Immersive Ads are rolling out!

[darkmodeonn]

[Update] April 17, 2023

@darkmodeonn

Hi Everyone,

Thank you so much for sharing feedback about Immersive Ads payouts! Since we are still in the early stages of rolling out, prices might fluctuate as we work on finding the right balance between available ad units and advertising budgets.

For this first stage, our main focus was making Immersive Ads available to developers, but we are working on increasing ad budgets which should lead to higher payouts for developers.

---

Hi Developers,

We are excited to begin rolling out Immersive Ads. Starting today, an initial set of eligible developers will be able to place ad units in their experiences and start earning Robux through Immersive Ad payouts.

Advertisers have various expectations around the context in which their ads are placed on Roblox. Therefore, we’re starting with an initial set of experiences that are likely to be appropriate for a broad range of advertisers on Roblox and we will gradually open up eligibility to more experiences throughout 2023.

Implementation is simple and you maintain control over your experience by deciding the number of ad units, the ad formats, and the placement within your experience.

We are thrilled to offer another potential way for our developers to earn incremental revenue from their experiences. We are just getting started and are ramping up more ad publishers (developers serving ads in their experience) and advertisers in the coming months. Ad spend will be low in the early stages as we ramp up advertisers. During this time, as a publisher, you may see fallback images when inserting ad units. This is expected as we onboard more advertisers in the coming months.

Overview

Immersive Ads allow developers to place high-quality, native ad units in their experience that will programmatically serve ads. Creators are paid through a revenue share for the impressions and teleports generated. During our initial testing of Immersive Ads, ad publishers who placed Immersive Ads in their experiences saw a net increase in earnings.

Immersive Ad formats

There are two types of immersive ad formats: image ads and portal ads.

• Image Ads - Non-clickable static images within the 3D space of an experience.
• Portal Ads - Non-clickable static images with a door that teleports users to another experience.

Image Ads (left) / Portal Ads (right)

Features

Let’s dive into the features that are available to publishers using Immersive Ads.

Checking Publisher Eligibility

To check whether your experience is eligible for Immersive Ads, visit the Creator Dashboard for your experience and see if there is an Immersive Ads link under the Analytics section.

If you are currently ineligible, make sure you continue to stay policy-compliant and complete the Experience Questionnaire. Stay tuned as we gradually open up eligibility to more experiences in 2023.

Insert Ad Units

One of our main priorities is to provide publishers a simple way to implement ad units within their experiences. To insert ad units into your experience, visit the Creator Marketplace and view the Ads category. There is a set of package templates for image and portal ad units which can be easily dragged and dropped into your experience. Image ad units can also be created by attaching an AdGUI instance to an existing Part.

For more details, please visit our documentation site.

Return to Experience Button

A request from publishers during our testing was to ensure that users have an easy way to return to their experience after entering a portal ad. To address this, we’re currently testing a ”Return to experience” button that provides an easy way for users to return to the experience after teleporting through a portal ad. During testing, some users may not see a return to experience button.

We plan on launching a version of the return to experience button to all users in the coming weeks.

Earning Through Immersive Ads

You can track your collective earnings from the ad units you insert into your eligible experiences either through the My Transactions or Group Transactions page.

Note: Earnings are paid out on the 25th of the following month. For example, if you place ad units in your experience for the month of March, you will earn Immersive Ad Payouts for those impressions and teleports on April 25, 2023.

Publisher Reporting and Analytics

As an Immersive Ads publisher, it’s important that you have all the reporting and analytics you need to make informed decisions about your experience and earnings. We have built publisher reporting within the Creator Dashboard that provides insights into the performance of Immersive Ads in your experience, including:

• Daily earnings
• Daily impressions
• Daily teleports
• Earnings Per Mille (EPM)
• Earnings Per Teleport (EPT)
• Estimated earnings per ad unit
• Impressions per ad unit
• Teleports per ad unit

Please note that initial data can take up to 48 hours to populate.

Getting Started and Future Plans

To get started, get familiar with Immersive Ads and our recent announcement introducing our Advertising Standards.

