00:02Hey, great to be here and what an enormous responsibility with 150 million users every day coming to the platform.
00:10We're rolling out what we believe will be the gold standard for the future of internet safety.
00:14We're the first really major gaming platform to use AI to estimate the age of everyone on the platform who wants to use chat and communicate.
00:25We're going to start rolling this out in December and then it'll be should be all rolled out by January.
00:31Basically, on whatever device you're on, take a quick image.
00:36We'll analyze your age with AI, complement it with a bunch of other signals and use that really to figure out who who might you be chatting with to keep the platform more safe.
00:47We're not going to be allowing minors, for example, to communicate with people who are adults.
00:53And we're going to roll it out to everyone on the platform.
00:56I'm really interested as to how you're going to measure success here, Dave, because in many ways you're trying to prove a negative.
01:02But how do you how are you going to be internally thinking this has worked?
01:06People are satisfied and they're safe.
01:09Well, I want to highlight things are already working in that we're a very unique platform in that we filter all of the text and communication on our platform.
01:19We don't allow the sharing of images. We have monitoring for critical harms.
01:25We work very closely with law enforcement.
01:28So I see this as an addition to everything we're doing and really to our vision of what we've been calling the gold standard.
01:37But we do estimate over the next few months we'll we'll know roughly the age of everyone on the platform and we'll complement that with some of the other things we do,
01:48like trusted connections and and things like that to constantly build on our innovation.
01:54You know, we've shipped over 100 safety innovations in the last year.
01:58So it's really a continuation of that focus.
02:01You're using a third party vendor persona, I believe.
02:04And how are you going to be ensuring that that's robust enough?
02:07The A.I., the underlying technology is robust enough over in the U.K.
02:10Well, some of them using Discord, for example, have managed to bypass previous facial recognition age verification tests.
02:17There's a bunch of other signals we have in addition to the facial age estimation.
02:22And we do have the ability to estimate several times if we need to.
02:28So so in addition to using the camera to do an age check, we have other ways to validate and putting all of these signals together,
02:36we believe is is pretty robust, really.
02:39What's so interesting is clearly you're here with safety as a priority.
02:43You did mention back in the earnings, your CFO in particular, that that maybe you'll see some friction.
02:48Maybe the numbers, the revenue, the growth might be impacted as people start to have to verify their age and maybe slower to come and adopt.
02:55Do you think that that will bear out?
02:56How will it look longer term?
02:58We shared this vision that we believe over 10 percent of the global gaming market,
03:03which is is somewhere between a 180 and 200 billion dollar market, is going to be running on Roblox.
03:10And in the in the earnings call we just had, we we shared this amazing growth,
03:14both on bookings and DAUs in the 70 percent year on year rate.
03:20Long term, we we believe this is just the right thing for the platform.
03:24We're unique in that we have all ages.
03:26We we have people under 13, over 13 or over 13 is growing rapidly.
03:32This is the right long term vision.
03:34And we're we're really optimistic about continuing our growth.
03:37OK, so this is the right balance from your perspective.
03:40What do you think the data will bear out as to the name?
03:44Well, ultimately, the actual ages of people you have using it.
03:47Do you think you'll have more under 13s you anticipated?
03:49Do you think you have more older users?
03:52We can't estimate that exactly.
03:55What I can say is that are the facial age estimation tech we're going to use is is pretty reasonable and pretty accurate.
04:01I've tried it.
04:02My some of my kids have tried it.
04:04We've tried it within our staff meeting.
04:06So I think we're going to find out we're reasonably close.
04:10But over time, we will get a better signal on everyone's age.
04:14And this must be something that marketers, that those that eventually will buy more ads with Roblox are going to be looking at.
04:21Is this going to help, well, inject some fuel to that offering?
04:25Because people will feel safer about what age group are going to be consuming such adverts.
04:30We have shared a couple of things.
04:32You know, we don't target under 18 already on the platform, but there's an enormous number of older users joining the platform.
04:41We shared in our earnings call, I believe, in Q4, like we're literally running at over 10 billion hours a month of engagement.
04:51That's an amazing amount of engagement.
04:53Our economy is primarily driven right now by our our virtual economy powered by Robux.
05:00But advertising is a wonderful complement.
05:02And you're right.
05:03We're going to have a better, more accurate estimate of everyone's age, which for a lot of our advertisers that are starting to hop on with events supporting all kinds of things, beauty products, movies, things like that.
05:16They'll have a better idea of really the number of people over 18 on our platform.
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