It appears that with the decision to eliminate user ads, growing a small game on Roblox has become nearly impossible. The new motto of “Reimagining the way people come together” doesn’t align with the actions we’re seeing from the Roblox Corporation, as the recent update seems to be more detrimental than helpful to the community.
ROBLOX should highly reconsider this update.
edit: removal of user ads is retired
the date is unknown for now…
Why does it suddenly drop after November 19, 2021?
Tbh I have no idea at all, i think thats where the metaverse craze started tho, so it might be linked to that
This entire update would make advertising obsolete, which it already almost is.
This is what I got for 1000 robux with user ads.
This is what I got with 1425 robux with ads manager.
Assuming only HALF of the people that clicked the first ad played it, that’s still 900% more than the amount of plays the new ad has.
The second ad was an in game portal. Maybe the image as are more effective, but I doubt it. This whole update is ridiculous.
I’d just like to make it painfully clear as a developer with a game featuring over 78 million visits, that I am completely shocked these painfully destructive updates have been happening.
I have evaluated both using immersive image ads in my own experience, and through advertising my own game through immersive portal ads - Both are so useless, broken, botted, and troubling in general that it is downright malicious for roblox to even consider removing user ads in favor of this. It’s a miracle that their own statistics aren’t pointing out how destructive this is for them.
Let’s get to the bread and butter:
Portal Ads are botted. (Or just SUCK!) (This is a big one)
There is no polite way to say this. I find it hard to find an alternate reasoning for this as well;
When advertising your place with portal ads, they will consume your entire ad budget almost immediately, proceed to give you 500-1000 players, then, within 5 minutes, all of those players will be gone. Statistically speaking this is almost impossible, both for how many players it acquires and how they instantly disappear. I think it’s so bad that the blip in the system actually caused genuine harm to my game, losing some favorability in the algorithm due to a sudden sharp spike and then decline in players. If it isn’t botting, it is broken, and despite me mentioning this on multiple threads, and getting multiple people agreeing they experienced the same thing, I have been unable to find any response from Roblox or actual outcry about this.
But we cannot be silent on this. I will be filing it as a bug report, for better or for worse, if I can’t get a direct staff response myself otherwise.
Ad budget keeps getting refunded
For some reason, no matter how high I set my CPP, I keep getting 25%+ of my ad credits back after ads are finished. This is really concerning to me, because my average CPP is around 0.05 - But even if I put the max CPP to 0.08 or higher, nothing seems to change. No matter how much money I invest, unless it’s for the botted portal ads, I’m getting a ton of refunded ad credits. It’s nice that this can happen, but why is it happening every time? It’s extremely hard to get the ads I need to actually get the pull I want without having to continuously re-invest unspent ad money. I need a burst of players, but not the botted burst of players portal ads gives, nore the half-refunded budget of sponsor ads.
THE AD MANAGER IS BAD. VERY BAD.
The ad manager is one of the most malicious tools I have ever seen.
This is the process for running a single Sponsored ad for a single game:
1 - Convert Robux into “Ad Credits” at an arbitrary rate, so you forget what you’re spending
2 - Make and name a ‘Campaign’
3 - Make and name an ‘Ad Set’
4 - Make and name an ‘Ad’
Notice a problem here? For one sponsor ad, you require making 3 whole named items in a big list. For a single ad. Even if you wanted to do multiple ads in one ‘Campaign’, they actually do not let you adjust much for the campaign, and the budget is set across all ads in the campaign - So you are encouraged, no, required, to make a new campaign, with a new ad set, with a new ad, every single time you run an ad. This basically adds 15-30 minutes of just me groaning to the process of creating an ad. It is a useless process that I wish I could skip. Campaigns are useful for mega corporations, maybe - But not me. And I’m a developer with a fairly large game. If they’re useless to me, they’re useless to 90% of other advertisers. But yet it slows me down like the old system never did, with no actual benefit for me whatsoever.
–
Even putting the wasted effort aside, it’s just not great. You can’t sort Campaigns/Ads by date - only metrics like impressions, budget, etc. So… If I literally just want to compare my last few ads to each-other, unless they have very specifically similar metrics and settings, I just… can’t? Because someone forgot to put in a Date Started/Ended sorting method? I understand it’s in Beta but this seems like fairly basic design decisions being unaccounted for here.
Due to everything above, removing User Ads is a malicious move.
