Roku (ROKU) stock fell more than 17% on Thursday after the company’s fourth quarter guidance disappointed, despite the media player reporting its first quarter of $1 billion in revenue.
For the current quarter, the company estimated gross profit to hit $465 million, with adjusted EBITDA expected at $30 million. Both metrics fell below Wall Street expectations of $477 million in gross profit and $36.2 million in adjusted EBITDA.
The company also said it will stop reporting streaming households as a key performance metric, echoing a similar move from streaming giant Netflix (NFLX), which will no longer report subscriber figures at the start of next year.
Instead, Roku said it will focus on streaming hours, platform revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow beginning in the first quarter of 2025.
“Since our IPO in 2017, the streaming industry has evolved meaningfully, with Americans now spending significantly more TV time streaming than watching cable,” Roku said in its earnings release. “Our business has also grown and evolved, and we are now primarily focused on growing platform revenue and profitability.”
Prior to Wednesday’s release, shares had rallied more than 30% over the past three months on expectations of a strong ad market and upside to platform revenue growth.
It’s a critical shift for the company, which underwent a number of cost-cutting measures last year in an effort to bring down operating expenses and improve profits. Roku has recently committed to various monetization initiatives, which have included a deeper integration with programmatic advertising giant the Trade Desk (TTD).
Roku said those efforts, along with tailwinds from political ad spend, will “continue in Q4.”
In the third quarter, Roku reported net revenue of $1.1 billion, up 16% year over year, with a net loss of $65 million, or $0.06 a share. That quarterly net loss was significantly narrower than the $0.33 loss Wall Street expected, as well as the prior-year period’s $2.33 quarterly loss.
Platform revenue, which includes ad sales, revenue from distribution deals, and the over-the-top streaming service, the Roku Channel, came in at $908 million, up 15% on the year.
The boom was driven by strength in advertising sales, content distribution, and expansion into international markets.
“In Q3, the year-over-year growth of advertising activities across the Roku platform — excluding media and entertainment — outperformed both the overall ad market and the over-the-top (OTT) ad market in the US,” Roku said, highlighting strength in political, retail, and consumer packaged goods ad verticals.
