attach a price to it. What this means is that creators are incentivized to create general-purpose components of building more complicated worlds. They can earn a living on it. That car example, if someone made an amazing package for cars, which you could control the year, the model, the make, the color, and so many other options, put it on the marketplace, they could charge money for it. Now, of course, other creators are incentivized to consume that because they're trying to get to market. They're trying to build a larger experience. There's this creator flywheel in which creators are building upon each other's work.
This is a critical flywheel for us as we talk about making mega scale and lifelike worlds. Okay. We also have really huge studios on the platform now. They need A/B testing. They need to understand things like user acquisition, engagement, retention, monetization, and so much more. Meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier, we have a vertically integrated platform. When users engage with content on our platform, we can track their behavior. We can really understand what's going on and what's working and what's not. As you might expect from a large technology company like Roblox, we have our own internal analytics system, which has all these capabilities and more.
We're working on investing on that internal analytics platform, and very carefully and deliberately, we believe we can expose certain capabilities through our creator analytics platform to allow our creators to make better and better content. If you'll recall earlier when I was describing this flywheel, that bottom arrow of feedback back to the creators, this is that. The better we make our creator analytics system, the more insights we provide our creators, the better able they are to make amazing content on the platform. This is a deeply strategic area for us. Finally, I wanna just touch very briefly on third-party tool integration. We want our creators to use the best tools for the job. Now, for many of them, that's Studio, but we looked across our creator community.
We saw a lot of them were using a tool called Blender for 3D object creation, and what they would do is they would create these amazing 3D objects in Blender, then they'd click Export, then they'd go over to Studio, and they'd import it in. They'd arrange that asset within Studio. They'd go back to Blender, and they'd wanna tweak something, change it, and go through that same flow again and again and again. Very inefficient. We saw an opportunity to build a plugin into Blender. With one click, they can publish the asset that they created in Blender into Studio, iterate, iterate.
This is dramatically accelerating content creation on the platform, and I wanna call it out because it's a win in and of itself, but more importantly, it's a validation of our API-first strategy in which we're providing APIs and capabilities to allow creators to use the right tool for the job to get their work done, whether that's our tools or not. Beyond, there are three strategic areas I just wanna cover briefly. We're investing in a cloud API-first platform. In the future, the Roblox Studio will not be in a privileged position as relates to creation on the Roblox platform. We're going to empower creators to use their own tools and probably for creators to create tools and perhaps create an entire industry of tool creation that essentially competes with Studio.
More importantly, it might allow new types of creation on the platform, new types of content that maybe we hadn't even anticipated and will make the platform more rich. Secondly, we see worlds getting larger and larger than can even fit on a creator's computer. I mentioned earlier when I was talking about Studio that when you create an experience now in Roblox, it's positioned on the cloud, and Studio connects to it. What this means, when those worlds become super large, what's going to happen is the creator will connect to the cloud, and they'll just stream in the part of that large world that's relevant to them that they're working on. Many other people may be working on the same world.
We'll be living in a world in which creators are creating in a world which they also explore to see what other people are creating, and this is much like the real world. Finally, we're continuing to work on democratizing creation. It's gonna be easier than ever to create on the Roblox platform. Right now, we do have experiences that allow creation in the experience, but the content that is created is locked in the experience. I mentioned earlier we're building APIs. An example of how these APIs will be used is in experience, users will be able to publish content that they created within an experience to, you know, outside of the experience and have a life of its own. The possibilities of this are almost endless.
Could be creation of new experiences, could be creation of new clothing or other types of assets. One way we think this is going to happen is through the use of AI and ML-assisted creation in which users will be able to use natural language or sketches to create things that have never existed, worlds that they can then export and make experiences of their own. All right. In conclusion, the future for creators is very bright. We believe we can get more than 100 million creators on the platform, and if you can imagine it, you can realize it on the Roblox platform. Thank you. All right, next up, our chief scientist, Dr. Morgan McGuire, will tell you about some exciting developments in the Roblox engine.
An interesting fact, Morgan designed the scalable graphics for the very first version of Roblox back in 2005, and he was the leading game technology professor in academia. He invented many of the features used across the industry today, and right now he leads all of our R&D efforts on the engine. Welcome to the stage, Dr. Morgan McGuire.
Thank you, Nick. I'm Morgan. I'm here to tell you about the Roblox engine. The Roblox engine is one of the key differentiators of our technology stack. It's unique across the industry. It's very different than the way other 3D engines are built because we built for social, and we built for scaling first. This is what powers our metaverse. The Roblox engine is what's executing simultaneously on your device, your phone, your tablet, your laptop, your console, and in our cloud. Our CTO, Dan, told you about our tech stack, which we own all the way down, and at the edge data centers, we have 15,000 multi-core processors. Each of those is also running the same Roblox engine. The Roblox engine is built on a concept of distributed computing. We can do work simultaneously throughout that entire cloud and simultaneously directly on player devices.
This gives us three tremendous advantages. The first is because we leverage local computation that includes local rendering, we have incredible responsiveness no matter what network connection you're on. You can have a ping, a latency across the network of 100 milliseconds or 1,000 milliseconds, and because we can run the physics and the graphics directly on your device, we don't have to wait for a round trip to the server like other engines do. Incredible responsiveness. The second feature of our distributed computation is it gives us very high player counts. Now, player counts lead to social density. For social 3D, the key is not just having a large number of players, but having them in the same world and able to interact with each other.
By putting more players in the same world, by distributing the cost of the computation, we're able to get more interactions between players, more social. Finally, because we're distributing that computation, we're able to run incredibly efficiently in those edge data centers. Each one of those 15,000+ servers is able to run hundreds of Roblox worlds on it. This is in contrast to traditional game servers where a single server node might give you one or two instances. Incredible density, both for the social side, for the player experience, but also for lowering our operational costs by leveraging the processing power that every player is bringing to that network. From this base of performance and scalability, we have a lot more performance overhead than you would expect from a tech stack.
Because of that, we are able to leverage it to build an advanced avatar sequence, and that gives us unbounded creation. Unbounded creation is what drives our growth. Let me tell you a little more about this. Creation on Roblox is radically different than in other 3D systems. It's because of this power. We don't limit what you can create to maybe just making new static maps or tweaking a couple of the properties of an individual object. We don't limit the scope of avatar creation. On Roblox, you can create anything. You can build a machine and bring it to life. You can write full program code if you want. You can invent new kinds of interaction modalities and new interaction loops, and you can design everything as a creator about identity and expression.
You can make sneakers, you can make dresses, you can make facial expressions and animations. You can create whole avatar bodies and combine them. Powering this social 3D space, it's not about frame rates, it's not about screenshots. That's how traditional games were marketed. We're competitive on that, but the key is that we are focused on empowering individuality for our players and for our creators, and about scaling. Distributed computation for scaling. Let me show you some highlights of features that we shipped in 2022. Everything on the Roblox engine, as one of the gems of innovation in the company, this is the central focus for our Roblox research academic style team, as well as our in-house R&D teams and day-to-day engineering. You've seen throughout this morning's presentations the great strides we've made on avatars.
