Upcoming Ads Roadmap and Changes

Roblox · October 25, 2023, 9:39pm

Hi everyone,

We want advertising on Roblox, like our economy, to be seamless for everyone to participate. To achieve this goal, we’re focused on driving value for everyone in our ads ecosystem: advertisers, publishers, and users.

With Roblox ads, we believe creators and brands should be able to achieve their core objectives, like driving discovery and awareness, and leveraging ads as an additional way to earn, all while making sure users see ads that are compelling, relevant, and transparent.

To support this, we have several enhancements and changes that we wanted to share with you. In the coming weeks, we will have more detailed posts, which will include:

Moving Sponsored Experiences to Ads Manager
Improving the discoverability of Sponsored Experiences
Testing the video ad format for Immersive Ads
New brand safety and suitability controls, along with expanded eligibility for Immersive Ads
Removing User Ads in early Q1 2024

Driving discovery of your experiences and creations

Advertising on Roblox can help you find new audiences for your experiences and creations. For advertisers, we’re focused on building a platform based on advertiser outcomes with simple but powerful tools using the following principles:

Buying ads should be simple

Today, we have three disparate platforms: Immersive Ads (in Ads Manager), Sponsored Ads, and User Ads which are each their own system. We want to make it straightforward for you to create, optimize, and measure your ads, so we’re working on moving to a single platform, Ads Manager, to create ads. As part of our effort to simplify, we will begin moving Sponsored Experience creation to Ads Manager next month, and removing User Ads in early Q1 2024 with the goal to consolidate all ad purchasing in Ads Manager in 2024. Ads Manager will soon be available for users over 13.

Focused on the objectives you care about

As an advertiser, you may want to bid differently by objectives such as driving awareness of your brand, driving visits to your experience, or increasing engagement. We’re moving Sponsored Experiences to Ads Manager, to move to the objective-based platform that powers Immersive Ads. Using Ads Manager, you can bid based on the objective that you care about (e.g. visits). We will show ads to users most likely to take your desired action. Our goal is to allow you to optimize for additional objectives such as video views, engagement, and monetization.

Ads should drive visibility for your experiences

In the coming months, we will move the placement of Sponsored Experiences to make them more prominent to users and drive more visits to your experiences. We will be testing potential solutions in the coming month. The higher placement may drive more visibility to the Sponsored sort and increase available impression opportunities.

Advertisers should have more control over brand safety

One of the biggest requests from advertisers is to have more control over the experiences in which their ads are shown. Later this year, we will launch new brand safety and suitability controls for Immersive Ads to give brands and developers more control over where their ads will be shown.

Additional ways to monetize with Immersive Ads

We built Immersive Ads to provide incremental revenue opportunities for creators on Roblox and to allow advertisers to reach new audiences on our platform. We recently published learnings that found that by combining Immersive Ads with in-experience monetization, creators can earn more than just through in-experience monetization.

One of our top priorities for immersive ads is to allow them to appear in more experiences - and drive greater demand (advertiser budgets) for those ads.

We’re still in our early days but committed to building a robust platform. Some areas we’re working on are:

New advertising formats

Next month, we will be testing the video ad format for Immersive Ads to provide advertisers with new ways to express their ideas and provide new opportunities for publishers to earn.

Increasing eligibility for Immersive Ads

At the same time as launching brand safety and suitability controls, we plan to open up Immersive Ads eligibility to all experiences with Experience Guidelines. Previously, only a limited set of experiences were eligible to host Immersive Ads. We anticipate launching brand safety controls will drive more demand for Immersive Ads with brands while enabling many more creators to earn from Immersive Ads and keeping our platform safe for all.

Ads are non-intrusive and integrated with the user experience

We want to ensure that all Roblox ads are non-intrusive and integrated with the user experience. This is why we have decided to remove User Ads in early Q1 2024. We’ve seen over the years that user ads have become incredibly creative but sometimes disruptive to the user experience. Our vision for the future of ads is that they are easily identified and fit with all of our organic content on our Homepage and other surfaces, and personalized so users are always seeing content that is relevant to them. We hope this change will help maintain our commitment to providing a platform for everyone to enjoy. Creators can use Sponsored Experiences and Sponsored Items to continue to acquire customers.

The future of ads on Roblox

Going forward, we plan to continue to invest in our ads platform to make it work well for you, whether you are an advertiser, publisher, or user. Over the next year, we will be rolling out solutions to help you better understand the impact of your ads through better measurement and reporting.

