As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard for newer, underfunded developers to take advantage of the current advertising system.
The Current System, in a nutshell
The current advertising system involves a bidding system in which developers bid a certain amount of R$ for 24 hours of advertising time. Those that place more R$ into their bid get a higher chance of their ad being seen in one of the ad slots on the platform. If there happens to be an outage, you’re out of luck. The R$ you spent won’t be recovered as a result of the lost ad time. Another person decided to run hundreds of thousands into advertisements? Guess you’re going to have to up the game as well, or else your advertisements won’t show.
Many new developers struggle to find a solid playerbase, simply because they cannot afford to pay for new players to visit their game. From my own experience, running 5,000 R$ into ads returns about 1,500 (give or take and depending on the ad) new players every day. This helps us maintain at least 20 players around the clock, with 40-50 players at peak times. This player count is sustainable for us to profit off of, but that’s only because we have the R$ to keep on doing this on a daily basis and because we already have an established playerbase. For new developers who don’t have access to this kind of money, and less likely hard cash to pay for ads, entering the competition gets tricky and hard.
Let’s suppose that a developer does have the hard cash to buy R$. How much would they need to pay Roblox to get to our sustainable level? More than $50 USD. Put that on a daily basis for at least 3 days to get traction going. That’s $150 USD. Even for a high school student with a part time job, that’s a week’s worth of wages (post tax) poured into an investment that you don’t have a solid return on (especially with the 30% tax and 100k R$ requirement for DevEx).
Now, on top of all of this financial burden, factor in the random (but often) chance that Roblox experiences an outage. Looking at past outages, they are typically never in the off-peak hours (and usually, in fact, during or near peak hours) or an Adopt Me update was dropped and Roblox servers just couldn’t handle it (which once again, is usually during peak hours). Not only does your advertising money go to waste, but Roblox also doesn’t seem to be making any moves to refund the amount of time that you lost as a result of the downtime. This downtime could last anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour, but the lost ad money is also lost social interaction, lost player potential to turn into a whale, and lost revenue potential.
In short, the frequency of Roblox outages has not worked well with the 24 hour advertising system that is currently in place. A solution? Use a Pay Per Click advertising system.
Pay Per Click, also in a nutshell
As the name implies, you pay for each click that you receive. With a little extra work from the engineers, the advertisement system could ask or how many clicks a user wants and the time frame in which these clicks would occur (to the best of the system’s ability). Shorter time frames could warrant higher Pay Per Click prices due to increase in demand, and prices could fluctuate depending on how many other ads are also in the queue.
Speculations aside, how would this help us? With a little coordination, advertisements could be disabled during times of outages and no ad money would be lost (since there wouldn’t be any clicks). Alternatively, if there is a known time frame in which an outage occurred, it is much easier to refund now, because you can (hopefully) track the exact number of clicks an advertisement received during that time frame and the price of each click to be refunded.
This also gives smaller developers a chance to have their game seen, since they now see the value of the R$ they are putting into advertisements. They are comforted by the fact that their money is put on something that is measurable rather than putting their money into a chance that their advertisement would show on someone else’s screen.
Anyway, it’s getting pretty late for me and my brain is definitely not going to function in a little bit. Please let me know any negative or positive opinions or questions on this feature.