Welcome to the second quarter 2021 Roku Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today’s call is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Conrad Grodd, Vice President of Investor Relations.
Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Roku's second quarter 2021 earnings call. I'm joined today by Anthony Wood, Roku's founder and CEO, Steve Louden, our CFO, and Scott Rosenberg, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of our platform business, who will be available for Q&A. Full details of our results and additional management commentary are available in our shareholder letter, which can be found on our investor relations website at roku.com/investor. Our comments and responses to your questions on this call reflect management's views as of today only, and we disclaim any obligation to update this information. On this call, we'll make forward-looking statements which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events, such as statements regarding our financial outlook, future market conditions, and other expectations regarding the continued impact of COVID-19 on our business and industry.
These statements are based on our current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions and involve risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our shareholder letter and our periodic SEC filings for information on factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. We'll also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures on today's call. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in our shareholder letter. Finally, unless otherwise stated, all comparisons on this call will be against our results for the comparable period of 2020. Now, I'd like to hand the call over to Anthony.
Thank you, Conrad, and thanks to everyone for joining today's call. I am pleased to report that Roku delivered a strong second quarter with record revenue growth that was driven by exceptional performance in platform monetization. Audiences, content, and advertisers continue their shift to TV streaming around the globe. Roku is a key enabler of this long-term secular trend. This quarter, platform revenue exceeded half a billion dollars for the first time, driven by significant contributions from both content distribution and advertising activities. On the content front, we are seeing direct-to-consumer streaming services lean into our platform's effective merchandising tools. Also of note, at the recent upfront, we closed commitments with all seven major advertising agency holding companies. We had a great Q2, and we are well-positioned for the future. With that, let me hand the call over to Steve.
Thanks, Anthony. In Q2 2021, we exceeded our outlook for revenue, gross profit, and adjusted EBITDA, continued to make significant operational and financial progress. Before taking your questions, I'll walk through highlights and discuss our approach to outlook given the current level of macro uncertainty. We grew active accounts by 1.5 million in Q2, ending the quarter with 55.1 million. Q2 2021 net adds were higher than pre-COVID levels in Q2 2019. As expected, lower than the pandemic-related surge of Q2 2020. Sales of player units were relatively flat year-over-year. Average selling price decreased 2% year-over-year. Roku users streamed 17.4 billion hours in the quarter, an increase of nearly 19% year-over-year. Platform monetization accelerated with ARPU of $36.46 on a trailing 12-month basis, up 46% year-over-year.
Total Q2 revenue increased a record 81% year-over-year to $645.1 million. Platform segment revenue was up 117% year-over-year to $532.3 million, representing 83% of total revenue. While player revenue was relatively flat year-over-year, following the pandemic-driven demand spike in Q2 2020. Our key financial metric, gross profit, grew 130% year-over-year in Q2 to $338.3 million, resulting in gross margin of 52%. Player gross margin of -6% was lower than normal due to global supply chain issues, which are affecting logistics and component pricing. Platform gross margin of 65% was more than expected due to a favorable mix toward higher margin media and entertainment spend by content publishers.
Our strong revenue and gross profit performance allowed us to deliver a better-than-expected adjusted EBITDA of $122.4 million in Q2. Q2 OPEX was $269 million, up 42% year-over-year. We ended Q2 with approximately $2.1 billion of cash equivalents, restricted cash, and short-term investments. Our approach to outlook will be similar to the last few quarters, where we'll provide formal guidance for the next quarter and additional color on our longer-term view for the business. For the third quarter, our outlook calls for 51% year-over-year revenue growth to $680 million at the midpoint, and 49% year-over-year gross profit growth to $320 million.
We expect adjusted EBITDA of $65 million at the midpoint and net income of roughly $2 million, which includes stock-based comp of $52 million and $11 million of depreciation and amortization and net other income in the quarter. This robust growth is a result of the secular shift of viewers, content publishers, and advertisers to TV streaming, which we believe will continue to drive Roku's growth over the long term. Looking ahead to the rest of the year, let me offer three key observations. First, we will face tough year-over-year comps across our business in the second half of 2021 due to pandemic-related outperformance in the second half of 2020. Second, we will also face tough comps within the year-over-year growth rates of our active accounts and streaming hours given last year's demand spike.
Third, the secular trend towards streaming remains intact, and we will benefit from our strong position as the shift to TV streaming continues. I'll now provide some additional color on each of these items. First, regarding tough year-over-year comps in the player and Platform Business segment. In our player business, we expect particularly tough year-over-year comps in Q3, given the surge in sales in the prior year period. In addition, while we're actively managing our supply chain, we're assuming increasing negative player gross margins during the second half of the year. Turning to our Platform Business, the mix shift in TV ad budgets to streaming, combined with the launch of multiple new premium DTC services in the second half of 2020, resulted in exceptional growth in our platform revenue during that period. While this will create tough year-over-year comps in the second half of 2021, we still expect robust growth.
