Creator AMA (Economy) - with Antoni and Enrico [May 22, 2024]

rester951 · May 22, 2024, 6:25pm

Ads are generally priced based on the supply of available ads to show on Roblox and the demand for those ads in the form of advertising budgets. Roblox is working on ways to make our ad systems more efficient by ensuring that we use our ad impressions to deliver the most advertiser value.

Recently, we elevated sponsored experiences to a higher placement on Home. Moving sponsored experiences up has helped creators drive more impressions and visits to their experience. From our tests, we saw that moving the location of sponsored experiences to a higher position on Home resulted in a significant increase in ad impressions, clicks, and plays per user giving advertisers more for their ad spend.

We are working on ways for ads to deliver more value such as improving targeting so that advertisers can reach the people that matter to them to make the most of the budgets they have. For example, we recently launched audience targeting for sponsored experiences so that advertisers can reach users by the genre of experiences they like to play. We recently added to Creator Analytics the ability to see average revenue per user by source including sponsored ads, this can help you better understand the impact of your sponsored ad campaigns.

rester951 · May 22, 2024, 6:26pm

We understand how valuable free items are as a promotional tool, and realize this was a big change; however, an oversupply of free items over time means free items will not be as valuable to users and dilute their uniqueness, thus defeating their original purpose. This also has an impact on our economy and future earnings of the community, as users spend less Robux on your creations when they get them for free.

In the future, we want the per-unit fee for free items to be dynamic and respond to market conditions similar to our dynamic price floors. It will reflect factors like the cost to our economy and the loss in creator earnings if a user had spent Robux on an item. This means that price might go up or down depending on supply and demand of free and paid items. We expect these changes to make free UGC items more valuable to the community and optimized for the right supply/demand balance.

We are always looking for new ways to help more creators of any size to monetize — if that is their goal — and are committed to continuing to invest in this product as we believe free items are critical for a healthy Marketplace.

rester951 · May 22, 2024, 6:32pm

Our systems constantly optimize for healthy marketplace dynamics that allow more people to create, sell, and earn. Our goal is a dynamic system that responds to market conditions to maintain marketplace health for the long-term earnings of our UGC community.

Dynamic price floors are specifically adapting to balance supply and demand. The best signal of a healthy and balanced market is creator earnings, and our price floor algorithm is designed to increase aggregate creator earnings. We have updated price floors only when there is evidence that the change achieves that goal as aggregate creator earnings have been increasing since launch.

We also give creators controls that let them set rules for how much to charge for their items relative to these dynamic prices. We’re confident this will help make sure creators can earn while giving consumers more access to items at fair market prices.

Tone · May 22, 2024, 6:35pm

Thank you for your suggestion! We know there is both creator and user demand for seeing multiple items from a creator as well as related items. We do have plans later this year to invest more in helping creators showcase their creations and more of their items, whether that is through their stores tab or within the details page as you suggested. Stay tuned!

rester951 · May 22, 2024, 6:35pm

Roblox remains devoted to protecting our IP and we will continue to evaluate our practices in this regard.

Roblox takes action on content that we believe infringes on our IP while also trying to support creators’ expression of Roblox lore and culture. There are many ways to create fan content that would not be an infringement and would be allowed to remain in Marketplace. In tandem, we work to ensure a wide diversity of creations are highlighted in Marketplace, and if you find infringement of your unique creation, we encourage you to follow our DMCA process to request a takedown.

Check out our prior guidance on how to approach protecting IP:

As we outlined in that guidance, there are many Roblox designs that are themselves inspired by normal everyday items, and we would not be able to prevent creators from designing their own version of those everyday items. For example, if you want to create a hat on Roblox inspired by a well-known style of hat, such as a top hat, you may not be able to stop other users from uploading similar hats.

rester951 · May 22, 2024, 6:37pm

Please refer to our answer here.

Tone · May 22, 2024, 6:38pm

Concerned users can report duplicate content that they believe to be violating Roblox’s Community Standards using our official Report Abuse feature also accessible on each item’s Marketplace page. We have dedicated moderation staff which work 24/7 to review and take action accordingly.

If curious, we answered another question about Roblox’s stance on replicas of Roblox-made items.

Thanks for the question!

rester951 · May 22, 2024, 6:40pm

Empowering creators to protect their creations is an important issue to us. IP owners are best positioned to tell us what they believe infringes on their rights. That’s why we recently launched Rights Manager, to help rights holders manage their intellectual property. You can use Rights Manager to report experiences, avatar items, and assets such as models, audio, and images that you believe infringe on your IP.

Roblox investigates and takes action on every valid report, which may include removing or disabling the infringing content, and in appropriate circumstances, permanently terminating the accounts of users who have repeatedly infringed on the IP of others.

To deter bad actors, we require email and ID verification for all virtual item creators. That means that once a creator is found to be a repeat infringer it will be very hard for that person to create again on the platform.

However, we are at the beginning of this journey. We are working to incorporate Marketplace search inside of Rights Manager, build detection tools that identify similar assets, and more in order to enable solutions to identify infringement of your IP at scale.

Tone · May 22, 2024, 6:41pm

Thank you for your question. Our price floors are dynamic and can move up or down based on market factors such as supply and demand. They are optimized with the intent of increasing the aggregate earnings of creators while giving consumers more access to items at fair market prices.

Tone · May 22, 2024, 6:46pm

I do not believe that abuse reports from users are considered “vigilante” behavior. Roblox provides Report Abuse buttons for all content types and we encourage users to leverage them when they find inappropriate content. Moderation teams review each report to ensure it is valid before taking action. And if the creators who get their content removed or get their account suspended feel that we made an error, they can appeal every moderation decision to get their account and content reinstated.

