Hello Developers,
On April 18th all remaining ROBLOX mobile apps were converted to the pre-roll ad system already utilized by PC. While most of you are already aware of this change, I want to utilize this thread to discuss more about why this change is happening and what exactly the reasons are for this switch. I believe this topic is quite complex.
The New User Experience on Mobile
This has been a major point of contention with the ad conversion as there is some confusion over why the new system is an improvement. Previously any user could be exposed to any number of ads until they reached their individual account ad limit. Now new users, guests, and BC members NEVER see ads. Of those that can see ads, they will only see one on a set interval, and only once max per game entry and never inside a game. The ads themselves are of higher visual quality and they are skippable after some amount of time as opposed to the 30 second un-skippable adcolony ads. This is incredibly important for our new user experience, showing new users an ad immediately causes a HUGE dropoff rate for new users, the majority of whom will never return to the product.
Replacing a Flawed System
The crash rate for games that utilized adcolony are higher than those that did not use the tool. This is due to both poor implementation practices, as well as problems with internal ROBLOX systems clashing with some of the adcolony protocols. ROBLOX had little control over the adcolony product and thus we cannot make changes or control their system.
The Economy of Mobile Ads
Another primary issue concerning mobile ads is how inventory and view counts are managed. Mobile ads are not a limitless well of free money that we can lackadaisically pull from the sponsors pockets. They are purchased at a discrete value and quantity, and must be shown in a controlled manner, or inventories will be used up. The ad display rate using adcolony was astronomically high and only increasing in frequency as more and more devs learned of the system. With a limited quantity of ads available each month trying to establish a controlled dev distribution system would be impossible to balance and may have lead to an “ad rush” each month as devs competed for the limited ads available. This is only made more difficult by our lack of control of the adcolony system and only further promotes poor development practices.
The Logic of the New Ad System
- Do not show an ad under the following circumstances (otherwise go to the next point):
a. If the user is not logged in
b. If the user is “new” (joined in the last seven days)
c. If the user is a member of builders club
d. If the user has seen a video ad in a predetermined amount of time - Randomly decide if the user is eligible to see an ad using the ad probability setting
- If the user does get to see an ad, decide which type of ad the user sees using the % inventory allocation percent setting
Growth by the Numbers
We comment a lot about how quickly mobile is growing, but I want to share some specifics about what this really means and how it compares to PC. ROBLOX has grown steadily over the years but for simplicities sake let’s take a look at peak concurrent player counts and how that statistic has changed over the last year. Towards the end of last year BuilderMan announced a 250,000 concurrent player milestone on ROBLOX. ROBLOX overall has seen consistent growth each month at an approximate rate of 10% a month. This stat was fairly consistent across all platforms in our previous year. In 2016 though mobile has seen monthly growth at approximately 25% each month, and in the first 2 weeks of April we have already seen a growth rate of approximately 17% across Android and iOS. That is huge and this growth is starting to make a noticeable difference in the ratio of Mobile and PC users. At the end of 2015 mobile to PC had a player market share ratio of 3:7, meaning for every 3 mobile users there were 7 PC users. As of posting this message mobile boasts a player market share of 2:3. That is getting incredibly close to a 1:1 market share with PC.
Note: Many of you developers out there may notice your PC vs Mobile player counts do not reflect this ratio. That is due to the fact the mobile users are spread more evenly across all games on ROBLOX.