From 2006, look at where we've come in 2022. These are all user-created avatar bodies I'm showing you here. We now have much more diverse hair and other personal items, and we're expanding the set of avatars available. What's most exciting about the avatars is that in 2022, we released the ability to have what we call the layered clothing feature, and that gives you custom outfits. Now, many platforms, many video games have custom outfits you can buy for avatars. The key to the Roblox system is that we don't limit them to whole body outfits or a small set of avatars. It's about mix and match. It's about combinatorial explosion. You see, our clothing and avatars have no limits. You can take a shirt, a dress, a tie, earrings, hair, and you can put them on any avatar.
Now, in the real world, imagine you go out and you buy a sweater. You didn't buy one outfit when you bought a sweater, like in a traditional game engine. You actually, by buying one thing, have doubled the total number of outfits in your closet, because you can take everything you used to wear in combination, and now you can wear it with or without your new sweater. When you take that multiplicative power through every item in your closet, you have this literally exponentially growing set of outfits that you can make. Now, we all know this from the real world. That's how things have always worked. The technology for doing that in a virtual environment is extremely sophisticated.
It's because you have to make all of the clothing adjust to different avatars, different animations, different sizes, and you have to make it so that it can layer, specifically so that under layers don't poke through the above ones. Now, almost no other real-time system has tackled this problem. It's tremendously technically difficult. We solved that problem. We solved it for an unlimited number of layers and for many different kinds of clothing, and we shipped that this year, and it saw tremendous adoption. This is what drove combinatorial explosions of outfits on our platform. It makes it so that every new piece of content released is magnifying every other piece of content. It's not just one additive piece. Shortly after releasing, in the first month, we saw that 96% of the top 10,000 eligible experiences on Roblox adopted this technology.
Our creator community moved very quickly, not just to create the content, but make sure it showed up in experience. We saw 115 million users who immediately acquired a piece of layered clothing. This is not just great technology. This is not just the future. It's that as soon as we release these features, they're adopted and loved by our community. We bring your avatars to life. This year, we released the ability for programmers on Roblox to control 40 different facial muscles, and by combining those muscles, you can create the full range of human facial expression. You can do this for player avatars, and you can do it for non-player characters, like a shopkeeper. This brings the avatar faces to life in a way that makes the entire environment more exciting.
Of course, when we have these great avatars and they're in great environments, we need the materials to reflect the properties of light correctly. Part of our fidelity to the simulation of reality and doing it at mega scale is making sure that when you have glossy wood, you get the little highlights on it. When you put on a leather jacket, it looks like leather and it has a sheen. When you sit on that velvet couch, that it looks warm and soft. We're simulating light in a much more physically based way, and we've passed complete control over that to the player community. The defaults look great like this, but then they can customize it for the look and feel they want. These are just a few of the things we shipped in 2022.
Here's a complete list, and of course, we still have a few more months left, so there's more coming. What I wanna do though is skip ahead and give you a technical preview of where we're going in 2023, 'cause we have some really exciting things that have spent a long time in the lab and that we're gonna ship next year. First, I showed you the programmable facial expressions. That's for creators on the platform. What we're going to do in 2023, and you saw Dave's demo of this on stage, is unlock real-time facial animation for every player in the over 13 group. What this does is we use your selfie camera or your webcam and the audio channel from the microphone on your device to drive your avatar in real time. You've seen what this looks like.
I think you understand intuitively the value of it, which is that this gives you a sense of presence. Even more than video chat, this is about making it so that when you're in an embedded 3D environment, and you're walking around, you're talking to your friends, maybe you're going to school in Roblox in the future, it feels real and it feels like real people, not plastic mannequins. This gives you lip sync, this gives you winking, smiling, tilting your head. The most important part of the tech stack behind this is that the video never leaves your phone. What we do is we take the video, we run it through our custom neural network that we developed, we run the inference directly on your phone. The video never leaves your phone, and so you have privacy and safety of that video.
Then we reduce it to these 40 muscle parameters, highly compress those, and we stream it out using the industry standard WebRTC protocol as a special media stream. What that means is we take tremendously less bandwidth than if you were streaming full video. We only need these 40 muscle numbers for every frame. That allows us to scale incredibly well. We can enable this for 50 players in the same world, and in the future, we're gonna unlock it for even higher numbers. We're taking that same tech for real-time facial animation and bringing it to whole bodies as well. You see, one of the greatest barriers to content creation in 3D is actually animation, not the creating of the shapes themselves. In Hollywood, to make a movie, we have multi-million-dollar motion capture studios, and you've all seen actors in black suits and behind-the-scenes shots.
That's not accessible to most of our creators. The alternative is hand authoring. This is quaternion splines, this is advanced 3D animation packages. Again, that's a skill level that keeps animation beyond the ability of most creators. What we're doing is we're gonna use AI to take full body video, put your iPhone in the corner, capture it, in the future in real time, and then we'll animate a full avatar in 3D, map it to any character, and run it in the virtual world. Now, we understand that this is a great breakthrough, especially in the way that it combines with our physics system and with our previously hand-authored animations. In many use cases, you're sitting down, you're in a crowded environment, you're not going to do a full dance.
For that case, we're also starting with offline authoring, so you can upload a video to the creator tools to Studio, like Nick just showed you, and then it'll produce that animation which can be reused for players who aren't in a situation where they can move around. I've talked a lot about efficiency. One of the key parts of our tech stack is the Lua programming language. Now, this is an open source package that we adopted, and then we extended it into what we call Luau, which is our advanced version. We added type inference. We added a high-performance interpreter. In 2022, we released Parallel Luau, which gives you a 3x, 4x, 5x speed up, as you can see here, in various kinds of computations. This gives us efficiency on your device.
If you're on a mobile device, it saves your battery, and it gives us efficiency in the cloud to reduce our cost of operations and scale up more on density. We're continuing to advance Lua in the future. 2023 will have many incremental releases that'll keep speeding up Lua. What I wanted to point out is that when we created our extension, Luau, we released it back to the community as open source. The reason that we gave it back is, first of all, it's just the right thing to do. We're part of that ecosystem. We wanna keep moving it forward. Second of all, it also, when we support the Lua and Luau ecosystem, we see others adopt our technology stack for their products.
We increase the number of Lua programmers who are available to create content on our platform, and we get the open source community helping to advance our tech stack. Now, I wanna close with two really exciting features we've been working on for close to decades at this point. The first is real-time constructive solid geometry. Now, there are multiple ways of making 3D shapes. 3D shapes are obviously the basis of games and virtual environments like on Roblox. One of them, which is relatively unique in the real-time space to Roblox, is this constructive solid geometry. The idea is this is how, in the real world, mechanical engineers, industrial designers, this is how they make real machinable parts in their CAD systems.
You take shape primitives like spheres and cones and cylinders, and in sort of a virtual machining way, you can subtract parts from them, you can slice off pieces, and you always end up with something that's real, physically simulatable, and physically buildable. It also, for many people, because it corresponds to real-world building and not a computer graphics concept, is a fairly intuitive way to build compared to mesh editing. We've always offered this as an accessible way to create shapes on Roblox. It's also across the industry always been an offline tool. It's something you do for authoring, not something that happens at runtime. We figured out how to speed this up by orders of magnitude, and by doing that, what we did is we made it fast enough to run it real-time, including in a distributed fashion for our mega scale simulation.