Second, regarding tough year-over-year comps in active accounts and streaming hours. In 2020, pandemic-related lockdowns drove a surge in active accounts and engagement. For example, active accounts and streaming hours grew nearly 80% and 100% respectively from Q2 2019 to Q2 2021. A surge in streaming player and smart TV sales in 2020 contributed to this growth. In 2021, we expect the overall U.S. smart TV market to shrink on a year-over-year basis as OEMs manage supply chain challenges. Third, regarding our strong market position. Overall, Roku remains very well positioned to benefit from the long-term secular trend of audiences, content, and advertisers shifting to TV streaming around the globe. Roku has been a leader in enabling the shift to TV streaming advertising and is benefiting as streaming ad spend increases.
We remain optimistic about our ability to grow over time, given the significant size of the opportunity ahead and the early stage of monetization to date. I'll summarize by saying how pleased we are with the performance of the business and the strong momentum we are seeing across the broader streaming landscape that benefits Roku. With that, let's turn the call over for questions. Operator?
Thank you. Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, then one on your touchtone telephone. Again, to ask a question, please press star, then one. One moment, please. Our first question comes from Justin Patterson of KeyBanc. Your line is open.
Great. Thank you. Two, if I can. First, could you unpack the drivers around ARPU growth in more detail, please? Second, could you talk about learnings from the upfront? It sounds like there was some healthy growth of new advertisers there. Curious to hear more about, you know, who's coming here that you didn't have before and how we should think about just that upfront strength trending into second half of the year. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Shweta Khajuria of Evercore ISI. Your line is open.
Hold on, [crosstalk] operator.
Hi. I think the prior.
Oh
analyst had a question.
Yeah, yeah.
if you want to go to him.
Anthony was on mute. He's
Yeah, sorry. I was.
That was actually the first question. I was on mute.
Yeah.
Okay.
Hey, Justin, thanks for that. This is Anthony. I'll turn it over to Steve and Scott in a second, but let me just say that, you know, ARPU obviously is a function of active accounts and platform revenue, and both grew nicely in the quarter. You know, platform revenue in particular passed half a billion dollars. You know, was the key driver of our Q2 record revenue growth. You know, we're just seeing strong interest in advertisers starting to follow their viewers to streaming. That's one of the drivers. We're also seeing, you know, the launch of all these new direct-to-consumer streaming services, you know, are becoming popular, and we're a great platform for merchandising, promoting, and distributing those services. Both of those are contributing, you know, to our overall platform revenue growth. Steve, did you wanna add anything about ARPU drivers?
Just on ARPU drivers, then Scott can talk about the upfront. ARPU on a trailing 12-month basis was over $36, and that was up 46% year-over-year. That's actually the growth in ARPU has been accelerating over the last three or four quarters, which is great to see. Really that's broad-based increases in the monetization. You know, we had strong quarter in both the advertising side as budgets follow the viewers and advertisers start to prioritize more of the shift to streaming and follow the viewership. As well as Anthony mentioned, strong competition, especially now that pretty much every legacy media company has shifted focus to their DTC services.
We're seeing strong uptake in use of our media and entertainment tools, that was a notable thing we mentioned in Q2. The combination of these things, you know, continue to drive the ARPU up and just show the strength of our monetization efforts. I'll turn it over to Scott to talk about the upfronts.
Yeah. Hey, Justin. Regarding your question about the upfronts, it was a pretty transformative upfront season for us. We closed it several months earlier than we have over the last couple of years concurrent with traditional TV networks. I think that's an indication that streaming has arrived as a first-class citizen in the, you know, way brands think about allocating their annual budgets. We closed deals with all seven major agency holding companies and more than doubled commitments in terms of the dollar basis. This is driven by a couple things. One of them is secular. It's definitely coming out of the pandemic increased urgency by marketers to follow audiences, especially amidst steep ratings declines. Nielsen reported a 29% decline among adults 18 to 49 year-over-year.
It's also a function of our scale and our capabilities, including OneView, which played a pretty prominent role, our ad platform, our DSP, and our data. This upfront season as well, our ability to offer originals, exclusive content, the performance of that content in the time since, as well as our new brand, branded content studio offering really resonated with brands. It not just brought in a significant uptick in dollars and earlier commitments, it also brought in a significant new set of advertisers who had not yet committed with us in the upfront. Over 42% of our advertisers were first time upfront advertisers with Roku. Overall, we're extremely pleased with how we did in the upfront and also think it's a good harbinger for how we'll perform throughout the year during the scatter period. Thanks for the question.
Thank you. Our next question is from Shweta from Evercore ISI. Your line is open.
Okay. Thank you. Let me try two, please. One is, could you provide some context on The Roku Channel? Any way you could quantify the impact of The Roku Channel in terms of dollar contribution growth and how we should think about the scale and size of that? Second is on what's the breakup of brand and performance marketing spend you're seeing, and how do you think that will shift over time with the impact of OneView? Thank you.
