Im not aware of any existing mechanisms to do with this, but if there are someone please tell me;
Sometimes the Roblox website can go down or be significantly slowed down for a few hours, (I noticed that at around 9am to 12am BST one day my game had 0 visits even though I had a total of 30k advertisements running and usually get about 600 concurrent players).
Now, although this is a very rare occurence, if someone such as a big developer is releasing a game they have spent months making and they advertise for 300k in total for the release day, if the website or game servers go down for 2 hours that day, they’ve essentialy lost R$25,000 or almost $90 at devex rates. If someone was advertising for even more, like when berezaa took over the advertising system a few years ago, let’s say 500k, they would lose R$40,000 or $140. Since roblox charges for a 24 hour time slot and not a specific number of impressions or clicks, this likely loses developers a lot of money. These numbers dont even take into account peak hours, for example at 1am BST my game makes about 4x as much as usual.
I don’t know how the internal Roblox systems work, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think developers receive any kind of refund or extra advertising hours for things like this. Perhaps they should?
tl:dr: People lose money on sponsors and advertisements when the website goes down, they should have some form of refund or the advert runs for an extra hour or two depending.
This is an issue I’d like to see solved
This is a non-issue
This is an issue small enough that it’s not worth action
Especially with Roblox going down more frequently lately, this is definitely something I’ve been concerned about. It’s never yet happened to me, however I don’t have much robux so if I were to advertise/sponsor then the website were to go down, I wouldn’t have the robux required to simply re-advertise if it was down for so long that my ads were rendered useless.
But I don’t think Roblox has ever been down for 24 hours either.
Estimated impressions are based on the day before.
I’ve seen a lot of ads for Miner’s Haven in the past two days so you were probably competing with a large bid and therefore got way less impressions. @berezaa
Instead of working on ways to easily recover from the when the website goes down, why not work on ways to prevent the site from going down in the first place?
This really doesn’t seem feasible, that’s a 95%+ drop in impressions from the estimated ones.
And no, the idea that it was caused by one developer running a huge ad campaign is just not likely, because the amount one developer has on the economy is minuscule now. Ok, maybe if it was like an extra million+ Robux spent on the same ad type, but why would someone do that… This should be investigated further, not brushed off.
What kind of ad was this?
Are you sure you compared the same type of ad for the estimated impressions vs the stats that came in?
Are you sure at the time your ad had only 4 hours of running left?
25k Robux making only 295 clicks is pathetic (not on your part, the CTR is not bad), that’s like putting 87$ in the toilet.
Roblox ad running is turning into a guessing game to run ads or not, and that’s not fun. We need some more stability.
If too many don’t run ads on a weekend because they expect another outage, others will go in instead and then might experience the seemingly inevitable outage, repeat that cycle making more unhappy developers weekly. Not a winning strategy
I don’t see Roblox implementing a refund system though. Complications: someone at Roblox has to decide how long the site was gone / not functional, and then some system has to refunds developers based on what? (Percentage of day out of total Robux spent sure) But ads running aren’t worth the same Robux throughout the entire day because certain times of day has more likelihood for purchases (depending on game demographics) it would never be perfect, someone would always complain
Sure, you have a good point, what about doing extra running of the ad for the amount of time that the site was running very slowly or not at all? This way there’s no actual money refunds, instead developers don’t even have to do anything, their ads will simply over-run to provide the extra time.
Rather than reimburse those people who bought ads during an outage Roblox could just stop running ads during such a situation. They could make a warning appear when trying to buy one when the website is slow:
The Site Is Experiencing Issues Right Now. Advertising is Temporarily Down.
If an ad is already running and Roblox is slow, you could stop showing all ads until the outage is fixed. Then resume them when it’s over.
I’d imagine it wouldn’t even be hard to implement this. You could probably even have this system set up automatically so nobody has to manually decide if the site is slow or not.
I know this has been a topic in the past however, I feel that it should be maybe discussed again to get an opinion on it.
I feel that there should be some option that developers can opt in to get some of their advertisement or sponsorship campaign funds back when the site is not operating properly. The advertisements just go to waste along with the robux. They serve no benefit especially with connectivity issues.
I believe this will help the smaller developers of our community who actually depend on that robux to generate ads for their games and groups. Getting a percentage of the funds back could help majorly.
I agree with this. I have wasted almost all of my advertisement money multiple times when the site was experiencing issues, and it has messed with my player count and how the game goes. I think if we’re spending money on advertisements, it should be a given that we shouldn’t have to waste money while the site is experiencing issues.
If its within a couple hours before the site experiences issues, the percentage should be easily 100% refundable.
However, I believe that the entire amount of robux spent on Sponsors can’t be fully recovered if was running for over 6 hours, but it should still grant the smaller developers a good chunk of their funds back.
Information:
Yesterday there was an issue where a lot of the Roblox servers were failing, causing Roblox to have some downtime. I noticed this due to the fact that my player count was dropping drastically even though I had sponsored, so I checked the DevForums to see if anything had happened, and conveniently found this highly viewed topic: Roblox Servers Failing [ROBLOXCRITICAL] - #4.
The plausible problem:
Even though I had been saving up for quite a while to sponsor, it was unfortunate enough for Roblox to be down for almost 8 hours, and inconveniently, my sponsor was placed in the time frame to end exactly when Roblox had started to get their servers back and running. Let’s say an example for other cases, that developers had spent over hundreds of thousands of Robux, just to run sponsors or advertisements for 24 hours, for 8 of those hours to only be viewed to a really low player density due to servers having some downtime, that would be a complete waste of time and value that they had spent unless initially, the servers had been running normal. Now I’m NOT saying it’s Roblox’s fault that their servers had some downtime, they were investigating a serious issue that happened to their servers yesterday and they worked hard to get it back to normal as soon as they can. I just feel like there should be some compensation for developers like me, to have solutions for this downtime because saving up Robux for sponsoring or advertising takes work, time and effort.
Possible Solutions:
So I talked to Roblox’s customer relations team about some compensation and explained the downtime issue, but they responded that they were investigating the downtime issue and ended my support ticket there without even talking about or responding to the message about compensation. I feel like there should be a change in customer service policy to give some sort of compensation to developers who had sponsors and advertisements running through the downtime. A fair choice would be to either give the remaining Robux back for the time left to run when Roblox goes down, or to run their sponsors and advertisements for the timeframe of the downtime. Another solution could be an implementation to the website where they could automatically pause the time remaining frame of the advertisements, when there is detected downtime, then resuming after they had solve the downtime issue. This would be very helpful to me as a developer, because I had spent so much time and effort saving up to sponsor my game, and not getting back the adequate results that I had expected therefore wasting Robux.
I just released a game and put money into ads, and then Roblox started having issues shortly after.
They need to either refund our ad money or extend the ad duration by the length of the downtime.
It’s ridiculous. It’s robbery. I paid for a service and didn’t get it.
Edit: The biggest issue is that they know this is an issue but they’ve ignored us for years.
The Site Is Experiencing Issues Right Now. Advertising is Temporarily Down.