We can run it on your device even. What that enables is real-time creation, in-experience creation, and real-time destruction. It makes the entire environment more dynamic. I want to show you an example we pulled together. Everything I've shown you today is real and in experience. These aren't visualizations. We're gonna have a firefighter run into a house. In the future, everything in the house will be simulated. The fire, the smoke, the water coming from the firefighters, and it's gonna cause the beams to erode, it's gonna cause them to crack and fracture in natural ways, not canned pre-done animation, but live simulation. I'm gonna show you the firefighter running through, and their ax is doing real-time constructive solid geometry to remove pieces which will then fall with full physics dynamics.
That's a level of simulation that you just don't see today in other 3D environments. We're pushing even further. The last piece I wanna share with you in terms of features that'll start shipping in 2023 is this airplane video. What we're going to do here is actually one of the holy grails of real-time simulation. We're doing full aerodynamics simulation. This is the beginning of a roadmap that leads us through what's called full computational fluid dynamics. That's simulating, like I said, fire, but water and smoke, different gases all coupled together, simulating wind and clouds, all of that. Normally, if you were going to make a 3D animation of an airplane or a video game or a movie, it's almost all in software, it's in code.
It's not simulated from first principles, it's that somebody has described in a program exactly how the plane should move. It's in a sense, it's a hack we would call it in the tech industry. That's not the way we do things at Roblox. We simulate reality, and we do it at scale. What I'm about to show you, the airplanes are not hard-coded. There's not software controlling how the airplane moves. It's all first principles physics. It's the way Lockheed Martin or NASA would design a simulation. We have air over the airfoils giving us lift. We have laminar flow on the top of the cockpit. When the control surfaces come up, we get drag, we'll get vortices, and that's what makes the airplanes fly.
You get emergent properties, like a parachute will automatically open because of the air resistance as the air flows in, and objects will have terminal velocity as they're falling. Let's see what our team pulled together. That's all real, and it's the beginning of a roadmap that takes us far into the future of full high-fidelity simulation. That roadmap is essentially high-performance computing. It's supercomputer-style simulation brought to real-time three-D. You might ask, "Why do we need NASA-level technology to make free-to-play games for kids?" The answer, of course, it has two pieces. One is unbounded creation. Instead of writing code to make those airplanes work, anybody who can make a LEGO model or a toy model or a paper airplane, it will just work. We lowered the barrier to creation. You don't need code.
You don't need to know about 3D graphics and physics simulation. If you know about the real world and you experiment, things will just work. We do a lot of work internally to make it very easy for our content creator community to make content. The second is, it's not about free-to-play games, and it's not about kids. That's an important part of our market. That's an important part that we're always going to support. If we think forward to our vision, to what Dave described, that 50,000-person concert, the energy you get there from that kind of social density and that kind of simulation, from the audio reverberating, just like in the real world, from the lights working, from the real photons bouncing around illuminating things. Then you bring that to other experiences.
Maybe it's a giant spaceship battle, or maybe it's millions of orcs coming over a hill. Maybe it's a university, and we're doing, in the future, augmented reality, and we have those 50,000 people are not at a concert, but they're going back and forth between lecture halls, and we're mixing the real world and the virtual world. All of those cases you need to simulate with real-world robustness and real-world fidelity, otherwise you break the immersion, and you break the value chain. Roblox has mega scale simulation. It's thanks to our key differentiator, which is our distributed computation. That's what lets us build a supercomputer out of every user's phone, every desktop, and then our server cloud. We are driving the future of real-time 3D. We have on our research and R&D agenda serverless computing.
It's one of the state-of-the-art in the back-end server community. We're bringing it to real-time. We're using artificial intelligence to auto-tune all of the hundreds of parameters that today are either set by players on a device on other platforms or in Roblox by our developers. We can automatically change those using AI in a data-driven way in order to give everyone the optimal experience, even on a device we've never seen before. We're doing high-quality visuals, not just on the client side, but we're now exploring how to use GPU computation in the cloud. Now, as I said earlier, we believe in the low latency, responsive aspect of doing rendering directly on your device. We don't believe in moving that all into the cloud.
On a legacy device, we can accelerate your computation, and we can give you higher quality visuals by giving you a lift with some of the compute on a GPU in the cloud and some directly on your device for low latency, and of course, the distributed computational fluid dynamics that I just showed you with the airplane video. In summary, there are three key pieces of the engine technical innovation that are leading to a unique experience for players and a unique ecosystem that we've created. The first is our mega scale simulation, building reality inside of a virtual world and doing it in a distributed way. The second is using all of that power we get from our unique distributed computation to power unbounded creation.
Using that overhead, that performance freedom we have, and putting it back into the system so that our players can do all of this mixing and matching so that we can solve really hard technical problems to create a better experience. What's great is, just as Dan and Nick have previously said on this stage, we do the hard work so that the players and the creator community don't have to. The third is combinatorial excellence. Our vision has always been at scale with full fidelity simulation to have any physics for any type of part, any type of 3D model running with any motors, any animation system, with any avatar and any shoes and any hair, any clothes, driving it from programmed animation, from simulation, from your camera through AI, running on any device for any user anywhere in the world and at scale. Thank you very much. That's our engine vision. Now I wanna bring back to the stage our CEO, David Baszucki.
Thank you, Morgan, and thank you for the whole team. We have said many times the primary product that Roblox is creating is people and systems to drive innovation and execution at scale. I feel we just saw a small snapshot of that today, and I'm very proud of all the people who presented. We are going to take a short break, about five minutes, and then Mike Guthrie, our CFO, is going to join us, and he is gonna show how we blend all of that execution around retention, frequency, engagement, monetization with all of that visionary innovation and how that comes together in our business model. Thank you all. We'll see you in about five minutes, and we'll make an announcement. Thank you.
I want people to know that if they wanna create a product in digital fashion that helps people feel things, that makes people excited, I'm the person to talk to. Hello, my name is Samuel Jordan, and I'm one of the top selling Digital Fashion Designers on Roblox. My dad used to always tell me, "Stop wasting all your time playing video games," and I would tell him, "I'm working," and he would go, "That's not a job." He now knows that it is. When I started designing fashion items, I wanted to make things I always wanted to wear. I had always wanted earrings on Roblox, and they didn't exist before. I decided I want to make items that help people feel excited and good about themselves. What do I want people to feel? What do they need to feel?
Is there anything they can't do right now that they need to? That's where I find inspiration. It's solving problems. I have 11 siblings, and it was kind of hard to find time to develop and be on Roblox, but it was my escape. It was my space where I got to create. When I'm outside in the real world, I definitely think through a creator mindset. It definitely changes the way you view things. Roblox recently launched their layered clothing feature, which really expands the limitless amount of what I can create. I wanna make experiences where you make a memory with your friend, and in five years you're talking about, "Remember when we did that together?" I want to have that impact. This world is ours for the making.
It really resonates because creators independently get to decide what is fun to make, and it really rings true. If I have an idea, I can bring it to life on Roblox. Definitely working with Karlie Kloss recently has been a big highlight, and we got to talk about the best way to enter Roblox. I also released a collection of original bags with Burberry. I redesigned their Lola collection for the digital space, working on fantasy themes. Growing up in a super large family, you know, everything is collaborative. You work together, and I think that definitely influenced my personality, where I'm great at working on teams.
