Roblox is a game about development and community, and with a active community comes a currency. Robux. These fund the platform, but are they being wasted on ads? Well, short answers, yes. Advertisements on Roblox have gone downhill for quite some time. But because of the spike in extensions, they became completely useless.
As a developer, I hesitate to advertise my game. I have noticed that thousands of users use adblockers, which means my audience of 100,000 impressions is turned to a mere 60,000 or 50,000. But there are no way to monitor this, because it oddly counts as a impression. Because of this, it is extremely hard to track, but I think that there can be fixes.
If this update to prevent adblockers by seeing if the HTML element is removed or hidden on the browser will help grow games larger without developers spending their hard earned cash just to be ignored unfairly. I think that developers should have a fair chance when advertising games.
In general, not just in Roblox, nobody clicks on ads anymore and applies ad blocker for everything else.
How will this even work? If Roblox does something special that current extensions don’t account for it won’t belong before a Roblox-specific fork is made.
Some sites detect them and 1) block you from entering the site or 2) find ways to make the advertisement be hidden in the HTML to make it hard to block. If Roblox implemented a similar feature, the advertisement rates would go up, making it actually worth your money.
Forcing users to see ads in which you are paid money is scummy, but ads on Roblox aren’t actually paying the corporation. They are just displaying user made content.
Also, they should make it that premium users have the option to block ads, so that premium has more of a purpose.
Ad blockers aren’t avoidable, the only way to check is on the client which, as any Roblox developer knows, the client has control over everything. If you add an anti-blocker, I can just block that anti-blocker; it’s not that hard to get around.
This would waste too much of engineers’ valuable time and the benefits of this feature do not outweight the cost in both user experience and development time.
Well, that is true, but it isn’t really wasting valuable time, because the time they spend would be to fix an issue. I do think that there are ways around it though. And if not, then maybe they can run checks to see if the HTML was deleted, and every 5 seconds they check and if it is then they re-add it.
Well your saying that like it’s a personalized thing. I was thinking more about universal adblockers, which are not going to go out of their way to block an ad on a single site.
Usually universal blockers are most commonly used, as Roblox’s largest fanbase are younger children, and they or their parents install adblockers without fully going in to Roblox specific extensions.
And I can disable that JavaScript, and the JavaScript to check I’ve not disabled that JavaScript, and so on.
Many adblockers are programmed to detect these since they’re very common. and of course, there are many roblox-specific extensions that are out there that can block the ads if necessary.
If someone goes out of their way to block ads, you can be positive that they had no interest in viewing or clicking them anyway. If ad blocking was prevented, the number of impressions would raise but the click rate would lower propotionally, not gaining you much.
Additionally, the classic ads aren’t the best way to advertise as you’re not getting equal exposure across the potential player base. They’re displayed differently depending on screen resolution iirc and not at all on the app and on Xbox. Sponsored games are the way to go nowadays.
I can’t blame anyone blocking ads though; I have blocked them for years and don’t plan on enabling them any time soon as they wreck the website layout and never cease to dissapoint me aesthetically.
Roblox used to have in-game advertisments, not sure why it got removed. There’s a lot of potential gain by adding it back though as developers would have more control over the advertisments, players won’t be able to block them, and a majority of a player’s time is spent in-game rather than the website.
An alternative option would be to give rewards for viewing ads. In 2015 this could easily be 1 tix per 10 ads viewed, but as Tix was removed, it wouldn’t really be possible.
