As a creator of accessories on the catalog, the sponsoring system for UGC items is currently majorly flawed due to the lack of visibility of the section of sponsored items. Currently the sponsored items only show up if you scroll down from an item’s description on PC or while scrolling down a good bit on only the main catalog on mobile app.
As you can see these are seasonal items that I have sponsored in the past and they still just don’t perform well. People click on them a very little bit however they are almost never actually buying the items that are sponsored.
** A few reasons why this could be would be**
Item isn’t relevant to what they are looking for
they aren’t noticing sponsors are on the page
SUGGESTION 1: Keywords tailor the sponsors that show
I feel like one of the major factors of sponsors not doing as well is the fact that the placement choice for sponsored items are in areas that people either don’t scroll down far enough to even see the sponsors or it isn’t relevant to the player so they just don’t click on the item.
However if sponsors were tweaked a little so it can still show up items in sponsors that fit the filters players add in the catalog such as accessory type or a keyword search, I feel like sponsors would be way more useful and have better statistics. For example if somebody were to go on the catalog and check neck accessories, sponsors can display neck accessories that are currently being sponsored. And for PC browser in general, sponsors should show up on the catalog itself like how the mobile app does it. You can scroll down more on pc so there is additionally more spots to have sponsored items added in for more people to see.
SUGGESTION 2: Sponsors available as a catalog API for avatar games
Additionally I feel like sponsored items could potentially be apart of an existing API for catalog games. (note that i am not familiar with scripting all that much and i do not know the implications this could have)
Many people use games such as catalog avatar creator. If this were to be an implemented feature and be effective, this would make it so items have way more impressions, in other words more potential revenue from sponsoring.
SUGGESTION 3: Different Sponsor placement on website/application catalog
Currently sponsors are shown at the description of items when you click them, but what if they were on the marketplace page instead? I’m thinking maybe every 10-12 items theres a sponsored item slot. If this could be added in alongside with suggestion #1 I feel like sponsors would actually become useful to use for UGC items again.
The question here is whether you’d be willing to have it not count towards your sponsored analytics. Allowing developers to self-report whether a user clicked on an item would be absolutely devastating for your analytics (as many may not implement it or silently report extra clicks that aren’t actually really ‘clicks’).
On top of that, I do wonder what the incentive for developers would be for implementing this, alike Roblox, catalog games also want to serve players with the most relevant items for their searches however unlike Roblox, they don’t currently benefit from showing sponsored items when they may not currently be as relevant to the user’s search. Developers also would likely need to implement the ‘sponsored’ label seen on the site (although I’m not a lawyer, so don’t quote me on that). However if that is the case, there’d likely need to be a new API of some form and a good insentive for developers to implement it (and not just a policy change because that would likely just end up hurting UX and developers).
Designing that API to prevent abuse by developers while also being helpful for both UGC creators and developers would also probably end up being quite challenging too.
Given your example image, I’m not sure how Roblox could implement the current ‘sponsored’ label shown elsewhere. Not only would it be misleading to users if it were to be omitted, but the UI could appear way too busy if it were to be placed next to every sponsored item. Just raising this as a potential discussion point.
I feel like there could potentially be a small % per sale for sponsoring the items that get bought ingame, im not 100% sure how roblox would go about it though, however with UGC items being purchased in games, the developer of the game already gets a higher % per revenue than the UGC creator themselves (devs get 40% while UGC creators get 30%)
Yeah I’m aware an implantation of something like this would be a little bit tricky, Its something that could potentially have some loopholes however i feel like with testing involved it could be something potentially very beneficial
