Announcing – Video Ads on Roblox!
Roblox is sketching out an ambitious 2024 road map for its ad business.
The online gaming platform announced a slate of new features for its Immersive Ads hub at its investor day on Wednesday, including video functionality and contextual and age-based targeting available on a self-serve basis.
As of now, brands can buy in-game display placements without having to create a virtual experience inside the platform. Starting next year, they can buy in-game video placements as well.
“What’s amazing is how far we’ve come without advertising,” CEO David Baszucki told investors. Now, the plan is for Roblox to build an ad business that can contribute to the company’s continued growth. Meanwhile, the platform will continue to bolster its virtual economy – in which users trade in-game goods using virtual currency – and its nascent real-world shopping economy, Baszucki said.
But it will take time before some of its more lofty plans come to fruition, such as ad measurement and an ecommerce offering for real-world purchases.
Ads are a “small contributor”
For all the advertiser interest in its young audience, Roblox’s ad business is still in its early days, said Stephanie Latham, VP of global partnerships.
And despite its popularity among preteen and younger users, Roblox is not looking to monetize this cohort. It only serves ads to users who are 13 years old and up, which includes 57% of its audience, or about 39.9 million daily active users. (Roblox introduced age verification in 2021, but users are not required to use it.)
The company did not disclose how much of the $713.2 million it reported in Q3 revenue came from advertising, but “it’s been a very small contributor to date,” Latham said.
Roblox has no immediate plans to specify how much of its revenue comes from ads, Latham said. But ad revenue has been growing at a similar rate to industry averages, she added.
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