Roblox

Roblox CEO David Baszucki said advertising “will not be material this year” during the company’s Q1 earnings call on Thursday.

In today’s newsletter: Online news revenue is being throttled around the web; Roblox is on a mission to build a $1 billion ad business; and TikTok is circumventing the Apple App Store’s 30% fee by directing users off iOS to purchase TikTok coins.

Roblox’s head of immersive media Ashley McCollum explains how the online gaming giant built its ad platform with demand for programmatic video in mind. And she previews Roblox’s ambitions to grow an ecommerce platform for real-world purchases.

In today’s newsletter: Data broker Adstra sues IPG-owned Acxiom and Kinesso; Apple could strip the P address of its status as a useful identity signal; and Roblox will introduce video ads later this year, with SSP PubMatic as its programmatic vendor.

SuperAwesome CEO Kate O’Loughlin discusses how contextual targeting makes it less risky for brands to market to kids and teens, and whether advertiser priorities for reaching young consumers are shifting after years of metaverse hype.

The vast majority of advertisers who buy ads in video games (91%) no longer consider gaming to be an experimental media channel. But ad spend in games still lags behind audience engagement.

In today’s newsletter: Uber, the New York Times and Roblox all have ads businesses, but in different flavors; Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery plan to launch a sports streaming service; and Amazon gets introspective in response to competition from Temu, Shein and TikTok.

Given the deprecation of third-party cookies and the reemergence of contextual targeting, 2024 could be a big year for in-game ads – so long as game publishers position themselves as a source of premium inventory.

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.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Long-Tail Retail Walmart Connect and Target Roundel are the two retail media players with the biggest adoption outside of Amazon, according to a recent Digiday survey. But both lag far behind Amazon’s 76% adoption rate. Twenty-four percent of those surveyed used Walmart Connect’s […]