I've also gotten to work on physical product recently and learning how you take IP from the digital space and bring it into the real world. You're gonna continue to see the most creative people shifting to the platform. The next new IP, the next global franchises, they're gonna be born on Roblox. You already see culture being formed there, and that's the future. Just keep making things that you love, that you've tried, that you've played yourself. If you love it, then the chances are other people will too.
Please welcome Roblox CFO, Mike Guthrie.
Good morning. It is really, really nice to see all of the investors. Thank you so much for coming. For everybody who's online, it is also great to have you. We really appreciate it. This is our second investor conference, and we're just incredibly excited to be here. What a tough bunch of acts to follow. I get to go last, which is incredible. I met Dave about five and a half years ago. We were introduced by a common friend. We had breakfast over in Woodside, and it was the first time I had ever heard this entrepreneur talk about a notion of creating a category of human co-experience, a new category. I was very, very enthralled with the discussion. I'd actually really never heard of the company prior to that breakfast or the night before I had that breakfast.
It was just fascinating to me. I can remember asking Dave a couple of questions. The first one was, "How do you keep growing?" The business had carved out a really good niche with nine- 12 year-olds, primarily in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Dave said, "Well, we're gonna grow because we're gonna expand around the world. It turns out today Roblox is entirely in English. We're gonna be able to translate Roblox eventually, and we think that's just gonna spur a global expansion of the company." The second thing he said is, "We're gonna draw older users to the platform. We're going to, what we call age up.
That's gonna be enabled by an incredibly talented creator community that we will empower with great technology, and the tech will get better and better. The content will get better and better, and older users will come to Roblox. That all made sense to me. I thought it was ambitious, but it made sense. The second thing I asked Dave was, "Well, what is it that you actually, you know, what do you worry about?" We talked about the whole. The first thing he said was, "I sleep very well at night. But I do think about a variety of different things. I think about how do I recruit, you know, the best people, how do we compensate them, get them excited to do incredibly technical work?
Really what I always think about is I have to have the 10X in front of me. I have to know how to grow the business 10X." That was 10X ago. Everything this morning that you've seen so far is about where the next 10X is coming from. We talk a lot about investments, and hopefully by now it is crystal clear to you what our model is. We are the platform. We are the technology. We build things for our community. Our community does amazing things with that technology. That attracts an incredible user base, and the business just grows. It has been an amazing run. My favorite moments at Roblox have been when creators are in the room, whether it's at town hall meetings where we've had creators present things that they're doing, or last week at RDC.
It's just amazing to see what they do with all the technology on Roblox. Really what we think about is, our investments compound at incredible rates when funneled through that creator community. That's the way we think about it. We often describe Roblox as having two viral loops, a content viral loop and a social viral loop. The content viral loop is, of course, fed by our creator community, and it's really those investments that we're making that allow that viral loop to grow and spin faster. That's really what we're all about. Really, we are in a constant form of investment and innovation so that they can build incredible things. Now, this actually is what my last slide said last year at our investor conference.
In a way, you could almost think it was easier to say it a year ago, right? The world was very different. Stock market was a lot higher. Interest rates were a lot lower. The overall level of prices around the world was lower. There wasn't a lot of conflict in the world. It's a different time. Some people, of course, have reacted to that by slowing down or being more cautious. We really haven't. We really, really haven't. We just fundamentally believe that if we're making the right investments, those are the kinds of things that are gonna drive long-term enterprise value at the company, and we're gonna continue to do that for a very long time because this is a category where we have so far to go. This was my first slide at Investor Day last year. Apparently, I'm repurposing slides.
I talked about scale, growth, and cash flow, and I want to return to the same three things today just to start off. This is in fact a business of incredible scale. We are on our way to connecting one billion people on our platform. Right now, last month, we're about a quarter of the way there. That's a lot of people. Every day, 60 million people come to Roblox. And on a weekly basis, they are routinely spending over one billion hours. Now, you saw in an earlier presentation that we now have about three million creators on Roblox that are earning currency. Three million. That number is twice as large as it was the last time we all got together to do something like this. That is scale. That is real scale.
In fact, when we look across most of our key metrics, we've just never been bigger. By any metric, we are just as big as this company's ever been, and it's a great jumping-off point for 2023, 2024, and 2025. We're excited about that. Growth. Growth has been so interesting. Along, over the years, the company has grown incredibly well. In this period that we've been dealing with over the last few years during the pandemic, I know growth has gotten really confusing to people. Are we comparing to a COVID period or not a COVID period? Are we reopening? Or, you know, what are we comparing against? I'm just here to tell you that we are growing. We are growing in every geography in the world. We are growing in every age demographic around the world.
The growth that we have is organic, and it is sustainable. We are not spending a lot of money on inefficient user acquisition with negative unit economics. As you heard many times, our user growth is organic. For that reason, we always have thought it would be more sustainable, and it has been sustainable over a very long period of time. We believe the company is at a great growth vector and is gonna continue to grow. Today, we've talked a bunch today about certain core metrics in the business. We're gonna weave that into how we forecast the business.
These notions of retention, frequency, engagement, and monetization, these are how we take our core user growth and actually accelerate it all the way from users to more hours of engagement to more monetization, and that's really exciting. The last one is cash flow. Roblox generated a half a billion dollars of operating cash flow as a private company. When I joined the company, we had raised $35 million of primary capital, and the company was already over $300 million of bookings and cash flow positive. It's a really, really high unit economic, incredible business. Before we went public, we had billion dollars of cash on the balance sheet, and over the last 10 quarters, we've generated another a billion dollars of free cash. The business has incredible cash flow potential.
We also raised an another billion of cash late last year, so we have a ton of liquidity and the ability to continue to invest and grow for the long term. We're still looking at the same basic simple model, scale, growth, and cash flow, and feel like it fits incredibly well around Roblox. Just keep in mind that we will always take a very long-term perspective. We're trying to do the things today that are gonna drive long-term growth and enterprise value. We're not saying that we're not gonna have outstanding performance in the short run, but just always know we're trying to take the longest term perspective that we possibly can. Okay. With those as a starting point, I'm gonna try to do four things this morning before we bring Dave back up and do some Q&A.
Number one is I'm gonna look at some historical financial numbers. This is mostly stuff that you all know if you've been tracking the company, but some numbers over the last four years. The second thing I wanna do is talk a little bit about how we forecast the company inside, and these core metrics that you've been hearing about, this notion of retention and frequency, engagement and monetization. There are people that, engineering and product leaders who are responsible for those metrics. How do those work into the way we think about forecasting and the way you should think about the growth of the business? That's the second thing. The third thing, I'm gonna cover are the August metrics. As everyone here knows, we do monthly metrics. We put those metrics out usually on about the 15th day of the month.
Today's the day, so we'll put August metrics out. I do wanna make a point. Just, historically, the third month of every quarter, we've waited to report our earnings to get you those metrics, and I think we're gonna change that with September. In fact, I know we are. The reason we always delayed was, one, to wrap it into the earnings call and the other reason was, the truth of the matter is, if you're running a public company and you're closing the books, you do make adjustments in the last month of a quarter. So, we always wanted to maybe hold off on those metrics until we made all those adjustments. We're just not gonna do that next month, and we're, from now on, we're just gonna go every month.