Hey, Shweta. This is Anthony. On The Roku Channel, you know, that's a obviously a very successful product for us. It's doing extremely well. It's our owned and operated streaming service that's primarily free, ad-supported . It's definitely benefiting from, you know, this virtuous cycle of viewers seeking out free content, advertisers following viewers, and us reinvesting the revenue back into better and better content. That's creating this virtuous cycle that's growing extremely fast. It's a big, you know, it's a big driver of our P&L. It's a great source of ad revenue for us, sorry, ad inventory for us as our ad business grows. You know, and it's doing well.
In terms of the specifics of how it's affecting the size of our business, I'm not sure if we've broken that out. Steve, did you want to add anything to that? No. In performance marketing, Scott could talk about that.
Yeah. Hi, Shweta. I'll just tag on to Anthony's comments about TRC, about The Roku Channel, and say that it's had an amazing quarter. It's been growing leaps and bounds. It more than doubled in terms of streaming hours year-over-year. It's growing much faster than the overall platform and even the AVOD, the ad-supported segments overall. As a result, it is taking on increased prominence, increased importance over time just as a supply source for our video advertising. As Anthony alluded to, it's also a place where we can innovate, where we can create new ad units, new ad experiences in a way that are not feasible when we're placing ads into third-party channels on our platform.
With regards to your question about performance advertising, it's true that a majority of our advertising is still, you know, your traditional TV top funnel brand advertiser. The performance segment, what we call internally our growth advertising segment, nearly tripled year-over-year. It's coming on strong, and it's really a function of the fact that as a platform with a first-party customer relationship, rich data, great ad tech, we can deliver for performance outcome-oriented advertisers, the kinds of outcomes that they seek when they're investing in search and social. That's a segment we're very bullish on. We're competing in that case for budgets outside of traditional TV budgets, and there's a whole new adjunct to our growth opportunity.
We've got some great case studies of brands like Smartwool, where they used OneView to combine both a streaming advertising strategy and a desktop and mobile advertising strategy. The one-two punch of combining those two media delivered a 72% increase in site visits.
Another brand used our data to also target across both desktop and streaming and drove over 200% increase in conversion rates to mobile app downloads. Right there you have two examples of case studies where brands are using our tools exactly as we intended it. They're exploiting the fact that we've got that deep first-party relationship on the biggest screen in the home, and then they're combining it together with our ability to help place ads on a multi-channel basis in desktop and mobile to deliver a bigger outcome. Just to step back there, we're just very bullish on the opportunity in performance, the performance advertising segment in addition to our competing for traditional TV ad dollars.
Okay. Thank you, Anthony. Thanks, Scott.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Cory Carpenter of JPMorgan. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks for the question. Just maybe for Steve, and Anthony, given the response to your original content thus far, could you talk about how this informs your thinking around your content strategy going forward? Does it make you want to potentially get more aggressive? Then maybe for Steve specifically, you know, how should we think about this impacting platform gross margins, maybe both in the near and long term? Thanks.
Hey, Cory, this is Anthony. Just a reminder, the, you know, The Roku Channel is an ad, primarily ad-supported offering that we make to our customers and, you know, the content that goes in that channel comes primarily from licensing. We've got, you know, a large number of licensing partners. We license both sort of deep back catalog content as well as newer, you know, more expensive content. There's a whole range of content that we license short-term and long-term deals in place there. We're also, as the scale of that platform grows, and as the number of viewers grow, and the number of advertisers grow, we're able to invest in better and better content. It's a portfolio approach, and the Roku Originals are part of that portfolio.
You know, the primary source of content is still licensing, but originals have benefits as well. And as part of the portfolio, you know, they're a great addition. We're seeing good performance with our originals, both the Quibi originals that we purchased from Quibi, and then also, you know, we bought This Old House as well. And we'll keep investing in originals both, you know, from a variety of sources. For example, we just recently renewed some of the Quibi originals that we purchased, like Kevin Hart's Die Hart. But the goal overall is to, you know, to maintain a business model that works for us in terms of an AVOD business model.
You shouldn't see any impact on, from The Roku Channel expanding into originals on our gross margins because the overall portfolio, we're maintaining the same, you know, the same margin structure that we have internally. The other advantage of the originals is, of course, there's a halo effect, so it's helpful with the upfront, it's helpful with, you know, our advertising business. It's helpful for bringing in new customers into The Roku Channel as well. I don't know, Steve, if you wanted to add anything or if I covered it.
No, I think you hit all the marks, so I guess I'll need to find a new CFO gig.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson. Your line is open.
Hey. Thanks. I have one for Anthony, and then Steve, I have one for you. I'll get a question to you. Anthony, on the Alphabet call, I asked the CEO, Sundar Pichai, about their vision for Android TV, and he described, you know, wanting to make Android TV more of a computing platform. Sounds like they want to include gaming and a really robust, you know, e-ecosystem. I wonder how does your vision compare to maybe what Google wants to do? Broadly bring it back to the current dispute you have with YouTube and whether or not there's any closer resolution to that. Steve, a quick number from you. You guys usually tell us The Roku Channel number of people reached. It wasn't in the press release. You haven't said so far. That's a question that hopefully you can answer today. Thanks.
hey, Michael. Thanks. I'm glad you got a question for Steve.
