Roblox developer Roblox Corporation has released the platform’s financial information for the second quarter of the 2024 fiscal year, and it contains a rather concerning change to one of the company’s key spending metrics.
According to a shareholder letter included alongside the company’s latest financial summary, $121.9 million was spent on “infrastructure and trust & safety expenses”, down from the first quarter’s figure of $124.4 million and significantly lower than the same time period last year.
In the aforementioned shareholder letter, Roblox Corporation attributes the changes made to the trust and safety expenditure figure to “internal efficiency initiatives, the shift to AI-driven moderation which increased the accuracy of our safety and civility systems, and optimizing infrastructure”.
As Roblox Corporation points out, the Q2 2024 figure is around 8% lower than Q2 2023’s, and with the exception of the first quarter of 2024 (which only saw a slight increase), the company’s trust and safety spending has been falling for the last few quarters.
The company currently has a goal to grow by around 20% every year through 2027, and it’s hard not to see the cutting of the trust and safety spending as part of the rush to achieve that goal, even if Roblox itself attributes the lower figure to the aforementioned “internal efficiency initiatives”.
Some may also question the timing of Roblox lowering its trust and safety spending at a time when keeping Roblox users, a great many of whom are children, safe is of paramount importance.
As detailed in a recent Bloomberg report, Roblox has experienced problems with predators exploiting children on its platform, with over 13,000 reports of child exploitation on Roblox being submitted to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children last year alone.
That’s in addition to accusations that Roblox exploits child labor in order to make money, a claim that studio head Stefano Corazza disputes, claiming instead that his studio is “offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job”.
If you’re interested in how Roblox‘s finances are doing in a more general sense, revenue in the second quarter of 2024 grew by 31% on a year-over-year basis, while daily active users grew by 21% when compared to last year. You can check out a full rundown of Roblox‘s finances right here.