The September metrics will come out a little bit faster, and we think we've heard from you that you want to see those numbers quicker, so we'll do that. Then the fourth thing we're gonna do is actually we're gonna return to that breakfast a few years ago, and we're gonna look at how we're doing on international growth and aging up, which are the core growth drivers of the business and have been, you know, for so many years. All right, this is what the world looked like if you were the CFO of Roblox in the first quarter of 2020, or the fourth quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020. What I, you know, I saw in the company was that we had this ability to compound bookings very quickly.
The white solid line are our bookings. In fact, in 2019 we grew at 39%. In the fourth quarter of 2019, we actually grew at about 60%. The business was really scaling nicely. We were starting to see some of the growth drivers really start to pick up. Underneath that, all stacked up to the dashed white line, are our cash expenses. Everything between the dark white and the dashed white line, that's cash flow, operating cash flow in the business. You can see over time, you know, we were generating really healthy margins, somewhere between usually about 12%-15%, on a monthly basis, while having enough cash to invest in the business and keep growing at these high rates.
It was a really, really nice financial model, the kind of thing that allows CFOs to sleep comfortably at night, running a private company. It did not require us to go out and raise a lot of venture capital, which is really a nice thing. Underneath there, you see, four colored stacks, or really five colored stacks. On the bottom is DevEx. Those are the economics that we share with our developer community. We'll talk a little bit about the various forms that we do that in, and you've seen some of that earlier today. The next one is our hiring, the number of people in the company and the salaries and other things that make up compensation. Above that, infrastructure and trust and safety.
Dan Sturman went through a lot of the things that we're doing in infra and trust and safety. That's a major area of investment for us. Then the purple is what we call cost of revenue, mostly payment processing, obviously dominated by Apple and Google App Store fees. Then the little teeny thing above that's overhead. That's all other expenses. We are very, very efficient on costs at Roblox. We watch every nickel. We're incredibly careful about it because we always look and say anything that we waste was money that could have gone to the developers to build the business. We try very hard not to waste any money. That's what the world looked like in the first quarter of 2020. It was very calm, very exciting, and then that happened.
In 90 days, when the pandemic started, the business doubled. We went from $250 million of bookings to $500 million in 90 days, and we continued to grow. For four quarters in a row, the business basically was a 3x over the prior year. It was absolutely incredible. I certainly had never seen anything like it. Our reaction to that was not to revel in high margins or all the cash that was coming in, it was to continue what we had been doing, invest in long-term value. This is what's happened with our developer economics since the pandemic started. They've grown aggressively. We had a planning meeting a couple of years ago to talk about where we wanted these numbers to be. We're 50% higher. Now, DevEx is generally a variable expense. It tends to track fairly closely with bookings.
One of the things that we've done in the last few years is added engagement-based payouts. When I talked to developers last week during RDC, there were many of them that talked about the balance of economics being really great and the excitement that they have that advertising is now gonna be a third way for them to monetize and earn economics so they can invest in their businesses and build great companies. That's what we've done on DevEx. This is personnel. I remember the last meeting at Roblox when we realized that we had to actually go home because of the pandemic. Dave said, "Recruiting will not stop." You can see recruiting has not stopped. We cannot build the kind of amazing technology that you've seen this morning without literally the best people in the world.
When you start hiring the best people in the world, the exciting thing is the other best people in the world wanna come to that company and work on really hard problems. You can see the acceleration in recruiting here when you look at just our hiring numbers. Our recruiting brand has never been better. Our recruiting team has never been better, and we're just attracting amazing people. Now, that number, I just wanna make a really quick comment. That number excludes stock-based compensation. Just put us in the category of companies that absolutely believe that ownership in the company is great for people. People want to benefit from the innovation they are creating and the value of that innovation through stock ownership, and they retain. It is a retention tool. Stock ownership works. Owners behave differently than renters.
Count us also in the category of companies that understand dilution. You're shareholders, we are shareholders. We have to grow value well in excess of the amount of dilution that's in the company. We've been very vocal this year, even though prices have been volatile all over the market, that we're gonna keep dilution below 5%. We're gonna do better than that, but we're gonna keep dilution low, but we are still gonna attract great people, and we're still gonna retain great people. So that's what we've been doing on hiring. Infra and trust and safety, huge area of investment, incredibly exciting. Dan talked to you about what we're doing here. It really is what powers us. When we make these investments over time, we really, really see the benefits. Now, today, this is an area that feels a little more variable.
As we're adding users and engagement, we are adding infrastructure and trust and safety, but this is also an area where there's real efficiency, and we will ultimately start to see leverage in infra in particular. By the way, we will also ultimately see leverage in headcount. As our revenue per person goes up, we do see that kind of leverage in the business. For now, we're really in recruiting mode. Cost of revenue, again, is the first purple line. You know, it's interesting. First of all, the first thing you see is it's bigger than a lot of the other expenses, which seems unfortunate, right? Cost of revenue, payment processing, you know, that shouldn't be the thing that dominates our cost structure.
We've gotten very, very good at running the company in the environment where it is expensive to process payments. We're good at that. If you really look at that, you'll see that a number that historically had been pretty consistently 25% of our bookings number, it looks like it's coming down, because it is. We've really, over the last year and a half or so, have leaned into prepaid cards. It's been fantastic. Consumers love prepaid cards. We do a huge prepaid card business during the holidays. We do a big prepaid card business during different times of the year, different holidays in different countries, birthday presents, all kinds of things.
Increasingly, we are also in a position where we have credit cards for more users, and we can more efficiently sell Robux to them. Today, we're actually sub 22% of bookings on our cost of revenue. Generally, you've heard us say this before, when we have an efficiency of cost, we wanna get that to the developer community. That investment has always yielded great returns for us. That really leads us to the next question, which is margins went from 12 to 15 up into the mid-thirties. We did not sit around and say, "How can we maintain 30% EBITDA margins?" We said, "How can we build and grow the business at its absolute peak levels?" We've made the right investments.
Now, a logical question that I get all the time is, "When are the margins gonna go back up?" The margins are not gonna go back up because we cut costs. The margins are gonna go back up because of all this incredible technology and this amazing creator community that's building better and better and better content, and it is gonna drive the bookings up, and when we get to those points, we're gonna get back to margins that look like we were where we were maybe pre-COVID. My guess is we'll run at those levels for a while because we really don't have a need to be up in 25-30%. If we're up that high, there's something we're not investing in that would drive longer term value that we should be investing in.
That's how we think about the margin structure, and this is the first thing I wanted to cover. This is historical. You know this, but I just wanna give you the philosophy. All right, the second thing is, how do we operate? For a very, very long time, especially during the pandemic, we knew the top line was coming in. I mean, we just knew that would be growing, generally at a rate that we almost couldn't catch up in terms of expenses. We learned a lot about what's really driving the Roblox machine, and how do we operate better so that we are compounding our growth. You heard, again, you heard it today, our user team, our growth team, and the economy team, they are very focused on those core metrics.
They know it, they talk about it, they report on it, you know, periodically to the executive team. That's what's really driving the business. Let me put this into context for you, both in terms of the way we forecast and in how we're operating. The vision, if you're in the finance, accounting, or biz ops team, we look at forecasting users, MAUs is our top level number. Our, the whole idea is we're gonna grow and retain users of all ages around the world. Big monthly active users. That's what we forecast. That's the starting point for all of our forecasts, is what does our MAU forecast look like? Now, we do this in a really interesting way. We have a lot of history, and we have a lot of data.