Additionally, we will add new targeting options that allow you to reach people interested in specific genres and other dimensions. We’re also working on providing Publishers with more control over earnings and which advertisers are eligible to appear in experiences.

Please let us know if there are other things you’d like to see going forward from our advertising platform.

Thank you.

FAQ

Click here to view the FAQ!

When will I no longer be able to create a User Ad?

We’re currently planning for early Q1 2024. We will share an update in advance of the final date.

What about groups? With the removal of User Ads, I can no longer promote groups.

The vast majority of User Ads purchased were for experiences or groups that promoted Marketplace items. We’re going to continue supporting advertising of experiences through Ads Manager. For Marketplace items, you can still purchase Sponsored Items ads to promote individual items, just not groups.

For those who have used user ads to promote groups, stay tuned as we work to improve groups discovery over the long term. In the meantime, you may want to consider channels outside of Roblox or other creative ways to promote your content

Will you be migrating Sponsored Items ad creation to Ads Manager?

We don’t have a timeline yet but plan to migrate the ability to promote Avatar items in Ads Manager.

Will I be able to buy ads with Robux?

In Ads Manager, you will be able to convert your Robux to an Ad Credit at the standard DevEx rate. We will cover this in more detail in an upcoming post on DevForum.

As a publisher, can I say which brands are allowed in my experience?

Next year, we will provide publishers with more control over what brands can appear in their experiences.

system · October 25, 2023, 9:49pm

This topic was automatically opened after 9 minutes.

OneEDM · October 25, 2023, 9:49pm

Curious to how this will work. What will be the minimum amount of Robux to convert to ad credit?

Also does this mean developers under 18 can no longer create ads? Currently the Ads Manager is 18+ and requires you to give Roblox a ton of personal information.

UPDATE: The 18+ issue has been clarified in a reply and it seems the original post has been updated as well. Thanks for the quick response!

oSudden · October 25, 2023, 9:49pm

Although these new changes are interesting, nice, and overall seem better adjusted to the current state of marketing and advertisement, I highly disagree with the decision to force us to “stay tuned” for group ads as many small creators need them to grow their platforms.

Regardless, it’s exciting to see what is becoming of the platform in terms of advertising and hopefully this brings better engagement to advertised games.

Evercyan · October 25, 2023, 9:49pm

I was expecting to be met with disappointment, but this actually has me excited. Sponsored Ads haven’t been so good compared to their performance a few years ago, and this isn’t even just correlated to the increased competition - it went from Sponsored games randomly appearing in every sort (from what I remember at least), to a Sponsored sort, and then the sort was lowered drastically over time. At the moment, it’s lower on my Discovery page, and at the very bottom for Home.

Better discovery for sponsors is essential, as many developers on the platform don’t even use them anymore because the amount of new players they get organically greatly outweighs spending tens of thousands on advertisements just to get a fraction of them. The current immersive ads rates are horrible in comparison to Sponsored Ads and only makes sense for developers/partners who are buying it with cash (and it wasn’t devexed).

I think we’ve all seen the removal of classic ads coming for a long time now. But is there any way we’ll ever see a Sponsored sort for groups in the discover groups page? There’s no replacement yet, and I don’t think I have any use to advertise for gamepasses.

headr0ws · October 25, 2023, 9:51pm

Interesting how about group ads?

JoeyKreates · October 25, 2023, 9:51pm

This is such an incredibly sad and disappointing decision to see. Not only was it useful for developers to use for acquiring new players, but it’s always been a part of Roblox’s charm to see the weird and quirky ads. Roblox is literally the only website where I willingly click on ads.

Removing user ads is removing an important piece of Roblox that many users would miss. I really hope this decision gets reversed.

xChris_vC · October 25, 2023, 9:52pm

This is simply devastating and makes acquisition so much harder. Site ads worked flawlessly, players got ads treated when they were looking for games.

I understand that it was being spammed with scams and nonsense, but every ad form has that issue.

I’m getting very low returns on sponsorships compared to user ads (especially before it was teared apart by the <13 targeting removal). Sponsorships seem to work for the short-term flashy kind of content, but it doesn’t allow creators to stand out and truly advertise what they offer.

I know this decision is made out of financial gains - driving up immersive ad demand - but don’t force us towards a solution that’s much worse and limiting for creators.