You cannot remove user ads if the thing replacing them - Immersive ads - Are downright broken.
That is simple enough to understand. If one of the main replacements is a heavily botted, useless, downright DESTRUCTIVE TO THOSE WHO USE IT system like Portal Ads are, then it is simply malicious to even talk about removing user ads at any point until you have fixed your systems.
This has been a very harsh critique by someone who has been suffering under these systems for very practical and obvious to witness reasons. I don’t know where I’m supposed to post this. If I find any other official threads on the topic I’ll probably post this there too. But I am awaiting any sort of reply, especially when it comes to this botting problem that I and many others seem to be having.
Thanks for reading.
Please do NOT remove User Ads. The new advertising system is absolute garbage designed to serve mainly corporations, not the average user/developer, and it’s not even good at that. The solution isn’t to remove User Ads, nor is it exclusively to improve the Ads Manager. Keep User Ads as an option for users. You don’t even have to make any changes to it, just keep allowing users to creatively advertise their game/group/whatever, everything else is boring corporate slop that does not align with the majority of developers on your platform.
This is outlined in the post
And can also be shown when using the ads manager
Oh wow. Well thats a relief. Because I’m 15 and I don’t have access to that kind of information.
Yeah but you only have like nine (or eight if youre in Europe-Asia) days (from the time this post was created. So why bother?
Can’t wait until 1 April where the user ads dont get removed. It would be a bummer to have User Ads removed. As a young developer it would be even HARDER to get my game out there.
They most likely won’t considering everything going on in the past couple of months/years. They wont give a care, they’ll remove the ads which in turn ends up screwing us over
I was looking at the Ads Manager as I wanted to start sponsoring my new game and I noticed when I sponsored my game, I wasn’t given the option to choose the objective of increasing engagement, like said in the original post.
I was wondering if by chance I missed this, it’s still in the making, or if it’s not being planned anymore.
I would also just like to say that I do think the new ads manager is helpful in a lot of ways that the previous system just couldn’t be, and I appreciate Roblox and the employees there for the dedication they put toward things like this for us (I feel as though they don’t get enough credit at times, and I just wanted to say thanks).
I’ve been trying to contact various developer relations members about this but so far I’ve gotten no result.
If you don’t mind me asking, I am genuinely curious to hear what part of the ad manager is more helpful than the previous system. Maybe I just am uneducated in using it appropriately, so your advice would definitely help me and possibly a lot of other people here.
umm ads still there???
Maybe April fools day came late this year?
Still wish there could be a response to this. At this point I’ve exhausted most options, and I typically have a response to something as important as a claim that the majority of ads of a specific method are botted by now. I’ve discussed less important things and gotten a reply - I would like it if this one had some active spark of reply by the dev relations team.
Either way I will continue escalating this.
As far as I heard, the removal of ads was delayed until further notice, no set date for the removal now.
The new ads on the homepage are EXTREMELY intrusive. Please give an option for users to remove these, as it lowers the quality of life on the roblox website.
The offending content is shown below.
First off the new ad manager lets you organize your ads with ad sets and campaigns which allows for easier data reading and comparing. You don’t have to make ads just for getting plays, but you can focus on just getting attention, (which e.l.f. up! used so beautifully). Previously the ad manager only gave you 3 categories to change: Age, Gender, and Device. Now they added on Location on top of that. With the In-Experience Portal, you can set an Experience Genre where you want your ads to show as well as the Game-Rating (parental guidance). Instead of just throwing your money at the system, you can now choose the maximum you are willing to pay per PLAY (not just an impression now). They also tell you the targeted audience size (monthly), which helps put a little perspective on things as well as, helping people niche down.
Now I will say that I am kinda disappointed that there is a minimum bid per play (which is .01 credit, about 2.85 robux), because I used to be able to abuse the heck out of console ads and I was paying like .5 robux per play. Other than that though, I think the new ad manager is pretty good.
Sorry for pinging this post but, according to Bloxy News on X/Twitter, Roblox will officially remove User Ads on June 17, 2024. With historical data remaining until July 31, 2024.
And for those who aren’t up-to-date, Roblox planned on Roblox User Ads several months ago, but was later delayed.
I think everyone just got a message on the Roblox website revealing the new deadline for the User Ad removal, yet the Ads Manager documentation still says it’s in beta.
I have a feeling that the rate of advertisements will drop significantly.