We look at five different age bracket breakouts today. There will be more as time goes on, but five today. Under 9-12, 13-16, 17-24, 25 and over. We look at three broad geographies, although it gets even more complicated, but we look at three broad geographies, core markets, opportunistic markets, and strategic markets, and then we look at the business also by gender. If you do the math, that's about 30 slices of the business. We have a lot of data, and when we look at that, we look at other information. We look at content data. What current content is doing what, and how is that having an effect on what our results might look like? We do look at COVID. What was happening in a certain country 12 months ago?
Was there a spike? Was, you know, what was going on? That is really how we forecast the business. What we've seen is that for any given number of users, if we get the user forecast right, and we tend to do a pretty good job, for any given number of users, there's an ability to massively compound the business by doing other smart things. We call these the compounding drivers, and you've heard them this morning. Frequency, well, retention, frequency, engagement, and monetization. Our user group, our growth group, and our economy team. Everything that Dan talked about, the core functions, some of this amazing technology, just think of that as things that, while they clearly affect the value of Roblox, maybe they're not touching the income statement every day. We're here trying to forecast the income statement.
We focus on these core metrics. It's been such an interesting few years, and occasionally we'll hear somebody talk about our business as if it weren't for COVID, we would not exist. It's just simply not true. I just wanna show you this graph, and I'm gonna show you a few more. This is frequency. On the left, you see deseasonalized DAUs divided by MAUs. It starts at the beginning of 2019. You'll notice something, we indexed just to make it easy. You're gonna notice something is that we were running at about 100, and then all of a sudden there's a spike. Obviously, that spike in about the first quarter of 2020 is COVID.
Sure, immediately people started spending, our existing user base was spending more time on Roblox, or our DAU to MAU ratio went up about 25% very quickly. What's interesting is look at how consistent that ratio has been. Notwithstanding the fact that our MAUs are growing at a very, very high compounded rate, and a lot of those are brand-new, new to the platform, we must have been making improvements to the product because this level of frequency has continued to stay well above where we were going into COVID. In fact, today, August, we're 18% above where we were at the beginning of 2019. We're not necessarily at peak COVID frequency, but we're pretty close, and we are well above.
We have retained a lot of that frequency improvement, and that's why, for a given amount of MAUs, we've been able to more than triple our DAUs from under 20 million in the beginning of 2019 to about 60 million as of August. Very similar story on engagement. Look at how engagement spiked. It's really interesting. The first thing that happened, all of the Roblox community immediately started spending more time on Roblox. That number jumped up above 125%. It really, really increased. It's really incredible what happened. People found their communities back on Roblox. They couldn't be in person, so they were able to connect with their friends, their family on Roblox.
Even though as more and more DAUs have come onto the platform and grown at very high rates, and we have certainly moderated from the very peak days of COVID, we are nowhere near back down to where we were. We have maintained and grown. The product has gotten better. The content has gotten better. Our engagement has grown 13%, and we believe we've held that and will grow on top of that. That is why hours have more than 4.5x between the beginning of 2019 to where we are today at 4.7 billion hours for the month of August. Same story on bookings. We started at $100. The pandemic started.
It took a while for bookings to grow at the same rate, for monetization to grow at the same rate, because we added a lot of hours and a lot of new users who very quickly spent enough time on Roblox to become engaged enough to actually monetize. Again, although those numbers have come down as we've reopened, they are 20% above where we started. As a result, there's been a massive acceleration in bookings over the last few years. Now, I wanna caution, not every month. Do we see the metrics lining up this way? Not every quarter does one increase by more than one, increases by the next one. It is true that over the last three years, this is what we've had.
A given amount of MAUs, we've seen a higher rate of growth of DAUs, a higher rate of growth of hours of engagement, and an even higher rate of growth of bookings. We believe that by focusing on these kinds of performance improvements, by investing in incredible technology, by giving that to our creator community, by giving ownership to product and engineering leads around the company for these core metrics, this is where the next 10X is coming from. Okay, that was the first thing, the second thing. Third thing is I'd like to go through the August metrics. We had a great August. I'm incredibly excited. We had 60 million daily active users in August that grew at 24% year-over-year. The business is growing. It's growing all around the world. It's growing in all age demographics.
This is one of the healthiest signs of the health and wellbeing of our platform is 60 million DAUs in the month of August. We've literally never been bigger. We've had a fantastic summer, and we really feel like we're, you know, we are reopened and the platform is reopened. Just a fantastic performance on DAUs. Users spent 4.7 billion hours on the platform, nearly 20% growth year-over-year. We generally expect August little less engagement than July, right? School's starting, people getting back to more normal days with schools open. Again, fantastic growth.
The last three months have been, you know, super strong, and we're really excited and we feel like, again, we're getting through the difficult comparison periods, and we're just showing that the platform just has never been bigger than it is today, which is wonderful. On bookings, our bookings range for the month of August is $233-$237. Now, we talked a lot earlier in the year about year-over-year growth rates. We knew because of comparisons we would have difficult compares in March and April. We talked about that on different calls and when we would, you know, bottom out in terms of year-over-year growth. We're really excited to see the business returning to high rates of growth very quickly in June, July, and August.
The reason we're showing you two year-over-year growth numbers, the reported year-over-year growth are the red numbers, 8%, 10%, and 7% year-over-year for the last three months. As all of you know, in the crazy economy that we're in right now, the dollar has just really strengthened across all major currencies, the pound, the euro, and many others. We're, like a lot of other companies, losing about 400 basis points of growth on a currency-adjusted basis. When we run the data for, you know, where the currencies were this time last year, the business is now in double-digit growth land.
Look, reported is what we're looking at, but again, we're operators and we're running the company and we feel like, we know that we've now returned to sort of double-digit growth and that feels great. It's been a really, really good summer for us. It was a really fantastic August. We're incredibly excited about the momentum going into next year. We're about connecting everyone in the world. That's what we wanna do. This is a massive platform. I go back to that breakfast with Dave, and I think about the major ways that we have grown the entire time I've been here. I get this question all the time, "How are you growing?" It's really around the world and aging up. It's the same story.
It's a really good story, but it's the same story, powered by massively improved technology, a much bigger creator community that can build absolutely amazing and wonderful things. We're growing in every region right now. U.S. and Canada is back up to very healthy, positive growth. I know that's important to everyone because U.S. and Canada monetizes great. But Asia Pacific is now growing at about 39%, and Dave showed statistics in Japan and in India and really all around Asia. Roblox is really enjoying fantastic growth. Same in Europe. We're doing incredibly well in Europe. We really feel like we're firing on all cylinders. Translation is certainly part of it. Other part of it is so many great creators around the world building content, and that's exciting.
The one on the right, I think, when I walked away from that breakfast, I believed the one on the left at the time. That day, I believed that that would happen. I don't know that I really believed this would happen at the rate that it happened until I got into the company and saw what was going on every day. 17- 24 year-olds are now growing at 41%. This is August over August. You can see really clearly it's not like it's the small little cohort that's growing on a small base. At 13.2 million DAUs, it's the second-largest cohort, and you can do the math on growth rates. It will obviously be the largest cohort in the not too distant future.