CrimsonForce · October 25, 2023, 9:53pm

this is pretty exciting ngl, will be interesting to see how it plays out! seems promising

AnomalousBob · October 25, 2023, 9:54pm

This is rather disappointing.
Although the alternative options are good, they completely leave out the gap User Ads conveniently cover being ads on casual browsing; sponsored items are nowhere as noticeable and in-game advertisements require you to be in a game to begin with, many game adverts rely on people surfing the site without much to do in order to present them with a new experience.

Sponsor spots don’t give us any space to express why should the user join the game, what are the appeals or ongoing events.

kavi_conner · October 25, 2023, 9:58pm

I have a question about the Ads Manager.

Currently, ads.roblox.com doesn’t allow any developers/advertisers who is ID Verified and under 18 years old to create Immersive Ads.

It displays this message:

Will this change? Or, can only people who are over 18 years old can create ads

Edit, they said that it will be for users who are over 13

1eontop · October 25, 2023, 9:58pm

Sponsored ads on top

Ariana grande obby will be doing numbers after this one

KinderDev · October 25, 2023, 9:58pm

An absolutely amazing feature! But why is advertising locked only to users over the age of 18? I sponsor my Roblox experiences such as 🎃 Oaklands - Roblox quite a lot, and it’d be a bit embarrassing to ask my dad to make a Roblox account.

Not to mention the fact that even if my dad made a Roblox account to use my robux for sponsoring an experience, he’d have to get that robux transferred to him (and that’s not an easy task.)

So yeah, kind of a bummer. It seems that Roblox is starting to be less young developer friendly…

moo1210 · October 25, 2023, 10:00pm

I’m for one mostly glad to see this announcement, to be perfectly honest. Sponsored ads have had terrible performance, and user ads have seemed to be littered with low-quality ads, which users would commonly ad-block.

However, in regards to the ad manager, I am curious as to the legal entity and age requirement, isn’t this somewhat of a barrier to entry for a majority of Roblox’s developers?

Edit:

Ads Manager will soon be available for users over 13.

It also appears personal account types now exist, so you don’t need a legal entity either. I would’ve liked to see this before the announcement was posted though.

In terms of the silly ‘privacy’ issues of giving out your ID and/or address to a major company, these are industry standards, usually regulated by federal law. If you want to remain completely 100% anonymous while doing any type of business, that’s not what USD or any federal currency is going to get you. Perhaps you should look into cryptocurrencies if that’s your end goal.

12mrcool · October 25, 2023, 10:00pm

Ok so reading through this some things seem good? Maybe? We definitely need more ways on advertising or better ways on getting our small unknown games seen by more people.

This part however is just so disappointing I had plans to use these if/ when the time comes that I do my game ideas. Had ideas for what to put on the ad too.

In my opinion the site ads are not intrusive, they are the only ads I actually click on, they are unique to Roblox. And probably the better way of advertising games or groups.

As for ads in games, im not a fan of that personally…

Also is the ad manager going to require a ID verification, if so that just like someone mentioned is a barrier to new developers etc. And those of us that VALUE privacy etc, I for one like I’ve said before do not want to upload my id to any online thing.

edit 2) Also will we be able to use robux or are we only limited to paying through actual currency… it would be nice if both options would be there. Especially robux, if one has a way to earn robux or something and they don’t work yet etc it would be nice if they could also advertise using that robux. (For those that are in that situation, personally I work etc but id rather use robux if i could)

oMysti · October 25, 2023, 10:00pm

so how will we advertise groups? will we just never be able to

ou1st · October 25, 2023, 10:01pm

Can anyone elaborate further here? Maybe an example of what “disruptive” means (with context)?

within the small period of time that @Roblox posted this, it’s already gotten so many views (probably because it’s Roblox), lol

Metalboy220 · October 25, 2023, 10:02pm

Personally i think advertising groups without having games and interesting stuff in it is useless, If you want to get your group advertised then make a game for your group and then advertise the game

Idk, thats my idea personally

hyde12345678 · October 25, 2023, 10:07pm

How will developers who are minors advertise their game?

Roblox updated the post, 13+ (email verified) users are able to use the Ad Manager

Ripxff · October 25, 2023, 10:07pm

Great changes here. User Ads were not very friendly for small developers and the excessive and the amount of moderation needed to handle such was entirely unnecessary. For those complaining the ads were useful and pushed games to light id advise that devforum members are about 1% of the roblox population and having ENJOYED or considered to have in-your-face blatant marketing be considered effective would put you in around 0.1%. I use Opera GX so this update barely even effects me, and im sure those who use ad blockers as well know that this change is pretty tight.