Currently users can’t click the ad to visit the brand’s website or through to another experience within Roblox, though these features are expected later down the line as it continues to experiment with adding e-commerce features. Last month, Roblox and Walmart formed a partnership that allows the retailer to sell physical goods to players inside the game, a pilot test designed to figure out whether users will want to make purchases on the platform.

“We are starting to dabble in what commerce and clicking out could look like on Roblox and we’ll be announcing more about that and some partners soon,” said Stephanie Latham, the company’s recently appointed vice president of global partnerships.

Advertisers that have tested the video ad format so far have included Warner Bros. Pictures, Walmart, HUGO, and e.l.f. Beauty, the company said.

Roblox has said 2024 will be a ‘year of scale’ for its ads business

Roblox first introduced ads in 2023, offering formats like non-clickable stack images and Portal Ads that teleport users to other experiences and games. Roblox creators earn a percentage of the revenue generated by the ads that appear in their games in the form of its virtual currency Robux. The company primarily makes money through in-game purchases and premium subscriptions.

Roblox’s partnerships boss, Christina Wootton, previously told Business Insider that while 2023 was a year of testing, 2024 would be the “year of scale” for its ads business. Roblox hasn’t yet disclosed ad revenue in its quarterly earnings, nor has it provided a detailed forecast. At its November investor day, Roblox Chief Financial Officer Michael Guthrie said ads “can be a business that crests $1 billion,” though didn’t say when it was likely to reach this milestone.

Alongside Latham, who joined from Meta last year, the company has recently made other key hires in its ads team including former Yahoo Ads chief product officer Ben Fox, who was appointed as vice president of operations and partnerships, and David Vesper, who joined from Google to become Roblox’s head of engineering for ads.

Latham said Roblox intends to make more hires in its direct sales team as it aims to forge deeper relationships with top brands and agencies and shift the platform from marketers’ experimental budgets to becoming a closer year-round partner.

“We are working with different social teams, digital investment teams, beyond gaming is where the Roblox audience engagement sits,” Latham said. “That’s an opportunity, but it’s also a challenge as we continue to evolve, and there’s a lot of education required.”

Roblox’s pitch to advertisers is that it has a highly engaged, hard-to-reach audience of largely Gen-Z users. Roblox in February reported 71.5 million daily active users, 58% of which are over 13.

Roblox’s biggest hurdle with marketers may be convincing them that it’s more than just a game for kids. Nathan Pillot, strategic planner at We Are Social Gaming, which has previously worked on Roblox experiences for the coffee brand Lavazza, said marketers should look beyond the blocky graphics and smiling cartoon-like avatars and instead think of Roblox as a form of cultural entertainment where young people meet.

“Even though it may be perceived as a child’s game, it has to be considered as a social platform and a place of expression,” Pillot said. “These users who are 13, or 16, or 18 will still think about Roblox and remember what happened inside of it in 10 years’ time.”

Roblox ads are labeled and can only be served to users over the age of 13, the company said.

Roblox is signing important partnerships with measurement and tech firms

As part of its efforts to encourage advertisers to feel comfortable on the platform, it’s followed a playbook set by other large digital ad businesses like Google, Meta, and TikTok.

It’s partnered with the ad verification firm Integral Ad Science for viewability and invalid traffic reporting and it has recently begun to offer a brand lift solution from Kantar Context Lab. It introduced brand suitability controls and added a genre targeting option to give advertisers more control over the environments they appear in. And it recently signed a deal with the supply-side platform PubMatic, which will soon let advertisers access Roblox inventory programmatically, initially through a private marketplace where it closely curates which advertisers can participate. Roblox is also looking at offering its ads on the open programmatic marketplace in the future, Latham said.

Experts said a challenge for Roblox’s ad ambitions will be to balance providing gamers with a native, non-interruptive experience while also driving the level of performance that marketers have come to expect from other digital platforms.

“Needing to be profitable and make money is important for both the platform and brands that go on it, but staying relevant and having cultural relevance is going to be key,” said Michael Litman, senior director of emerging tech strategy at the marketing agency Media.Monks, which has created Roblox experiences for brands like Logitech and Duolingo.

“If you literally just slap ads within the game, people are going to run a mile,” Litman added. “It does need to feel intuitive.”

Latham said Roblox is actively monitoring user sentiment to figure out the ideal ad load ratio.