Roblox has set the price for creators’ brand integrations in 2027.
In March, Roblox announced that it would take a cut from all brand integrations on the company’s user-generated content platform beginning next year, sending the Roblox creator community into a whirlwind of speculation over how much Roblox planned to charge and how it planned to calculate its fees. Today, June 17, the company has revealed a framework for its advertising revenue program, which will take effect on January 1, 2027.
Roblox plans to calculate creators’ brand integration fees using the cost-per-thousand-visits (cost-per-mille, or CPM) metric, with Roblox counting all visits that include an advertising impression toward creators’ revenue share obligations. Specific CPM rates will vary by market: $1.50 for visitors from the U.S.; $0.75 for visitors from the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Nordic countries; $0.20 for visitors from Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea; and $0.05 for visitors from the rest of the world. After a campaign is live for 28 days, all global impressions will be charged at a flat CPM rate of $0.10.
“Some creators really want to show integrations to everyone on the platform and want to make sure everyone has access, but we also want transparency for the brand to understand and know what they’re getting, and the value that they’re getting,” said Roblox senior product manager for ads and monetization Nick McLachlan in an interview with Roblox, who noted that Roblox based the $1.50 CPM rate on conversations with creators, studios, and other stakeholders in the platform’s ecosystem.
Before launching brand integration campaigns on Roblox, creators will be able to forecast and lock in maximum revenue share fees. If the actual amount of fees incurred is lower than the forecasted amount, creators will pay the lower value. Forecasts will be based on an experience’s performance during the 56 days leading up to a campaign, per McLachlan. Forecasting will allow creators to predict their brand integration fees and price them into the costs they charge advertisers for integration campaigns if they wish to do so.
“We want to get more targeted with this — we want to be able to say, ‘hey, if you’re looking for users just in the U.S., we have the technical ability to limit that now,’ and we want to help people forecast based on that,” McLachlan said. “So, as we get more precise based on where or who people want to reach, obviously within the privacy constraints that we have, we want to pass that on to creators and let them price accordingly as well. So this should only get more sophisticated from here.”
Roblox is framing its advertising revenue share update as part of a wider push to welcome more brands onto the platform by increasing its transparency and standardizing its pricing and measurement. Creators whose businesses are built around brand integrations are welcoming the idea of more brands coming onto the platform, but wary of the revenue share policy, with many creators initially anticipating that it would take the form of a percentage pay cut. McLachlan acknowledged that creators’ concerns over pricing had been part of the discussion that resulted in the framework revealed today.
“The numbers we initially came out with were higher than this, but that got us to a better model, and something we think can grow the market and actually have people make a lot of money out of this,” he said.
As currently defined, Roblox’s CPM-based revenue share rates could still cause headaches for some of the platform’s largest experiences. The popular role-playing game Brookhaven, which enjoys an average monthly active user count of at least 120 million, would have to pay roughly $180,000 for each brand integration — and with traffic numbers spiking during limited-time events like integrations, these numbers could go even higher. McLachlan acknowledged the potentially outsized fees that might be paid by prominent experiences with consistent high traffic, saying that Roblox was considering an upper cap for the revenue share fees of large brand deals.
“We might look at an upper cap — it may be something we put in the documentation later this week, and that’s just because, once you hit a couple million dollars, certain deals don’t come into effect,” McLachlan said. “But, at a level that most creators would be used to, probably not, and that’s largely because any cap that we put below a total top ceiling would require us to know the value of the deal, and we don’t want to get into a position where we’re saying, ‘hey, tell us the value of a deal.’”
Since launching Portal ads in 2023, Roblox’s sales team has encouraged advertisers on the platform to invest in the platform’s homegrown ad formats to drive guaranteed traffic into their branded experiences or integrations. In other words, Roblox is now charging advertisers to increase impressions in their integrations — then charging creators or advertisers a fee for those increased impressions. McLachlan said the intention of the framework was to create a price floor for brand integrations on Roblox, rather than to drive more revenue to the platform.
“We think if more value goes to the brands and creators, ultimately, we’ll win, being the platform in the space,” he said.