New Sponsored Items and Updated Ad Audiences

I understand that, but it is an overkill still and will seriously harm all developers except the large ones.

It was already almost impossible for small developers to gain traction.

7 Likes

RIP Advertising to my entire demographic :joy: :joy:

9 Likes

the change is good but also bad, i think games suitable for all ages should be able to be advertised -13 and should be rearranged accordingly otherwise roblox family safe games won’t be anymore and new developers will definitely not be there anymore because it won’t be easy to start and good advertising will be needed and definitely this youtubers way will be with

4 Likes

Yeah lets make game discovery even worse and not offer any new ways to offset the loss of U13 ads. Amazing idea.

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This just feels like a slap in the face. As a small developer, it’s already difficult enough to grow and maintain a userbase without crazy funding. This decision essentially blocks advertising to HALF of the userbase (<13), making competition tighter and our reach smaller.

The lack of a heads-up and transparency is also extremely frustrating. I understand if the decision was made for privacy reasons, but there’s no justification for this anywhere in the post. In my eyes, this is literally commercial suicide.

I’m baffled, this is extremely upsetting. Normally I just brush off the occasional slip up from Roblox, but this is unacceptable. My player base, and hence my income will be effectively HALVED. For a platform that prides itself on being user-generated, it seems like there was little (if any) consideration for its creators with this decision.

25 Likes

No, You can’t remove Player under age of 13 to the Game Sponsor Ads… It make no sense.
You want to improve Game visibility not to Reduce it…

YOU ARE REMOVING 54% OF PLAYER VISIBILITY
ITS ONLY A GAME ICON … ITs not a Billboard… Am I the Only one Freaking out At the moment???

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He’s referring to the UGC discovery change. If Roblox disables the ability to browse through UGC in the catalog they can make more money by offering a way for creators to make their UGC more discoverable (sponsorships)

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Majority of the ads on the platform are clickbait and contain random and misleading information. I feel this is a change that needed to happen. It’s a shame it took this long though.

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I thought tracking kids history and targeting ads to them because of their histroy was what’s illegal? Roblox sponsors and ads aren’t catered to someone based on their search history as far as I’m aware, so why were they removed?

15 Likes

This will be a hot topic. I’m thoroughly underwhelmed. A classic overpromise and underdeliver situation - which is rare for Roblox!

If Roblox provides extremely clear reasoning for this change - I’d be more receptive. The team clearly knows the severity of the issue they are solving by removing ads for < 13 users - we do not and that’s a huge issue. Communication needs to be improved in this regard.


making adjustments to the audiences you can reach with our ads to be more consistent with our safety standards

says very little. Please elaborate on how this improves the safety of <13 users and if Roblox expects Sponsorship targeting to improve over time.

9 Likes

But… why? I don’t advertise personally but this makes me want to advertise on Roblox even less. If I’m going to lose half of my advertisement engagement, therefore much of my game’s engagement entirely, including revenue, what is the point in advertising on the platform anymore?

Game discovery is already extremely flawed, there are several topics already talking about this, and I’m sure Roblox staff are aware but this seems to be a giant step backwards. This is doing nothing but further fortifying the idea that it’s impossible to be successful on Roblox. Sponsored games already appear at the bottom of the home page, they’re separated from normal games on the games page, halfway down the page at that, and they don’t appear to be visible in search anymore. And that’s just for over 13 users, now they don’t appear at all for <13 users. And that’s not even to mention normal advertisements. What is going on?

You must not forget that this is not only harming on-platform accounts, but developers, who are real people in the real world and amidst extremely high inflation rates at that. It’s also going to damage Roblox’s revenue, less people will spend Robux on advertisements which means Roblox as a company, are going to lose even more money as people take their advertisements off-platform. At this point advertisements on-platform are effectively useless.

10 Likes

My account is 13+ and I can see the Sponsored game sort but I am unable to see User Ads without logging into a different account…

So the ads that are already moderated by Roblox are now apparently not suitable for under 13?

Advertising takes place in many forms on Roblox, like game’s thumbnails and ads developers put in their games.

This really just shifts where under 13’s will find new games to play. I think now the majority of the games they find will just come from whatever youtubers they watch.

I think this is a terrible change. It doesn’t make sense to me how this improves their safety if the ads are meant to have already been moderated by Roblox. I think it just shifts it so that smaller developers will find it even harder to get an audience for their game.

It also means that people are more likely to shift to making games not for under 13s as it is now harder for them to get an audience.

8 Likes

And who in the Roblox headquarters thought “Yoooooooo this blocking ads for -13 gonna be fire”?

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Completely understand if there’s a moral or even legal conflict driving the removal of the <13 sponsorships. However the way this announcement is worded seems like a total deflection of what’s really going on. There is no world where this change is helpful to developers, and therefore no reason it should be implemented unless there’s some sort of external pressure. Roblox needs to be completely transparent if they’re going to push an update so blatantly anti-developer.

15 Likes

A change that will only benefit the top 1% of Developers who are already making a killing off DevEx.

This update has essentially halved the possible target segments that Developers can advertise to, in addition, this update came without warning and without the need for feedback from the developer community.

A viable solution would be to give parents the option to have control over whether 13> can see advertisements. Fully blocking those segments negatively impacts prospective developers wishing to enter the space.

“Empowering Imagination: for all multi-million dollar entities”

The same developers who sell 10k USD NFTs while blatantly violating Roblox’s ToS will be graciously rewarded with this update. Looks like I don’t need to be scared this Halloween after-all, this takes the cake!

21 Likes

This change is simply awful. As if smaller developers didn’t struggle enough, their ad and sponsor impressions will now be reduced by about 60% (roughly the amount of <13).
Will people now get more impressions for the same amount of robux, or is this making all ads even more useless?

Very poor judgement on this one, and very sneaky how such a massively impactful change has seemingly been hidden inside a UGC update log on purpose.

It honestly feels like Roblox is just trying to remove games targetted towards younger audiences so they can promote their new system to see more games with a mature age-rating.

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Don’t want to be one of those people but can you provide a source? :thinking:

Really amazing feature! It’s good that there will be less advertisements for people under the age of 13, because most people with their accounts under 13 are more gullible and more likely to fall for a scam that might’ve accidentally slipped through moderation. I don’t use Sponsorship or Advertising myself, because a lot of people use ad blockers, and not every player is interested into sponsored games, so It would be a waste of Robux. However I plan on getting to create 3D UGC Accessories, and Sponsor my items, so I’m really interested to see how this feature plays out!

This sounds terrible for me. I was planning on sponsoring my game to get it discovered and now it looks like it won’t be as effective.

I honestly expected people to be freaking out, I don’t know why the reaction to this is so mixed.

9 Likes