Yes. Thank you.
Let's see. You know, our vision, you know, we've been competing with large companies, including Google, you know, in our space for since we started. We compete extremely well. You know, the primary difference in the way we compete versus Google is that we built from the beginning a software platform designed specifically for TV. Whereas they take their phone operating system, Android, and they port it to TVs. If you look at the history of computing platforms, whether it's Windows on PCs or Android on phones, or Roku on TVs, purpose-built operating systems have always won in terms of market share. It's because, you know, when you build something from the ground up for a new user environment, for new business models, it's just more effective.
That's really the kind of where the source of our competitive advantage has come from, it's working well for us and has worked historically. You know, we compete extremely well. We're the number one streaming platform in the U.S. by a pretty wide margin. It's really those advantages that accrue from having a purpose-built platform. For example, you know, the cost structure of a TV is really important. TVs are super price competitive, and how much it costs to build a TV is very important in terms of market share because it affects the price you can sell the TV for. You know, we've put a lot of reference in making our software platform run with less memory and smaller chips than our competitors.
Right now, for example, you know, although the entire industry is suffering from the supply chain issues and the shortage of chips and the related increases in pricing, it's impacting us less than others because we use less memory than all our competitors' products, for example. You know, I think our vision is that most TVs are gonna run a licensed operating system, that we are the leader in that and we'll maintain that leadership by being very focused in building the only purpose-built operating system for TVs. That's what we do. In terms of YouTube, I'll let Scott take that one.
I'll answer that question, but let's make sure to get a question back to Steve, since we know. We really don't have new information to provide on the YouTube situation. You know, just as a reminder, this is not a carriage dispute. We're not seeking more money or economics in this relationship. We want Google to agree not to try and dictate search behaviors on Roku or access data we don't make available to others or require hardware or software changes to our platform that would harm our competitiveness with other competing platforms, including their own Chromecast. We think these are pretty fair and reasonable asks. We're working to resolve it in a way that's good for Roku and consumers and Google, but we don't have a resolution today. Steve, you wanna take your part of the question?
Ironic 'cause TRC reach is more of a Scott question, but I'll do my best Scott impression here. In terms of TRC reach, TRC continues to grow nicely. As others said, you know, the streaming hours doubled year-over-year there again, which is great. We didn't update the reach number. It didn't hit a particularly different milestone, that's kind of why we didn't add that. In general, TRC continues to do well. The other thing to mention just on TRC, the content, you know, the flywheel just continues to be very good, right? More content, we talked about Roku Originals driving more engagement, which drives more advertisers, which then in turn gives us more money to invest in more content and fuel continued increase in scale and growth. Yeah, we're very happy with the reach and the growth of TRC.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Ruplu Bhattacharya of Bank of America. Your line is open.
Hi. Thank you for taking my questions. I have two. The first one relates to active account growth and international expansion. Roku had strong active account growth last year. I think you grew active accounts 14.3 million. That's, you know, a tough compare, sort of, for this year. At the same time, you're expanding internationally. Do you have a sense for how much of the active account growth this year can come from international expansion? What's a reasonable level of penetration that we should expect over this year and next year in key markets like U.K., and Brazil that you're targeting? Overall, how do you measure success in international expansion?
This is Anthony. I'll take that in terms of, you know, our international expansion. I mean, obviously streaming is a global business. The U.S. is ahead of most countries. There's still room to grow in the U.S., and there's even more room to grow internationally in terms of active accounts, and I'll come back to that. I mean, the other way we grow is not just active accounts. We also grow by increasing the monetization on existing accounts. You know, a big difference between a company like Roku and a subscription service is that subscription services' active accounts correlate directly to revenue. You know, Roku's is growing and investing in building the monetization on a per-customer basis just as much as we are on growing our active accounts.
Actually, I mean, in places like the U.S., there's a tremendous amount of room to continue to grow ARPU, and that'll be a big driver of growth as well as active accounts. In terms of growing active accounts globally, you know, it's the strategy we're using is the same that worked for us well in the U.S., which is to focus on building active accounts. Well, in terms of our business model internationally is to focus on building active accounts, engaging those users, and then monetizing those users. You know, the way we are building active accounts is through selling our streaming players and licensing our operating system to TV manufacturers and coming to market with Roku TVs. Both of those are working well for us. We're starting to see, we're definitely seeing success there.
For example, we are already the number one operating system in Canada. You know, things are going well in Brazil, India, and Mexico. In the U.K., we just launched a TV with TCL, a new TCL Roku TV, increasing the number of OEMs that are selling Roku TVs in the U.K. ,That TV is getting excellent reviews. It just got a five-star review, so that's going well. We just announced that we'll be launching products in Germany soon as well. You know, we're gonna continue to build out regions that we're in and go deeper in the regions that we're already in.
