Roblox Gets into Video Ads

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Roblox, the wildly popular video game, plans to introduce in-game programmatic video ads, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The gaming industry, like every other sector including banking and rideshare apps, is enmeshing itself even deeper into advertising.

Kidding Around

Roblox isn’t one game — it’s a platform that lets players build their own virtual worlds and create games inside those worlds. Roblox attracts some 200 million monthly players, which means 400 million eyeballs every month, and it wants to find new ways to monetize those peepers. 

Roblox launched static in-game billboard ads last year, and now the WSJ reports that Roblox has partnered with digital advertising firm PubMatic to display video ads in-game. As advertisers move deeper into the Roblox jungle, however, there could be some risk attached:

• Roblox is hugely popular with children, and a children’s advertising watchdog said last year the company had served ads to under-13s in the form of worlds created by brands like Nike and Kellogg. Roblox pushed back, saying those worlds didn’t count as ads.
• Now, with more ads to come, Roblox’s policing of who sees them will be under intense scrutiny. The platform is already under some scrutiny over how its child users interact with “microtransactions,” the gaming industry’s term for small purchases made in-game.

Creator’s Market: As well as potentially spending money in Roblox, kids can also make money off it. Roblox lets players profit from games they create, paying them in a bespoke currency called “Robux.” However, that system has led to some intense criticism because Roblox takes a big cut of developers’ earnings, which gets dicey when kids under 18 are making the games. In an interview published by Eurogamer just last week, Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza pushed back against accusations that the platform profits off child labor. “You can say, ‘Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labor,’ right? Or, you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income,” Corazza said. Somewhere a PR advisor is crying.