Top Roblox creators don’t view brand deals as a significant revenue stream

Although brands often contract individual Roblox creators to design and build their activations on the platform, the five Roblox creators told Digiday that their brand deals have always offered far smaller payouts than direct avatar item sales. Creators’ cuts of brand deals on the platform have typically numbered in the hundreds or low thousands of dollars for UGC item design or the tens of thousands for developing virtual experiences. 

“For the most part, it’s not worth it, especially for larger creators, because the earning potential on Roblox is so big, especially for big, front-page games — those games are pulling in millions of dollars,” said Roblox creator Supernob123, who asked to keep her real name private and said that she had decided to focus on other revenue streams after previously being paid fees of $1,000 and $3,500 for branded work. “I’m a small creator; I’ve only really been able to make money off of selling items on the catalog, and even then, back in 2020, I made $300,000.”

When selling in-game items directly to players, Roblox creators make money by charging players Robux, an in-game currency, then exchanging Robux for real-world currency via Roblox’s Developer Exchange program. Creators who have built their own experiences also have access to additional in-game purchases such as subscriptions and passes to access special in-game privileges. Item sales are most Roblox creators’ primary revenue stream, with brand deals acting as a smaller, secondary source of cash.

Some top Roblox creators enjoy working with brands, such as Jonathan “WhoseTrade” Courtney, who said that he had done 30 campaigns in the past year, signing an average of three or four brand deals per month, some through agencies and others directly with the brands. However, Courtney, as well as Junozy and Empyror — other prominent Roblox creators known for creating branded content — said that generating revenue was not his primary motivation to work with brands.

“The majority of my income does not come from these brand contracts — I don’t really do the brand deals for the money,” said Junozy, who has created avatar items for brands such as Forever 21 and Tommy Hilfiger and also requested to keep his real name private. “I use it for brand-building: ‘Hey, I collaborated with X, Y or Z.’ For me, at least, it’s definitely just a cool résumé builder and a great portfolio piece.”

The studio question

Top Roblox creators are increasingly wary of working with brands because they believe that the fees they are paid for branded content represent only a small fraction of brands’ overall marketing spend on Roblox. 

Brands typically spend between $400,000 and upwards of $1 million for their Roblox campaigns, according to four Roblox creators and two media buyers who spoke to Digiday for this story. (A Roblox representative declined to comment on this figure.) However, five Roblox creators told Digiday that the majority of campaigns they worked on were managed by creator studios — essentially influencer marketing agencies that produce branded content or help integrate brands into popular Roblox experiences. 

Studios act as the connecting force between multiple individual creators and brands interested in advertising on Roblox, giving the creators access to extra services such as legal support or liability insurance. However, creators do not believe that the services that studios provide justify the cut they take from brand deals, which can sometimes be as large as 80 or 90 percent of brands’ overall campaign spend. Creators’ preferences would be to work directly with brands to receive a larger cut, with three creators telling Digiday that their fees when working directly with brands were typically three or four times the size of the fees they were paid for deals intermediated by creator studios.

Roblox studios are aware of creators’ concerns over branded work, and some have taken steps to help assuage them. The studio The Gang, for example, practices complete transparency with the creators it contracts to develop branded content, sharing the total value of brands’ deals with them, as well as the percentage of revenue from each deal that goes to each individual creator. 

“You have to be transparent to both the brand and the developer on what the deal is about and what your cut is, because then you’re going to eliminate all the question marks when it comes to how much you’re taking,” said The Gang CEO Marcus Holmström. “I think that’s the easy approach. If someone comes to us [to sponsor] our games, I would do the same — I would want to know what the deal is about, and not just some breadcrumbs. So I fully get the developers’ perspective.”

Matthew Warneford, the CEO of the Roblox studio Dubit, said that studios also provide value for both brands and Roblox creators by helping wrangle several creators and their experiences into a single, more streamlined advertising campaign.

“If you’re a brand that wants to be in three different games, they don’t want to work with three different creators managing that same process — they want just one central team,” he said. “So, the way I view it is, there’s just this messy job in the middle that we could make easier for the games and easier for the brands.”

The Roblox factor

As Roblox builds out its own advertising products, the company has started to mimic an agency role, directly organizing brand deals rather than forwarding marketers’ queries to creator studios. When Roblox coordinates the integration of a brand into a popular experience, it does not take a cut of the fee paid to the creator of the experience by the brand, according to a Roblox spokesperson. Instead, Roblox benefits from organizing the deals by selling ads such as Portals to guarantee brands a certain amount of foot traffic in their experiences.

“When brands bring their IP onto the platform in an authentic and relevant way, the result is a win-win for both creators and brands, with increased user engagement and monetization opportunities,” said a Roblox spokesperson. “To reach Gen Z users on the platform at scale, brands also typically invest in on-platform advertising to drive visibility for their branded content and activations, which again benefits our creator community and powers more engagement with their content.”

The fact that Roblox doesn’t take a cut from brands’ payments to creators adds to the appeal of working with the platform directly, according to three Roblox creators, who said that the company’s relatively quick payment process was an additional incentive.

“One of the deals we did, because it routed through Roblox, Roblox ended up paying us for it within two weeks, which was awesome,” said a Roblox creator who requested anonymity in order to avoid potentially damaging business relationships. “Whereas if we went through the actual partner directly, or the agency that the partner used, we would have been stuck waiting for three months.”