Okay. Thanks for all the details on that, Anthony. That's, that's helpful. Maybe for my follow-up, wanted to ask you about the new brand studio that you have. How many advertisers are making use of it now? Can you talk about, like, what type of programs or commercials is it producing? Is there a way to quantify the revenue benefit from having the studio and just the overall reception that you've seen so far?
Sure. Scott, do you want to talk about the brand studio?
Yeah, I'll take that. Thanks for the question. A couple things. One is, we have been doing some form of sponsorships or innovations with advertisers for several years now. Earlier this year, we acquired a team out of Funny or Die to really upsize, to supersize that so that we could not just produce new executions off of our home screen that were sponsored by brands, but also produce content that, you know, in partnership with advertisers. I would say it's got a double effect, in direct answer to your question. One is a revenue effect. There's no question that as brands come and invest with us, that they're being driven primarily by the ability to target and measure and optimize all the benefits of streaming advertising relative to traditional TV. They're also looking for breakout executions.
An execution, for example, that would reach a viewer who maybe in that session isn't going to watch an ad-supported stream. They're gonna go into Netflix or some other ad-free experience. We're still early in that production exercise, but it's going very well. We just launched a show called The Show Next Door featuring Randall Park with Maker's Mark, where he mixes up a Maker's Mark cocktail at the start of the show and then brings in a bunch of comedian and athlete friends for a casual conversation. You know, that's a quick-hit kind of production that's totally aligned with their brand, and it's a fun format. It's valuable for consumers. That's exactly the kind of experience that we aim to be able to produce.
A bigger production, you know, and something that I think, you know, is a perfect fit for who Roku is our Roku Recommends show. It's a topical weekly show where we review top five shows of the last week. That's performing extremely well. Right down the middle of the kind of thing a consumer might expect from Roku, and also a highly sponsorable experience. Walmart was our launch sponsor there. You know, what I'd say about the brand studio is it has a direct economic impact. It makes our deal sizes bigger, but it also has a halo effect because it brings in a lot of brands.
It reinforces our client direct relationships because it's often the CMO, the client himself or herself who is driving the creative execution as opposed to a pure media execution, which often originates out of the ad agency. Overall, great progress with the brand studio. We're very excited about it.
Okay. Thanks for all the details. Appreciate it, Scott.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Steven Cahall of Wells Fargo. Your line is open.
Thanks. I was wondering if we could dive into ARPU and hours a little bit. I think the streaming hours per account was about 3.6 per day in the quarter. That's ahead of 2019. It's below the last four quarters or so. Obviously, the pandemic really skewed things in the last four quarters. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about what the trend might be there. Is there more live sports coming back? Is that a bit of a mixed headwind for you if folks are using their cable box a little more? Maybe just unpacking the streaming hours per account would be helpful. You know, the flip side is the ARPU, which was really strong in the quarter. I have it up about 66% year-over-year per account.
If people are watching, you know, no more, but the dollars are going up, then that says to me that there is either some pricing going on there or more The Roku Channel or an effective CPM that's really strong. So maybe if you could just help us unpack the trends in ARPU a little bit, that would be helpful. Thank you.
This is hey, this is Anthony. In terms of streaming hours, you know, you're right. The, you know, because of all the variability around the pandemic and year-over-year stats, we saw the industry saw, television overall saw a 19% decline year-over-year in viewership. Our viewing was up 19%, well ahead of, you know, the overall industry. We're very happy with that. That even compares favorably to streaming as a whole. Streaming, all platforms was down 2% in terms of streaming hours. You know, I think the big picture for me is that we're still in the middle of this transition where viewers, advertisers, and the industry is moving 100% to streaming.
We're just not there yet, but, you know, it's moving and it's happening. One stat I think that's interesting from Nielsen is that if you look at 18 to 35-year-olds, 39% of their TV watching is streaming. You know, that means that still the majority of TV is traditional TV, and that's all gonna move to streaming. You know, and our viewers are a combination of cord cutters and people that have, you know, traditional paid TV subscriptions as well as, you know, streaming obviously. You know, I would say just in summary, we performed well in the quarter relative to the market and our peers, and that there's a lot of room to grow still. In terms of ARPU, I don't know, Scott or Steve, if you wanna touch on that.
Hey, this is Scott. I'll let Steve talk about ARPU, but I just wanted to tag on to your comment about streaming hours. you know, I think the right way to think about this is we, Steven, is we took share. That as Anthony said, the slowdown was more of a secular trend in TV, and we grew even while-
Yeah
traditional TV shrank and streaming shrank. We grew. We took share. The other thing to think about is the average U.S. household still does about seven hours of TV viewing a day. We're only around half, and the other 50% is gonna go completely to streaming. I wouldn't interpret this secular transition as anything other than people getting out after a year and a half in the pandemic. On the whole, it's been good for Roku.
Yeah
we took share. Steve, you wanna address the ARPU question?
Yeah, sure. Just on the ARPU. Yeah, you quoted 66% year-over-year growth in ARPU. That's on a quarterly basis. On a trailing 12-month basis that 46% year-over-year. Either way, it's accelerating, which is a great indicator that, you know, the world is moving to streaming and that the monetization is still early days. You know, Anthony talked about the viewership levels to streaming, you know, are being strong and that's at about 39% of key demographic viewing is. The truth is the advertising budgets are well behind that, right?