We have a lot of exciting plans for the future, with upcoming releases that include:

• Opening publisher access to more experiences.
• Scaling advertiser demand and increasing Earnings Per Mille (EPM) and Earnings Per Teleport (EPT) rates.
• Launching our Immersive Ads self-serve advertising tools which will give Creators more opportunities to advertise on Roblox.

FAQ

Click here to view the FAQ!

Who is a Publisher?

• The developer serving ads in their experience.

When will developers be able to be an advertiser?

• In the coming months, we will be launching our self-serve advertising product which will allow developers to advertise on our platform.

Will publishers know which ads are being shown in their experience?

• Publishers will not have visibility into ads being shown in their experience until they are served in real-time. In the future we’re going to provide publishers with more control over the categories and types of ads that can be shown in their experiences.

How do publishers earn from Immersive Ads?

• Image ads pay Robux for each viewable impression, which Roblox defines using an internal set of viewability criteria that considers factors such as the size of the ad, the angle between a user and an ad, and any obstruction between the user and the ad.

  Portal ads pay Robux for each successful teleport, which Roblox defines as when a user enters the portal and arrives at the advertiser’s experience.

How can publishers see the revenue generated from Immersive Ads?

• You can track your collective earnings from the ad units you insert into your eligible experiences either through the My Transactions or Group Transactions page. You can also analyze the overall performance of your immersive ads through metrics graphs on the Creator Dashboard.

For Immersive Ads, can advertisers reach users of all ages on Roblox?

• While Roblox is a platform for all ages, we are designing our Immersive Ads product to reach users ages 13 and older. When a user under the age of 13 comes across an ad unit, rather than displaying the advertising content, the ad unit will display a fallback image of the Roblox logo.

  However, publishers can remove the ad unit(s) altogether for those users by utilizing PolicyService API. For more information, see Removing Ad Units from Ineligible Users.

What is the player experience for users that are not served an ad?

• When users are not served an Ad, Roblox displays a fallback image. Therefore, publishers do not earn for impressions of the fallback image.

---

Thank you.

[metatablecatmaid (metatablecat)]

Two things

One, can you add a feature so we can change the fallback image to something that would better integrate with the world around the ad

Two, how is abuse going to be limited with this since I can think of multiple ways this feature could be abused, including, but not limited to, forcing the camera extents onto the ad, using bots to farm impressions, just to name a few

[NevermindBuild (build)]

I believe you already can judging from looking on the documentation.

[hhwheat]

How will this work with advert placements on items that may not be in game on server start up - for example spawning in vehicles with these attached? Is this already accounted for or will it not work?

[JuanGamerPlayz_RBLX]

@darkmodeonn Will there ever be a model with a 3D style? For instance, in New York (Times Square), it is possible to see that it is animated and interesting, giving an impact for players to join the portals and/or check out the frames. But, of course, if we have a resource for it, which is “Videos”:

[AwesomeXForLife (Whimsical)]

@darkmodeonn

Image ads pay Robux for each viewable impression, which Roblox defines using an internal set of viewability criteria that considers factors such as the size of the ad, the angle between a user and an ad, and any obstruction between the user and the ad.

If not manually reviewed what stops someone from making ads intentionally limited visibility.

[OutlookG (Outlook)]

Based on the beta, ad rates as they are right now are complete garbage.

Currently, EPM sits at around 70 robux or about a 1$ CPM, with the devex rate taken into account this ends up at about 20 cent CPM, well under 20-30x the advertising average.

Currently the earnings per teleport is around 7 robux or about 10 cents per teleport, with the devex rate taken into account this ends up at about 2 cents per teleport.

---

Superbiz on the other hand offers a 3$ CPM and a 8 cent cost per teleport. Personally, I wouldn’t choose Roblox ads in a heartbeat if the ad rates are going to continue to be this low and I don’t see many others switching over.

For context here, our first party ads make almost 100x what I get through robux per day for my obby, Roblox is offering about 0.001% of that. This despite Roblox being a much larger company with much more connections and leverage, I would expect Roblox ads revenue to be around and HIGHER then this once ads are ramped up. At this point we are losing money, we’re showing companies ads for much cheaper then if we were to remove the ads and replace them with our own. I’m not sure weather this is because of Roblox’s cut or because of the low cost Roblox is charging, but this rate NEEDS to be improved 20 fold.

