Upcoming Ads Roadmap and Changes

I just don’t get why roblox thinks its okay to remove features before a proper solution is in place. When they removed forums, they just told people to go to groups, the devforum, or the blog. When they carried out the audio update, they told us we could toggle permissions of our own audios. 1 year has elapsed and we’ve heard nothing since. When the oof sound was removed, we were promised to repurchase it on a “creator marketplace”. Still haven’t heard from that either. When Roblox started putting 2d faces offsale for the locked-in-head 3d faces, they told us we could eventually change the head shape. Its getting concerning how Roblox likes to remove old features while dangling new solutions that have a 50/50 chance of never materializing. Why?

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Please don’t remove User ads, these skycrapers and banners made by random people are funny to see. This is the only website where I like to see ads !!
I think it’s just a bad idea to remove them. Small developers will have less chance to have visiblity if rich people can use USD on the platform for ads. Small developers ads will be in the darkness.
I don’t want the Roblox ad system to look like Google ads, Youtube ads, and more.
You really have to be ruthless to make such a decision to remove them. That’s the charm of Roblox, which no other platform has. It’s a shame you prefer to standardize on a more “metaverse” style.

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Huh??? So it’s just goodbye to the only noticeable ads on the website??? No one pays attention to sponsors because of how much they blend in and how little information about the game they give. Immersive ads are also supposed to blend in games, making it a slightly worse version of image ads. It’ll look like ads are entirely gone to most casual players. They weren’t intrusive at all yet caught the attention well enough.

I guess sponsors and immersive ads can’t be blocked using ad blockers, but still. It’s quite worrying that developers soon won’t be able to catch the attention of people as much as before, making it much harder to get people to play games.

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@Ryxku

These ads were never visible anyway, and heres why:

  • Mobile, the largest audience, doesn’t even have ads on the app
  • Most people use ad blockers or BTRoblox
  • Ads can only be seen by 13+ users
  • The only platform which see ads are desktop users, which are usually older and less keen to click on ads

Don’t see any reason not to remove them.

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There are lots of ads asking people for followers so that they can be verified. How will developers find followers to get their accounts verified now?

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Advertising for followers just proves you have a massive ego.

Why are you trying to speedrun getting a checkmark next to your name?

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There is literally no reason to every follow anyone on roblox otherwise. There exists no purpose or feature to the follower feature, so users have no reason to use it other than to verify developers.

If they have a notable game they’ll naturally get followers. That’s how the feature was intended to function.

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yeah… people still follow popular figures anyway? It’s no secret that some of the largest and smaller creators have hundreds of thousands of followers.

I’m sad about it, but user ads have become pretty boring and corporate in the past few years. I will not miss them, because they already might as well have been gone for years. Not to mention that only a few ads are ever in circulation at a time since either buying them is so unpopular or a few people buy all of them, not sure which is the case. Not excited for Roblox to replace user ads with something like Google ads though, don’t they track us enough?

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Really not surprised User Ads are finally being removed; there were so many low-quality ads that it almost made the Roblox website look like a joke at times. I ended up blocking User Ads entirely because I was tired of seeing so many cringy ads.

But I have to bring this up again. Will there ever be more AdShapes for Immersive Ads? I have a lot of potential ideas for how Immersive Ads could be integrated into experiences, but this all depends on having AdShapes that aren’t a basic 16:9 rectangle.

Additionally, with the removal of User Ads, this is going to make advertisers who traditionally relied on User Ads have to migrate over to Immersive Ads, and having more AdShapes would just make that move a lot easier.

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Big L for small devs… guess it will be harder to discover new experiences…

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I’m terrible with terminology… sponsored ads are the ones where it replaces a spot in a list of games on the page, while user ads are the ones created with an image editor, right? Not keen on seeing the latter go, especially with the most recent YouTube fiasco(s) driving the whole adblocking thing into the spotlight… even though my adblocker works on them for some reason.

To make it clear, I don’t monetize my games at all (Easiest way to keep money from influencing your game making decisions negatively is to keep money out of the equation in the first place, imo), I only ran either type just to get people to play them.

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Did they ask any dev/user about this or just went with what investors wanted to thrown in?

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That is true. This is also not considering the use of Adblockers. I’ve personally had an Adblocker for as long as I can remember. So I never saw these ads to begin with

I whitelist smaller websites that are trying to put food on the table (I gotta respect the grind as a fellow developer, even though I am lucky to develop as a hobby) but the ads on Roblox were pretty horrible for YEARS. They were always clickbaity in a sense, and the ones that weren’t had a monopoly considering it was usually games that were already large advertising. In my opinion, this never helped smaller developers and I’m happy to see them go, although I am open to and understanding of other perspectives

The only concern I have is that this monopoly-type practice with ads currently may transition to sponsorships, making it harder for smaller games to compete. I hope Roblox addresses this potential issue

user ads were a total scam anyway. lots of devs advertise on tiktok now because it works way better

What…? This mindset feels so backwards. Saying that ads are intrusive and non-integrated is absurd, they’ve been around for years and have helped many people (such as myself) get from no where to somewhere.

To then to say that ads will be “non-intrusive” by having them plastered all over your face while playing a game. what??? That is somehow a better “less intrusive” solution to ads simply being displayed on a homepage or while randomly browsing the site?

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No the follower feature was intended so that you could follow people to get twitter-like status updates on your feed, but that feature was removed years ago.

If they did then developers with popular games wouldn’t have to spend money on ads to get their 10k followers.

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Interesting but I’m not sure how to really feel about this.

Roblox advertising has been in a rough state for the longest time, and become almost completely useless. I hope with these changes, Users under 13 will be able to see sponsored games then? If not then theres no real reason to sponsor on Roblox when you can post TikToks and tweets about your game and get the same or even more impressions then you would investing into the platform.

at least we can still use Robux, else id be very upset about this change. Overall im neutral about this

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