Everything there at the bottom are the aged-up cohorts, 13-16, 17-24, and 25 and over. That's the fastest-growing. What we've learned with those users is they do in fact engage at very similar rates as younger users, and they do in fact monetize better, which is really what we expected. You know, they control their own wallets and so they monetize really well. Five years later, the story is very similar and it's really exciting. First of all, I just wanna thank everybody again for spending time with us. Dave's gonna come back out, and we're gonna get ready for Q&A with everybody. We're gonna have microphones on the side. Thanks again for coming, and we look forward to taking your questions. Dave, come on back. I'll tell you later.
All right, Mike and team. That was awesome. We have two microphones right here for any of you who would like to ask us a question. It can be anything. Grab a mic. We'll go back and forth as much as we can. We're live and nothing is off-limits. It's exactly the way we do it at Roblox with our open mic. When we go to you, just name where you're from and question.
Hi, it's Brandon Ross from LightShed Partners. Wanted to dig into the ad business that you're creating and launching next year. First of all, how long is it gonna be until we could see meaningful contribution in terms of revenue or bookings from the ad business? If you look out three-five years, how big do you think that business can be, and what are the gating factors?
Maybe I'll talk about the how long, and then you can share. I do want to caveat this is a brand-new type of ad unit that's never been seen before, and it's combined with 4.7 billion hours, which we can extrapolate into other types of platforms. Manuel mentioned that the early tests are gonna happen this year with a select number of partners, and I expect we will see early partnerships that will involve revenue pretty close to that. We plan by I believe early next year to get this into a self-serve mode where anyone can use it. Then I'll go to Mike on projections.
Yeah. It's very difficult to put financial projections around the brands. I think in a very, you know, Roblox way, worked with brands to have them experiment and figure out what works for them, and we're gonna see. We're gonna see what they do. We're gonna see how creative they can be. We're gonna see how valuable the interactions are with their user base. We feel really comfortable that in three-five years, this is gonna be a big part of our business. We really do. We think brands are gonna be incredibly creative. There are multiple ways to engage with the user base.
Just if you think, just in a very simple way, on the example we showed, the portal into into Vans World, that's a user engaging with a brand for possibly an hour, which is really difficult to do in other places. There are things that can happen here that haven't happened anywhere else. That makes it inherently hard to forecast, but it also makes it inherently exciting about the long-term value of the business.
How are you thinking about the creator splits for the advertising business?
In discussion now. I would say give creators as much as we possibly can. One thing that's unique about these ad units is we're optimistic they'll heavily be performance-based, teleporting into a destination, staying on platform, being within our bounds of safety and civility. Even the performance ads, I think, help the platform.
Thank you.
Should we go back and forth?
Cool. Yeah.
Andrew.
Hey, Mike. Hey, David. Thanks for the presentation. Really informative. Thanks for adding all the age data there at the end. I wanted to kind of dig in a little bit more to the age data. How much is that verified? A lot of these new features that will be for older users, are those gonna be for verified users only? Then lastly, around the age and, could you talk about the engagement by age group as far as time spent on the platform? Thanks.
I'll say a little. We can go back and forth.
Sure
O n this one. What we know is we have a long history of getting age data from the players on our platform. We know that these gains are real relative to the size they used to be. We are not verifying right now the age of all of our nine and 14 year-olds, but the incremental gains are absolutely real. When we think about a lot of the economic things we talked about here, and I'm just running through the product roadmap in my head, incremental improvements have nothing to do with age gating. Immersive ad system has nothing to do with age gating. Expansion of our catalog and perfecting the economy, nothing to do with age gating. I'm trying to think of any of the economic things we've mentioned that will have friction from age gating. I'll kick it over to Mike.
Oh, yeah. We ask that question all the time 'cause when we start looking at the data, we say, "Is there any reason to believe that behavior would be affected by something that would, you know, lead them to be behaving differently than they've ever behaved before on the platform?" We're always looking at that kind of data. Self-reported, as we've always said. Your other question, Andrew, was on engagement and monetization of those users. Is that?
The engagement side.
Yeah. They're very similar. Different ages are engaging very similarly. There are not major differences across. Put it this way, there's a little more difference between regions. There's less, probably less within a region, and within age demos. They look just as engaged and high monetizing. Not meaningful changes around the different ages.
Got it. I just want to sneak in one more question philosophically. David, the scarcity stuff you showed, the buy and trade, giving developers, you know, incremental revenues as things get bought and sold, that sounds a lot like NFTs. Just curious,
Yeah, I actually think it's the exact opposite. I think one way to think about where we're trying to go in our catalog is, first and foremost, we've had active economy on Roblox for a long time, and it's really a utility economy. If I buy shoes in the real world for $100 and I wear them 10% of the time in Roblox, we could see those shoes being $1 to $5 to $10. I feel we have this real solid historical utility-based economy. We did see some brands in the real world, Gucci for example, can demand high value for rare items. I think the philosophy is more replicate the real world rather than try to create some speculative economy.
Got it. Thank you so much. Appreciate you guys.
Yeah.
Thanks, Andrew.
Great. Thanks.
Yeah.
David Karnovsky from JPMorgan.
Thanks.
I'm gonna follow up on the advertising question. I guess, Dave, how important of a revenue stream do you see advertising being to developers over time? How could that potentially change the type of experiences that become popular on Roblox? How much control do you wanna give to developers in terms of ad load, types of ads that they build in?
Yeah
I have a follow-up.
I think we're coming at this from this wonderfully fortunate position, and for the Roblox historians out there, the very first source of revenue we made were very bad banner ads. A second source of revenue that was live on Roblox for a while was pre-roll video. Both of those are no longer on the platform. We've learned along the way how can we create a very, very large business without any advertising whatsoever. Philosophically, that stays there, but what's really exciting is the units we're talking about sure have a revenue upside, have an upside for developers.
We love that, a third source of revenue, but they're also fun and interesting, and brands we believe our people on the platform wanna participate with. There's growth opportunity from the types of advertising we're gonna do as well. I think historically our values are always gonna be very thoughtful and cautious in how we roll this out. We've always been very selective about the ad partners that will work and that will come onto our platform. I think huge opportunity for booking, huge opportunities for growth, and at the same time we'll do it in a values consistent way.
Can you maybe just discuss how you think about it geographically? Is this an opportunity globally? How important is it for a region, say like India, where monetization is more of a challenge?
I'm optimistic that given the efficiency of our infra and given our ability to scale trust and safety with ML and AI, I'm optimistic long term we're gonna be in really good shape all around the world, even without advertising. I think on top of that, of course, different regions have different eCPMs, and it's gonna be different around the world. Some places are gonna be better than others. I don't think we're gonna be in a position where, "Oh my gosh, we need ads in India to do this to make it work." I think it'll always be a values consistent accelerant.
Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing. I think people go to this notion of, well, in a place like India where GDP per capita is much lower, maybe what you do is you just like everyone has to get advertising in India, so you can get the monetization up. That would be not at all consistent with the way we wanna run the business and really not a great experience for users in India, so why would we do it that way? Yeah, ultimately, when we get this right, it's gonna be really valuable across the entire platform, but it should be, you know, consistent and get there over time. One of the reasons it's hard to forecast is this isn't what anyone else is doing, right? We're doing something different.