If the reason for these bad rates is Roblox’s cut then it NEEDS to be lowered. Roblox’s cut here should only include the cost for actually running the servers and finding advertisers. Moderation, app store fees and other fees Roblox outlines don’t apply here. I severly hope that this rate is just for testing and that the rate is greatly improved in the NEAR future, otherwise I don’t see much of a future for this program, as it is right now this is INSULTING.

Here’s to hoping the promised “market decides” revenue model is adopted and it is not forced to stay at 70 robux by Roblox. I should also mention that Ads do not display on Mobile devices, so good luck making good money out of this.

[StrengthThroughFaith (Fr0stByt3)]

This feels easy to abuse.

Where’s the skip button on this thing?

[Baileyeatspizza]

Please expose an api method somewhere allowing us to check if the game is eligible for ads.

allowing developers to hide ads that will never load.

[SpookyMeril (MeriI)]

I was excited to use this feature, until I saw that I don’t have access to it currently.

What are the eligibility requirements exactly? I own a game with 5m+ visits and I cannot see the Immersive ads tab underneath it. I have already filled out the questionnaire for the game and it’s up to date and all. It would be helpful if the eligibility requirements were public.

[Edo_UK (Edo)]

Is it any possibility that ads can be shown on curved surfaces like a portion of the inside of a tunnel?

[OneEDM (EDM)]

I think it is important that Roblox is transparent with the cut of ad revenue Roblox is taking.

[IGOBOOM123]

a popular one can be “look at the ads to get rewards in-game”

Some games have tvs that look like ad tvs/billboards (but don’t actually show ads (yet…)) for in-game special currency and then have actual ads [that look similar to the tvs/billboards] littered everywhere across the map…

[knightmb1 (KnightMB)]

@metatablecatmaid

Two, how is abuse going to be limited with this since I can think of multiple ways this feature could be abused, including, but not limited to, forcing the camera extents onto the ad, using bots to farm impressions, just to name a few

I couldn’t have said it better. It’s already too easy to bot visits, likes, etc. Now being about to bot the ads just means it’s either going to really need some “good” anti-cheats setup (because now you are talking about money) or it won’t and everyone is just going to bot the ads like they already do the visits and likes. I sure hope Roblox has a handle on these ads and cheating before it goes public because the worry is it will be ignored and abused like many other things on Roblox already which ruins it for everyone.

[Phoenix_Ascended (Phoenix)]

Only accounts with verified emails would count? just an idea, only little 4 year old timmy will own a secret account his parents will find in 2 days anyways and prob verify email while setting up parental controls.

[grilme99 (brooke)]

@OutlookG

well under 20-30x the advertising average

Do you have a source on the advertising average?

[YasuYoshida (Yasu)]

The documentation says this:

Metrics graphs that report impressions and teleports per ad unit use each ad unit’s name in Studio.

Does this mean that the ad units must be named in studio and not during runtime? Because right now it sounds like changes during runtime to the name of the ad unit will not affect the report, which I hope is not the case. It’s also not clear what’s considered an “ad unit” in the documentation. Is it the AdGui? Is it the first ancestor which is a Model?

If I set an AdGui’s Enabled property to false, is it possible for Status to be Active? It’d be nice to be able to debug ads in studio just like how we can debug purchasing developer products, gamepasses, ect.

[LIVONO5KAHN (Alchemist)]

I love the idea of immersive ads. This will open doors for more successful advertisements since people can’t use ad blockers inside of games. EMOTIONAL DAMAGE (joking)

And developers get a new way to earn Robux. Can’t wait to make my own billboards that show ads and developers finding creative ways to make advertisements!

I don’t know why after I read this the 3D Japanese billboard came to my mind. Since it pays you Robux, I think some popular games won’t hesitate to use it. But some devs (like me) also don’t like someone else’s game advertised in my own game.

But time will show what happens. I hope this feature improves with the Roblox advertisement system.

[LIVONO5KAHN (Alchemist)]

I guess developers will make a new type of bait for earning money (just like clickbait), but time will tell the rest.