With the pandemic, they found sort of a new focus on mixing into streaming, because not only that's where the viewers are increasingly watching, but also the fact that they're now held to a higher standard in terms of demonstrating ROI for their TV spend, which you can do on Roku and other streaming platforms. That's an important distinction on that front. When you look at what's driving that, advertising dollars moving over, that's a positive indicator. The advertising business has grown. Has been growing tremendously. We had another quarter where we more than doubled year-over-year on a Roku monetized video ad impression. Also, competition on the service side, right?
The legacy media companies, pretty much all of them have a focus in DTC services, there's increasing use of Roku tools, our media and entertainment tools, to help drive viewership and engagement on their services. That's another thing that's increasing the monetization. We're very happy with those trends. That favors Roku kind of in that middle of that shift. You know, given our scale and our industry-leading tools, we'll be a beneficiary of those trends.
Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Shyam Patil of SIG. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. I had a couple questions. Steve, I had one for you. You talked a lot about active accounts and streaming hours, you know, kind of on a year-over-year basis. I was just wondering if you could talk to them on a sequential basis. Just, you know, should we see growth in active accounts sequentially in 3Q and 4Q? If so, how much? Maybe that might be easier for modeling externally. Just a broader question. You know, there continue to be a lot of privacy changes for digital advertising overall, but it seems like CTV is, you know, one of the areas that's not impacted by that.
Just wondering if that's becoming a tailwind or a consideration in conversations, with advertisers, you know, right now, and if you expect that to become more pronounced going forward. Thank you.
Steve, you wanna take that?
Yeah, I can take this.
Maybe turn it over to Scott for the privacy question.
Sure. Yeah, no, good question on the streaming hours and active accounts. As we mentioned in the letter and my prepared remarks that certainly, given the pandemic surge in demand and engagement last year, you know, we've got some kind of challenging year-over-year comps, not only on those key operating metrics you asked about, but also on certain parts of the P&L, depending on the quarter. I do think, looking at it sequentially, looking at those metrics relative to pre-COVID levels is probably more informative in the short term. You know, starting with active accounts, you know, we grew the active account base by 1.5 million active accounts in Q2, up over 55 million.
That's as expected below the comparison in what we grew last Q2 given the surge in demand, but it's favorable to the increase in Q2 2029. I think that's, you know, that's a good comp there. In terms of streaming hours, similarly, you know, as mentioned earlier in the call year, we're at 3.5 hours, 3.6 hours per streaming account per day, which again is kind of in line or slightly favorable to the pre-COVID levels. You know, that's kind of where we more where we would expect to be as things get back to normal. Again, apologies, I think I might have said 2029. I meant Q2 2019. I'm not a soothsayer.
Clairvoyant.
the future. Yeah. Anyway, back to that. I think looking back to those pre-COVID levels is probably very instructive as we look ahead here in the interim. Certainly, there's a lot of uncertainty still around in the macro environment around recovery and the economy open up or the Delta variant taking hold and kind of putting us back a step. You know, I think looking at the pre-COVID levels and understanding that the year-over-year comparisons are a bit challenged here for another few quarters at least is an important perspective. I'll turn it over to Scott now for the other piece.
Hey, Shyam. Let me take the privacy question. I'd say is that it is definitely a more challenging environment for marketers, for independent ad tech, for small publishers who don't have a first-party direct consumer relationship as cookies get more scarce, as regulators make use of consumer data harder, as companies like Apple make moves to make device IDs harder to access. I would not characterize that as a tailwind for CTV generally, but rather a benefit or an advantage for platforms and services like Roku, who's got a first-party relationship. It's our strongest advantage when working with a marketer that we know are consumers. We can onboard their data, we can target more precisely, measure, drive more impact. That's not the case for independent ad tech for entities who don't have that direct consumer relationship.
I would definitely say that we're less effective relative to those entities because of this privileged direct consumer relationship that we've got.
Great. Thank you, guys.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Alan Gould of Loop Capital. Your line is open.
Yeah. Thanks for the question. Scott, I was wondering if you could drill down a little bit as to how much of the revenue, platform revenue is coming from the streaming companies or how quickly the streaming companies in aggregate are growing. Just any more data on how much of the 100+% growth we're getting from the streamers. Thank you.
Yeah. We had a very, very robust quarter for the platform business, and it owes to strong performance on both the content and advertising activities of the business. Just taking it in parts, most of our big streaming service providers are still relatively early in their growth, they're still acquiring consumers heavily. They're investing heavily with us and taking advantage of our scale and our marketing tools to acquire users. We definitely saw good strength in terms of not just the revenue shares that we derive from those relationships, but also their investments in marketing, purchases of buttons. The media and entertainment vertical in particular, which is the advertising segment of our business where we're selling marketing products to our content providers, more than tripled year-over-year. It's a very strong segment.
