thats because most of the games on there are games by walmart or some other big corporation
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I feel that’s what makes portals worth it, knowing your game could show up in bigger games. However in this case there’s almost definitely a botting situation, because my game for example went from 400~ spiked to 800 for a couple seconds and back down to 400. During the spike the portal was completed after being active for around 6 hours.
It’s just a strange system and what proves this point a bit more, if you go into any game that has these portals in place it’s always a placeholder, not once have I seen an actual game being displayed. Though if this is intentional then I would avoid using portals as they just seem to hurt the games stats
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Nah we need to understand the difference between “bigger games” and “corporate shovelware”. I don’t think Donald is implying that larger genuine games will lead to higher botting rates - But that on average, real developers likely don’t want to drive players away from their game via portals, so the average game that does have portals tends to be very corporate - If you haven’t seen the “Walmart world” experience, consider yourself blessed. Realistically these games exists as, themselves, advertisements, so if Donald is right, and mega-corporation experiences are a large source of plays from Ad Portals, it is unlikely they’d ever output anything other than bots and the lowest quality of playerbase.
I wish I considered this factor before, as clearly I’m not the only one with this botting problem… Seems ridiculous that someone above in roblox staff hasn’t noticed this yet, maybe it should be filed as a literal bug report of feature request even
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Simply, sponsored ads are much better and based on my personal experience, it’s not even close.
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Well considering there might be botting going on for ad portals, Yeah, I’m gonna say that’s an understatement 
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I’ve expressed my overall complaints with the new ad system here as well for anyone interested;
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Unfortunately so far I have been unable to get any dev relations responses to this weird botting problem.
Hi, can you share what amounts you spend on sponsored ads to see some increase in player clicks you your game? @Maxwell_Edison @DonaldDuck5150 @MuPower @TheDCraft ?
Thanks
My playrate is above 60% with portal ads, I feel like thats highly unusual. I highly doubt 60% of the players that see a portal ad will actually enter It. This proves more that the portal ads are being botted, does anyone else also have a unusually high playrate?
Yep, most likely botted. As talked about in my various posts on the subject at least.
Did your ‘players’ from portal ads also disappear near-instantly? Staying for but a brief second?
Yeah, they join and stay afk for 10 second and leave.
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I think I figured out the “botting”. Most people who play Roblox are drooling children on iPads. They accidentally wander into the Portal Ad and realize they’re not in Adopt Me anymore, so they leave. Your Ad Credits get used up and they forget they ever played your game.
Does Roblox not see this?
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Unfortunate, it does seem very much so like a botting issue to me.
I’ve tried messaging a lot of people marked ‘Dev relations’ on the forums, even some I’ve had interactions with previously, but have gotten no comment.
was about to put a loooot of money into portal ads, glad I didn’t
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lolllll rip roblox’s revenue 
Yep tried it again recently with another $50 portal and game went from ~30 players to 400 and now it’s hovering around ~50 players (in a matter of seconds). For anyone reading this and is considering using portals I would highly recommend sticking to sponsoring for now as that is still is the best way to advertise your game.
Also if want to try it out, I would recommend doing it on a test game since this will ruin your stats especially for smaller games.
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We NEED to find a way to get this into the eyes of staff/dev relations. Unfortunately I don’t think it qualifies as a bug report, so I’m not really sure where this could be posted or who this could be sent to. I’ve messaged about a dozen dev relations people at this point and no response still.
Yeah I’ve tried sending a support ticket but didn’t really lead to much. I feel like staff are aware of this issue and are actively working on it behind the scenes but just not very transparent about it. There’s no real way of telling if this getting into the eyes of staff since they may not be at liberty to speak on it. The most we can do is wait and hope it is being worked on or at least given a reason for the current portal behaviour.
I’m actually quite irritated, I spent $20 just for my game to go from 300 players up to 800 for around 5 minuets and then it returned to the regular count, did it just ruin my games average playtime? This is literally absurd. They need to fix this because it eats up the budget before it’s even over? I genuinely dislike the entire Ad Manager system and they need to go back to the old one.
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Yep for me when I used it I had around 400 players, it spiked to around 800 I believe and dropped instantly. After that my game just kept decreasing and now gets ~30 players and one of my other games I tested on now gets 0 players too.
I also dislike this ad manager system, I feel like it’s way more tedious and you need to do a lot more research and testing. I’m sure we’ll eventually get used to it but right now it’s just demotivating to use. I recently used $500 and had an ad running each day for 5 days ($100 each day) and once it was over it only used $50 which I find quite annoying as I don’t really want to spend a ton on bidding.
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