We announced an update to the Community Standards last year which included information about how to advertise within your experiences. These policies exist to ensure that the platform remains safe and respects the privacy of all people on Roblox. Please take some time to read and ensure you are following our Advertising guidelines in the Community Standards.
It is particularly important for you to review the following policies if you are working with 3rd party ad networks:
First, you must retain complete control of the ad content that is shown in your experiences across the platform. This means that you cannot serve ad content which wasn’t directly uploaded by you, the individual, within your Roblox experience.
In addition, you must not insert any code within your experience that makes calls to third party ad servers.
Starting the week of June 6, we will block all calls to third party ad networks. Take this time to review your experiences and ensure you are complying with all of our advertising policies. After June 6, we may take further action against accounts or experiences which attempt to circumvent these blocks or our policies.
As a reminder, you can monetize your experiences in a variety of different ways:
Offer in-experience virtual items for people to purchase with Robux
Earn additional Robux through engagement-based payouts, which happen automatically in addition to in-experience purchases
Partner directly with brands to integrate sponsored content into your experience, as long as you follow the rules above and the content follows the Community Standards.
We understand the importance of creating additional revenue opportunities for our developer community and are working diligently to provide developers with multiple avenues consistent with our privacy and safety standards that we hope to announce in the near future.
Thank you for helping us foster a safe and diverse community.
The policy enforcement outlined above is in full effect as of June 7, 2022
Q&A
Can I still add paid content or ads to my experience?
Yes, as long as the content follows the Community Standards and is clearly marked and distinctive to the user that it is a paid advertisement.
Can I still work with brands to sponsor my experience?
Yes, you can still work directly with brands and include sponsored content in your experience, as long as that content is clearly marked and otherwise in compliance with our Community Standards.
I’m working with an advertising network, can I embed their code in my experience?
No, we do not currently permit Developers to work with third party advertising networks to serve ads in their experience. Serving ad content not directly uploaded by you, the developer, within a Roblox experience is prohibited. If you are using ad-related code to track people or decide what assets (not uploaded by you) will show up in your experience, you are not in control of what your experience is showing to your users.
It’s important that Roblox remains safe and appropriate for all people while respecting user privacy. In order to do this, we expect developers and their content to be in line with our policies - meaning, developers must retain full control of the content that is shown in experiences across the platform.
Can I add a third party advertising network to my Group?
You may not relinquish control of the ad serving logic in your experience, including by using third party ad servers and third party ad networks. Even if you add an ad network as a member to your Group, it is still considered as non-compliant because it involves adding code which tracks people and serves content that you do not control within your experience.
Is working with third party analytics companies to track performance of my experience now also prohibited?
No, there is no change to the policies relating to third party analytics. You may continue to work with third party analytics companies to track performance of your experience as long as your sharing of user data with them complies with our data sharing and privacy policies. Specifically, you may only share aggregated user data.
What actions will be taken towards non-compliance?
This announcement serves as a clarification for our advertising policies. Starting the week of June 6, we will block all third party ad calls. If we identify continued violations of our policies or attempts to circumvent these blocks, it may result in further action against your account and/or your experience.
Our priority is to ensure platform safety. Severe violations that break our Community Standards or Terms of Use are not protected under this grace period. We may remove the non-compliant content or suspend the experience at any time and without notice.
What about user created content into your games? For example, in the racing community we often allow users to input a decal ID to place a scheme onto their car that they have made themselves.
Is this also against the guidelines as I’m not “retaining complete control of the content shown” or is control only a concern for advertising content?
To be fair, I have never seen a decal be used in a game as an advert, or a real one, besides “Join Taco Son Fan Grioup!!!1!1!”, so I dont think it’s that much of an issue.
In addition, you must not insert any code within your experience that makes calls to third party ad servers.
Just curious – can data be sent to external servers as long as the game has full control over an ad that is being shown?
For example, say I wanted to set up advertising billboards for just my games, and wanted to build some sort of analytics platform that would allow partnered advertisers to view their impressions. Is this allowed?
It’s 100% number 2, it’s only about ads, unless your game allows you to build ads or something, highly unlikely.
They also know that games like Bloxburg are some of the top games, and have been promoted by Roblox, I dont think that they’re gonna ban a top game outright.
What qualifies a “third party ad server”? Can I make calls to my own off-Roblox web server, which then reports to the 3rd-party ad server? This sounds like it would comply with the second bullet point.
Can a third-party ad platform provide content for me to vet and upload myself? Can an ad platform provide any form of software which can automatically verify and track the existence of any ads within my experience?
Edit for question clarification: Let’s say I upload the content myself as described, then send aggregated analytics to a 3rd party service. Can that service pay me based on the metrics of that thing? More specifically, every time I teleport a player to a 3rd-party game from an advertisement. Is it not kosher if an ad network sent me the ad content and advertised game ID?
A decal that a player is using has supposedly already been moderated on upload. (although I don’t let players use decals in my game because I don’t think the moderation is good enough)
The control they are referring to is external ad networks feeding in automated content that has not been reviewed by the game owner. This could be also in the form of text.
The game owner adds a script to the game that retrieves unknown content from external sources. (ad networks) How do you know they will not advertise inappropriate products? You don’t, because you lost control when you added the script that retrieves content.
These policies do not make sense, what is the difference between an identical asset uploaded by the developer, and the same asset approved by the developer, but uploaded by someone else?
This locks out smaller developers from earning money through advertising. Brands won’t work directly with a 1k, 2k, or 3k CCU game.
Ads make up nearly 50% of our total revenue. These policies prevent us from capitalizing from alternative monetization strategies, while empowering the venture capital backed companies that have been taking 99% of brand deals across the website.
I have a mall, and it has those fun electronic ad displays. Instead of making my own advertisements, I intend to let others who own a store in my mall to upload their own advertisements. I store their asset IDs on a public JSON file pn GitHub. To retrieve the ads, I make an HTTP call to the file’s raw.githubusercontent.com address. Does GitHub count as an ad server in this situation, or does it qualify as content that I screen myself?
The one uploaded by the developer is assumed to be approved by the developer since he uploaded it. There is no way to know if a developer has approved an automated ad retrieved by code. (chances are high that the dev has never seen it before as its being fed by external sources)
I don’t think this change is targeting roblox decals being uploaded by players into games. Public decals are considered free models and are available to be used by anyone on Roblox.
This seems to be targeting larger games that work with outside advertising companies to automate their ads inside an experience — which is against the community standards.
This thread makes me wonder why Roblox hasn’t released their own in-game ad network which devs could use to monetize their games within the TOS while maintaining control of the ad content. (although some of the ads I see on the web page I would not approve of or want in my game, so idk if i’d use it or not. I’m not a huge fan of horror ads being shown to little kids as they are.)
