By Alexander Lee • November 5, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
Clip It — the Roblox version of TikTok — crossed the billion-view threshold yesterday. To take advantage of the hype, the game’s creators are developing an advertising product that combines some of the strengths of both custom-branded Roblox spaces and the platform’s programmatic ads.
The user experience of Clip It is similar to that of platforms such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts, allowing Roblox users to view, create and share videos of their in-game avatars.
Like the platforms that inspired it, Clip It gives users access to a nearly infinite feed of short-form video, with video ads interspersed between bits of content, similar to the way ads are served on TikTok. At the moment, all of the video ads served inside Clip It are the same programmatic ads that are sold directly by Roblox and placed across different experiences on the platform, although Clip It plans to launch its own advertising products in the near future.
Since launching in March 2024, Clip It has rapidly become one of the most popular experiences on Roblox. The game currently boasts over 8 million monthly active users and achieved its billionth total view at 1:44pm Eastern Time yesterday, according to figures shared by the Clip It team.
Clip It has also been awarded a grant by Roblox’s Creator Fund, as well as one of the annual Innovation Awards handed out at Roblox Developers Conference earlier this year. At the moment, the game’s creators are taking advantage of its considerable growth and success by selling premium content and taking a cut of in-game item sales.
“The content packs that we sell have been available since about a month after launch; those let you get exclusive scenes, more editing tools and things like that,” said Clip It developer Yevheniy “Genya” Shestopalko. “We’re also a really big seller of Roblox UGC [user-generated content items], so if a character is wearing something people want, it’s easy for them to spend Robux and acquire it in two to three taps.”
As a short-form video platform located inside a metaverse platform, Clip It is very much a media business — and, like any media business, it understands that ads are the secret to monetizing successfully. At the moment, Clip It serves the same programmatic video ads located inside any other Roblox experience, but it is on the cusp of releasing a range of custom advertising products and tools that includes both full-screen video ads akin to those on TikTok and custom integrations such as branded video backgrounds.
“Clip It really isn’t a game so much as a social platform, and that makes a huge difference for what brands can do with it,” said Ben Saraille, the co-founder of the agency Makeshift, which assists Clip It with ad sales and other business functions. “For games, even if the size or demo is right, the fit is often wrong, and that makes ads feel foreign or disingenuous. But nothing is off topic in Clip It, because like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and other content apps, there’s a place for every niche.”
At the moment, the most popular ways for brands to advertise inside Roblox are to either build an entire custom-branded space or integrate a brand into a popular pre-existing game, or alternatively to invest in the platform’s programmatic video ads.
“It’s almost like a pyramid of ways of activating,” said Nic Hill, the co-founder and head of interactive at Roblox Partner Program member Sawhorse Productions. “It’s very simple just to drop an ad, and then it is very complicated to have a persistent experience that you’re updating every month and engaging with the community, but you can pick where you want to get in.”
As Roblox continues to build out its own official advertising products, the advertising options inside Clip It — which the game’s creators developed with the official approval of Roblox — could represent a middle ground between custom brand integrations and programmatic ads. They use the same formatting as the targeted video ads traditionally served inside platforms such as TikTok, but also allow for more in-depth integrations, such as the branded video backgrounds, that can help players feel like they are also getting something out of brands’ involvement in the game.
Saraille declined to specify the advertisers that have purchased custom backgrounds inside Clip It thus far, though he said that some brands had already signed on and others were currently in negotiations.
“2025 is set to be our busiest year by far, and we’ve got several items on our product roadmap which will unlock new ideas that haven’t been possible before,” Saraille said. “As a rule of thumb: if there’s a feature you’re used to using in advertisements on TikTok, Snap, Instagram or YouTube Shorts, it’s either there or will be soon.”
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