It's a different unit, it's a different approach, and we're gonna keep learning with the brands. That's been a huge benefit over the last couple of years. Yeah, it should not like be used to sort of milk money out of a part of the world where the unit economics aren't quite as good. That just really changes the experience.
Yeah, I would say as we have scaled and we have gotten efficient and driven operational excellence, what would be considered lower monetizing regions, Brazil or Philippines, I think are solid contributors.
Yeah. Yeah
To our business at scale.
Yep. Yep.
Thank you.
Hi, guys. Tyler Grosse from Edgewood Management. Good to see you again.
Yeah.
My question is, given the importance of search and discovery and recommendations, how do you think about managing the balance between servicing the best content and the most monetizable content? A secondary question to that is this sort of a prelude to sponsored recommendations in search?
We already have some sponsored recommendations. On our homepage, we didn't talk about it, but we know ultimately this is a mix of all of those. It's funny, Anupam and the search and discovery team, we say, "Oh yeah, just the optimization function is enterprise value in 10 years, just implement that optimization function." That is a very difficult function to implement. I think graphically, we specifically showed the efficient frontier as a very cautious small slope deviation because we do believe long-term engagement, DAUs, that's the big hit. We just think to developers, it's very thoughtful, some of them, how they mix engagement with monetization. We want to give a nod to them as far as more personalization.
Yeah.
Anything to add?
No, same. Absolutely.
Okay.
Great. Thank you.
Hi, thanks for taking my question. This is Omar Dessouky from Bank of America.
Hey.
I have a couple of questions. I'll start off with more on the content, and then I'll ask one about infrastructure. How do you protect the strong brand that Roblox has developed, you know, as being a family-oriented and family-friendly brand, and really expand to types of content that may be more edgy and more appealing to, you know, teenage and adult gamers, things like Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Call of Duty, you know, and really expand that market, you know, for the older users, or is that not even, you know, what you
Yeah
Are going for?
I think it's one of these two quadrant charts, where one of the quadrants is trust and civility, and a separate, you know, axis is the types of content on the platform. We wanna be a utility, a trusted, safe, and civil utility that people trust to support a wide range of things. I think there's wonderful brands out there that span all ages. We've been thinking about this for a long time. Someday there will be older content on the platform, and there will be content that a four-year-old can safely go to without a grandparent, you know, looking over their shoulder. There will be that. I think the common thing will be trust, civility, and safety, even as people start to understand this.
I think we've all, you know, in the midst of the last two or three years, we already have seen the brand and the understanding move from, "That's a place where younger people play games," to, "Oh, my gosh, what are we gonna do in the middle of this pandemic? How are people gonna stay connected when they can't be connected in the real world?" I'm optimistic we can hit that quadrant. Anything to add, Mike?
No, that's right.
Sorry, just a couple more questions. You know, if I was to think about all these wonderful technological innovations that you guys are making to improve the fidelity of your games, you know, do you think that you could soon develop games that are close to, you know, AAA level that you would see on Xbox and Sony, AA, indie, kind of, you know, where do you think you can kind of get up to in terms of quality?
Yeah. I think Morgan said it really well when he talked about, of course, we think about photorealism and frame rate and AAA things, but we think about a lot of things. We think about social. We think about player density. We think about the ability to go anywhere with a friend in under a second. We think about join times. We think about variety of content. We think about the very, very difficult thing of having exactly the same content run on a crappy old iPhone and on a 16 or Android phone. I'm just saying old phone, not crappy iPhone, or a 16-core gaming console, and that's super difficult. I would say for those of you that wanna do a Google search by year of the content on Roblox and the quality of it, you can extrapolate that it's getting better and better all the time.
Okay. Great. Well, I just wanted to ask a couple of infrastructure questions before concluding. You talked about neural networks, which I'm quite interested in. How long has Roblox had a research effort to develop state-of-the-art neural networks, models, that companies like Google or Microsoft, you know, would develop, things like BERT, ResNet, AlexNet? Do you consider the existing chip architectures, such as GPUs, sufficient for your purposes, or would you consider, you know, maybe, building your own application-specific architectures?
Yeah. I would say this is a mix of things we develop as well as the open source community. I don't know the very first day we launched a first neural network on Roblox. I know the cloud service for ML is not a hardwired thing. It's something we're developing as a Roblox ML cloud side by side other things developers want. You know, our creators on Roblox, in addition to our internal teams, they want data storage. They want persistence. They want analytics. They want event storage. Where we're going with this is, you know, side by side with that, ML for Roblox is both what we use as well as what developers use at super scale. Roblox now has a chief scientist.
ML creation is a huge focus on that, and I think there are areas where we're using that way beyond where other companies are as far as like we talked about 3D object detection, code detection, and things like that. There's a bright future. As far as what's it take to build that 50,000-player photorealistic thing in the cloud, a couple advantages we have that would be very, very difficult if we were not incrementally building our own edge data centers. We're in a wonderful position with the learning we've done running everything through those computers. There's a wide range of technical innovations that are coming, shared memory, GPU in the cloud. We have a lot of options to put that together, so you'll be seeing that.
Just one final question. I appreciate your patience here. What categories of unstructured data do you use to power your growth recommender systems, your DNNs there, and your moderation systems?
Now we're getting into trouble for the CEO answering that one. I think Anupam is in the audience. I'm looking at him. Right when we're done, he could probably answer that better than me, so I don't wanna get in hot water there.
Sounds good. Thanks a lot, guys.
Okay. Thank you.
Hey.
Hey, Chris Pierce from Needham. Thanks for taking the question. Just curious, the conversations you're having with brands now, how do they measure the ROI on the platform, and how do you kind of guide them towards measuring ROI in the future on brand spend or when it moves into performance spend?
These are real-time discussions. We can probably have Christina talk to you, but we're building those systems right now, having those discussions right now. We really haven't launched anything meaningful yet. Those are the kinds of conversations that are happening literally as we are speaking.
We do hear of brands that we have been working with who are running various ways of user engagement, telling us they're moving it 100% to Roblox. There must be some rationale or logic between that. I think longer term attribution possibilities for shopping are absolutely enormous. Same thing with an experience like Vans, for example. We do know people in the real world, when they're walking, you know, in the region of a Vans store with their family, go in there and make purchases partially because of the engagement of that experience. I think Vans knows that. I think over time we're gonna find better and better ways to attribute that, and the more we can attribute that, there's an enormous possibility there.
When you say brands moving it to Roblox, is that taking it from another platform, or it's Roblox is becoming a new category of spend?
I would say anecdotally, you can talk to Christina about it. We'll see what she could share or not. I'm saying anecdotally, other forms of advertising or engaging with the community, some brands saying, "Look, I just wanna do it all on Roblox.
Thank you.
Yeah. Okay, I do not see any other questions. What I wanna just do is wrap up, and then we can all go have lunch, and then we will mingle with all of you. We wanna thank all of the online visitors as well, all of the small investors out there who might be watching us. I really wanted to get across this balance of innovation and execution at scale and doing both of them with an amazing team. I think in closing, I wanna thank everyone at Roblox. It's been a super busy two weeks. We just did RDC. We just did this. It covers way beyond everyone you've seen on stage to put this together. Two things. Thank you to the Roblox team, and thank you for all of our new investor partners that we're hanging out with today. Thank you, and we'll see you at lunch.