We also, we had a very, very strong traditional advertising quarter as well, with strength from large what we call our large customer segment, Fortune 500 type advertisers. There was a question earlier in the call, we're also seeing really great strength from performance or growth advertisers as well. That category for us, which is still a smaller part of our overall ad business, more than tripled or nearly tripled year over year. You know, I'd just say that broadly there was strength across the board, but our content vertical was particularly robust in especially the M&E segment.
This is Anthony. I would just add that I would characterize both areas, content distribution and advertising, as still relatively early compared to the potential of those businesses. There's a lot of room to grow. I would also say that, like, you know, from the point of view of someone who's in it day to day, that it's gratifying that both of those customers have kind of switched their attitudes recently from, you know, experimental thinking about it to all in, like we need to get serious about this. Which is great to see.
Okay. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Anthony.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason Helfstein of Oppenheimer.
Thanks, a few. I guess that, you know, there's obviously increased focus on any change in the active accounts or any kind of slowdown. You know, just maybe talk about your ability to kind of drive hours. I mean, clearly, it's the counterbalance between you purchase more content for The Roku Channel, presumably you can then drive more hours, and then you get dollars and kind of balancing that. Maybe talk about like, even if U.S. active accounts were to slow, how much you still have with kind of, again, driving hours and then monetizing. I don't I just did anybody ask a 606 question? Steve, do you want to comment on, you know, relative to the first quarter, there was more or less 606 impact? Maybe last, any thoughts about how the Olympics will impact you in the third quarter? Thanks.
Let me start with that and then Steve can jump in for 606 discussion. You know, I would say just first of all on active accounts, I mean, they're You know, we've hit 55 million active accounts, which is a proxy for a household. If you look at the potential market, it's just huge. I mean, there's 1 billion households around the world that have broadband and watch TV. All of those households are going to transition over time to streaming for all their TV. The way they're gonna get it, I think ultimately will be embedded in their TVs. You know, the real question is market share for smart TVs, and we're the number one.
In the U.S., we're number one. In the markets we're entering, we're doing extremely well. I would say it's still lots of potential for active accounts. In terms of our ability to drive hours, it's a core competency that we continue to build out. You know, it's really one of the primary goals of our home screen experience is to help consumers find content, influence what content they watch, be a trusted partner with our viewers in finding content. I think a good example. We have a lot of ability to do that. We view it actually as important that we help our viewers find content.
For example. You know, with the Olympics, we spent the six months prior to the Olympics working with NBC to build out into our home screen an Olympic hub as a way to help viewers find out, you know, when do the Olympics start? How do I watch the Olympics? What's happening? How do I get highlights? Just to make it easy for our viewers to find content. That, you know, that hub is getting a lot of use. It's doing extremely well. You know, there's just lots of ways like that where we can become more important and want to become more trusted with our viewers in helping them decide what to watch. Wonderful. Hopefully that helps you answer the question. 606, Steve.
Yeah. six. Yeah. Hey, Jason. Steve. Yeah, thank you for keeping our tradition alive with the 606 related question. Nothing of particular note this quarter on 606. As a reminder for everyone, the 606, we have a portfolio of material deal models. Every quarter we look at that, we update our assumptions. You know, if there are new services or, you know, specific terms have changed on a deal we've renewed, you know, that would be a case to, you know, update the model or create a new model. In the quarters where we talk about the 606 impact, you know, it's usually a quarter where you've had some kind of change in assumption or some other factor that created a large increase in deal models across the portfolio.
In a standard quarter, we have deal values that go up, we have deal models that go down, and then many stay relatively the same. This is one quarter where there's nothing particular to note.
Thank you.
Steve, do you wanna also address the question about Olympics affecting Q3?
I can take it.
Okay. Scott.
Unless you really want it, Steve. All right. Well, look, I do think, you know, Olympics is a key TV driver generally. We'll have to see how it affects overall viewing. It's certainly been on 24/7 in my household. You know, as Anthony said, I think the thing we're proudest of is our execution together with NBC, and it's really indicative of the kinds of things that Roku can uniquely provide to drive viewership and increase consumption and streaming.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason Bazinet of Citi. Your line is open.
Thanks. You guys called out how the chip shortages and supply chain issues impacted player gross margins and will continue in the future. I just wonder, is there any scope for that to ripple over and affect sort of active account growth? In other words, could the shortage get so acute it actually affects a metric that people care about as opposed to gross margin?
Sure.
Thanks.
Yeah. You wanna take that, Steve?
Yeah, sure. In terms of the supply chain issues, I mean, certainly since the pandemic started, the industry and Roku have been dealing with some, you know, component shortages. Especially recently, component price increases have seemed to accelerate. Our supply chain and operations team have done a really good job over time, you know, minimizing those impacts. Certainly, you know, last quarter on the call we mentioned as part of our outlook that we thought that given the cost increases that our player gross margin would go negative, which it did. It was -6% gross margin per player in the quarter. We said we think that will increase in the back half.
