Roblox is finally letting brands advertise to the under-13 crowd for the first time – but very cautiously.
After years of not showing ads to users under the age of 13, Roblox said in April that it would make this audience pool available to advertisers for the first time. And, on Thursday, it named youth-focused ad marketplace SuperAwesome as its exclusive advertising partner for under-13 users.
This represents a noteworthy change in Roblox’s ad strategy, a company spokesperson told AdExchanger, rather than a move Roblox was building up to since first launching ads across its platform in 2022.
Recent safety improvements – such as introducing new age verification for all users and two new user tiers for young kids and teens – laid the groundwork for bringing privacy-safe contextual advertising to youth audiences, the spokesperson added.
“Brands are already part of everyday life to all ages of the community,” the Roblox spokesperson said. “So we wanted to move to a standardized and restricted pathway to ensure that every encounter is transparent and age appropriate.”
Direct campaign control
“Restricted” is the key word. Roblox is choosing to prioritize maintaining control over the ad experience rather than offering automation for advertisers.
First and foremost, ads targeted to under-13 users will be limited to direct deals only. “No programmatic for under-13 whatsoever,” the Roblox spokesperson said.
And only banner ads on the Roblox home screen and some in-game placements will be available for this cohort, including in-game billboard ads featuring static and video ad creative – but not including rewarded video ads.
Roblox wants to avoid incentivizing kids to remain on its platform for extended periods of time, the company spokesperson said, adding that other platforms typically restrict rewarded video for kids over the same concerns.
In addition, all display and video ads shown to its under-13 audiences will be clearly labeled as ads.
But Roblox’s branded game experiences and virtual worlds are not affected in any way by the launch of advertising for under-13 audiences or by the exclusivity agreement with SuperAwesome. Roblox treats those branded experiences as a separate offering from its ad platform.
Speaking of branded experiences, it’s worth recalling that Roblox was called out in 2023 by the Children’s Advertising Review Unit of BBB National Programs for not clearly labeling all of its branded experiences as advertisements. But it introduced a new feature in May to add standardized labels to “advertising integrations and brand experiences classified as ads.”
Ad targeting & brand safety
Ad targeting for the under-13 cohort will also be strictly overseen by Roblox and SuperAwesome to ensure compliance with COPPA and GDPR guidelines, the Roblox spokesperson said.
There will be no one-to-one personalized targeting or collection of behavioral data. The targeting will mainly be contextually based on the Roblox experience in which the ad is shown. But advertisers will also be able to target their campaigns based on some generalized demographic information, like the country a user is located in, their gender and what age range they fall into.
SuperAwesome will provide the infrastructure for brands to target their under-13 campaigns globally, said SuperAwesome CEO Kate O’Loughlin.
Roblox will share revenue from these campaigns with game publishers as it does for other ad campaigns, with SuperAwesome also collecting a cut.
Although SuperAwesome will serve as the exclusive ad platform for under-13 audiences, this exclusivity agreement will not affect Roblox’s existing partnerships with other programmatic ad partners, such as PubMatic and Google Ad Manager, since under-13 ads will only be sold directly.
Because this is a contextual advertising play, much of SuperAwesome’s work has been focused on classifying the tens of millions of user-created experiences and games on Roblox’s platform, O’Loughlin said – including the roughly 15,000 new games added to the platform daily. That work involves not just breaking down games by genre, she said, but also providing information about the style of gameplay and the game mechanics themselves.
Roblox will also offer a pool of inventory called Advertiser Select with placements across its most highly engaged-with games and experiences.
And, to address advertiser concerns about video game content – particularly when it comes to user-generated games – SuperAwesome is also providing brand safety and suitability controls alongside Roblox’s other partners DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science.
For example, O’Loughlin said, it isn’t enough to simply say a game features weapons or combat in its gameplay. SuperAwesome also breaks down whether the weapons and combat featured are realistic or fantastical (i.e., whether a player character is fighting enemies using an AR-15 or a giant lollipop).
In addition, SuperAwesome has always felt very strongly about not treating the under-13 crowd as a monolith, since very young kids are fundamentally interested in different experiences than older kids and pre-teens, O’Loughlin said.
Roblox’s introduction of new user tiers – namely, Roblox Kids for ages 5 to 8 and Roblox Select for ages 9 to 15 – helps advertisers tailor their campaigns to these different groups, she said.
Audience makeup
With stricter age verification now in place, Roblox also has a better idea of its audience makeup, information advertisers can use to target more effectively on the platform.
As of Q4 2025, Roblox had 144 million daily active users, 45% of whom had completed age verification. Among the age-verified group, 35% were younger than 13, while 38% were between ages 13 to 17, and 27% were 18 or older.
Looking at those numbers, it makes sense why Roblox would want to find ways to monetize its under-13 audience as it seeks to grow its ads business.
Of course, these changes aren’t happening in a vacuum. Roblox, like other large online platforms, including Meta and TikTok, has long faced criticisms and even legal challenges related to child safety.
Roblox currently faces at least 130 child safety lawsuits that have been combined into a federal class action in the Northern District of California, in addition to other suits brought by state governments, including Nebraska, Louisiana, Kentucky, Texas, Florida, Iowa and Tennessee. Roblox also settled two lawsuits brought by the states of Alabama and West Virginia last month.
In light of these cases, it’s natural for parents and advertisers to have concerns over whether a platform like Roblox is truly safe for under-13 users. And expanding advertising to kids might also raise some concerns among parents who doubt ads can be beneficial to their children.
When asked what Roblox would say to parents worried about their kids seeing ads on the platform, the spokesperson emphasized that the ads on Roblox will look no different from what kids see elsewhere – the kind of spots parents might remember from Saturday-morning cartoons, but with more privacy protections and restrictions built in.
“We are not doing anything different than real life,” the spokesperson said. “In fact, we’re being more conservative than you’d find in real life.”