For context, we provide several distinct channels for users to report potentially violating content found in our Marketplace and across the platform. All reports via all channels are evaluated before action is taken. The EU Illegal Content Report Form is meant for citizens of the European Union who would like to report content that they believe violates the law of EU member states. The Report Abuse function is used to report content that the reporting user believes violates Roblox’s Community Standards. The DMCA process is for rights holders who believe their intellectual property rights have been infringed or violated on Roblox. We only process DMCA claims made by the actual rights holder. If a user is not the rights holder or authorized representative, the request will not be processed.

First, it’s important to note that sending a false DMCA take-down notice can hold severe legal penalties. Filing a false or fraudulent DMCA notification is illegal and specifically prohibited by the DMCA, and a reporter may be subject to damages and other legal liabilities. Further, illegal activity may result in suspension or permanent termination of access to Roblox services.

In addition, weaponizing our abuse reporting systems is itself a violation of our Community Standards. Fraudulent reporting, coordinated attacks against users, and creating alternate accounts to evade consequences and Roblox systems are all forms of Misusing Roblox Systems. Roblox is able to identify potentially fraudulent actors and suspend them from the platform. In the event that a Roblox user is subject to a fraudulent DMCA report, that user can also submit a counter-notice or appeal for account reinstatement.

We recognize this impacts creators. We review all reports and are monitoring this behavior closely. The volume of our Illegal Content/Abuse/DMCA reports has been stable.

Tone · May 22, 2024, 6:47pm

Roblox requires avatar creators to have a modesty layer because Marketplace is accessible to users of all ages, and buyers of avatars can enter experiences with any age rating. We also need to ensure consistency and fairness across all creators and designs while keeping Marketplace safe and civil for all users. This is why we have Marketplace Policies that specify when modesty layers are required, the use cases when they aren’t required, and how to implement them properly.

Tone · May 22, 2024, 6:50pm

Our motivation for moving Creator Store to real-world currency is to maximize the revenue share for asset creators. We explored many alternate options, but real-world currency offered the best path to maximize revenue share for creators.

We are continuing to work on expanding who can buy and sell on Creator Store. For example, we recently added the ability for people 13-17 to sell on Creator Store with parental approval. As a result of this change, we’ve seen more high-quality plug-ins released on Creator Store. These plug-ins will empower Creators to be more productive and build more engaging experiences. On average, Creators who transitioned their plugins from Robux to real-world-currency pricing are enjoying 3x the take-home revenue. Even more encouraging, we have seen an increase in high-quality plugins getting added to Creator Store.

Tone · May 22, 2024, 6:51pm

Great question. We have considered subscription support for plugins, but the Creator Store team’s immediate priority is opening commerce for new asset types like models. We’ll keep this request in mind for the future though.

Tone · May 22, 2024, 6:52pm

We are actively working on improvements that will enable Models to be sold on Creator Store. Please stay tuned for a formal announcement.

Tone · May 22, 2024, 6:54pm

Thank you for the question, as that is a very reasonable request. The analytics team is currently focused on improving analytics for experiences and ensuring that UGC analytics remain stable now that the marketplace is available to more creators.

We will add this to our list for consideration and can share an update in our creator roadmap when we have a more final UGC analytics roadmap in place.

Tone · May 22, 2024, 6:55pm

We do have real time analytics for experiences, so this is a great suggestion. What specific UGC metrics would you like to see update in real time? We can’t commit to any timelines right now, but we can add it to our UGC analytics roadmap for future consideration.

rester951 · May 22, 2024, 6:57pm

In the near-term we are not planning changes on these revenue shares, but we are always evaluating ways we can make them better for all members of the community and exploring new ways for creators to monetize.

For virtual item revenue shares, the split between affiliates and creators encourages the marketing and distribution of items beyond the Marketplace, which in turn attracts more buyers to your items. Today, generally speaking, there is more effort and investment involved to grow and retain an audience for an experience than creating an item. We see a major opportunity for avatar item creators to build their own experiences to drive item sales, capturing both the revenue share from the original item (30%) and from being the affiliate (40%).

As a way of comparison an experience selling developer products gets 70%, but the developer 1) creates the dev product 2) creates and markets the experience. Comparing the 30% to the 70% is not apples to apples because there is a lot more involved in creating experiences and developer products and marketing the creations (which carries — in many cases — monetary investments).

As an aside, we allow resales of community-created Limiteds which is another way for creators of items to earn more into perpetuity through a 10% cut on every resale transaction. UGC Creators are the only group on the platform who has access to this revenue stream.

When it comes to Marketplace publishing advances, our goal is to ensure that the value creators get from publishing items remains high. We set publishing advances so that the number of items in the Marketplace does not grow faster than user demand, and to incentivize creators to only publish items they believe will sell. Since opening up creation, we’ve seen significant growth in the number of virtual items being created each day.

We are always looking for new ways to deliver more earnings to the creator community. Our goal is to drive as much money to creators as possible while maintaining reasonable margins for our company to develop, maintain, and improve the tools and technology that support our community.

rester951 · May 22, 2024, 6:59pm

Please see our answer here.

rester951 · May 22, 2024, 7:01pm

Refer to our answer here.

rester951 · May 22, 2024, 7:03pm

For your first question, please refer to our answer here.
See our answer here.
We plan to invest more in UGC discoverability in 2024. From improving search to an avatar-first shopping experience to buying multiple items and collections, we know there is a lot of opportunity here and plan to invest in this area.