And certainly this is an industry issue, this is not only impacting us, but competitors on the player side, but also on the TV side. You know, there was a strong surge in TV sales last year. Some of the industry research firms are assuming that those number, you know, the smart TV market is gonna go down year over year. Certainly many TV OEMs, whether they're Roku TV, are, you know, because it's a low margin business, are pushing forward those price increase, those cost increases into price increases that, you know, are testing the elasticity demand. Certainly these kind of conditions do not help the industry in terms of driving, you know, player and TV sales forward. That is something that we're factoring in.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. The last question comes from the line of Rich Greenfield of LightShed Partners. Your line is open.
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. You know, I guess two questions. One on sort of as you become more of a, you know, I'm gonna use John Malone's word for Roku, sort of more and more of a gatekeeper to sort of the streaming world. Curious how you think about ultimately being able to get subscription revenue, sort of a fee for usage or a fee for being on the platform. It seems like nobody can sort of be in the streaming world without being on Roku, as evidenced by all the deals you were able to get done over the last couple of years. Then sort of on a different topic, it sort of relate to this whole streaming world topic that I'm pushing on.
When you think about sort of the media and entertainment spending that was called out in your investor letter. How do you think about the sustainability of that? I mean, we're seeing a lot of, a lot of platforms spending a lot. I mean, you're not the only one to call it out. Twitter did too on their conference call. We are seeing a tremendous amount of spending and wondering like, I think investors are sort of curious like whether this can be sustained in terms of how much they're spending to acquire subs. Are you thinking that's repeatable over the next couple of years, or do you think that gets more challenging? Thanks.
Hey, Rich. Great to hear from you. Last but not least. You know, I wouldn't characterize us as a gatekeeper. I'm hesitant to even say that word out loud. I mean, you know, we exist in a very competitive industry. We have lots of big, huge competitors. Consumers have lots of choice, you know? Not just Roku, but they have choice of Samsung, Google, Amazon and so forth. We're very confident in our ability to compete, but, you know, it's a competitive industry. In terms of, like charging for access to Roku, I mean, I don't That's just not the way we think about it. We think about it as distributing people's content in a partnership, in a win-win type situation type deal.
How do we help them build customer base, customers, build subscription bases, you know, increase engagement? How do we participate in that success when we achieve it? You know, we're focused on structuring deals that result in more viewers watching streaming from a variety of services, and us participating in the economics of that by being really good at it and bringing a lot of value to the table. That's kind of how we think about it. You know, I guess the other, that's on the M&E side.
I mean, you know, obviously advertising is a huge part of our business as viewers switch to streaming, all ads are moving to streaming and, you know, it's a huge, a hugely large business that we're very focused on. That's gonna keep growing. I don't, I don't know if Steve or Scott, if you had any other specific answers.
Yeah, this is Scott. Great question, Rich. I would just add to that the suggestion of a gatekeeper term suggests a one and done kind of relationship. As Anthony just highlighted, the success of these services and our ability to earn alongside them is an ongoing exercise. It's not just about acquiring a user, it's about retaining a user, especially as these services get big. Shifting the frame to not just user acquisition, but also retention is critical. It's also a global market. Yeah, I do think that we're in a phase where there's very heavy investment, but I also am bullish on the long-term potential to partner with these services to continue to drive and retain viewership in their services.
Scott, I think that's an incredible point that probably doesn't get enough focus. When you think about the user acquisition spend versus the re-engagement spend, is there any way that like when you made that comment about sort of the robust growth substantially outpacing the overall platform revenue growth, is there any way to think about how much of that spend now is coming from re-engagement versus sub-acquisition?
Well, look, I'll say it's still relatively modest. Most of these service providers are still very much in user acquisition mode. But it becomes critical as you know, you just run the math. If you lose 5% of your users monthly and you hit 10 million subs, that's what? 500,000 users you gotta acquire just to replace the users you've lost. Some of this is just the scale problems. I think, you know, our partners are bringing more focus to it. It's an area where we can certainly help. We've talked about the Olympics execution here a couple times.
It's executions like that that don't just get the user to sign up for the service, but get them to keep coming back and seeing the value in the service, so when that monthly bill hits, they don't cancel the service. That's critical. We've got a great tool set to help there to predict churn, to predict what's going to engage a user, and we're bringing more attention to it with our content partners.
Thank you very much.
I guess my one last comment is I think I've been a little surprised about the willingness of consumers to sign up for multiple streaming services. There was a big question, you know, about how, you know, will these streaming services all survive? How many will survive? I don't think we know the answers to that, but I do think we're seeing consumers interested in more than just one or two streaming services, willing to sign up for those multiple services, still save money versus what they're spending on pay TV.
Pay TV is expensive.
Indeed. Yeah.
Not very good. Sorry, that was an editorial.
That was a Rich opinion.
Thanks, Anthony.
Thank you. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Anthony Wood for any closing remarks.
I would like to thank our employees, customers, and partners for an excellent quarter. We believe our competitive advantages and the broad secular trends that have driven our growth continue to position us for success. Thanks for joining us today.