How much do Roblox ads cost in 2026, and what are you actually buying?

Roblox has never published a rate card, and the agencies quoting you a CPM are quoting their own last invoice. What the platform does publish is how each format is billed, and that tells you more about your budget than any borrowed benchmark. Let’s go through what you are buying, then what moves the price.

The four formats and what triggers a charge

Roblox sells four in-experience units, and each one bills on a different event.

Image ads. Static images placed in 3D space inside someone else’s world. They are not clickable. An impression counts when the image holds at least 1.5% of the player’s screen, at a viewing angle under 55 degrees, with more than half its pixels visible, for at least one second. The ad block itself runs from 8×4.5 studs at the smallest to 32×18 at the largest.

Autoplay video. Plays sound-off by default. The impression bar is lower — half a second under the same visibility rules — which is worth remembering when someone quotes you a viewability figure.

Click-to-play video. The player chooses to start it. The publisher hosting the ad earns once it has been watched for fifteen seconds, and that fifteen-second view is what advertisers bid on. Because the player opted in, completion rates on rewarded formats run high — Roblox reported completion above 90% and viewability above 95% across the rewarded video inventory, which by early 2026 covered more than 400 experiences and over a thousand brands.

Portal ads. A doorway that teleports the player out of the world they are in and into yours. You bid on teleports, so you are buying arrivals rather than eyeballs. Of the four, this is the one worth paying a premium for, provided you have somewhere to put the arrivals.

At CES in January 2026 Roblox added a CPM-priced homepage unit and opened programmatic buying through Amazon DSP, Liftoff and PubMatic, so budgets can now route through the same auctions as the rest of your media plan.

What actually moves your CPM

Since there is no published price, the auction sets it, and four things push it around.

Who you are targeting. The 18-plus audience is where the demand has moved. Roblox reported 18-plus daily users up 32% year over year in Q2 2026, and advertisers followed. Bidding for that cohort costs more than bidding broadly.

Which format. Teleports price above impressions, for the obvious reason that a teleport is worth more.

Season. Q4 on Roblox behaves like Q4 everywhere else.

Your own creative. A billboard that reads as an ad gets ignored in an environment built out of player attention. The formats that survive are the ones offering the player something — a reward, a place to go, a reason to look.

The comparison that matters

Ads buy you attention inside worlds other people built. A world of your own is a place players return to on purpose. The economics are different in kind, so run the arithmetic before choosing.

An ad campaign spends until the budget runs out, then stops. Nothing accrues. A branded world costs more up front — a single-mechanic pilot runs roughly $5,000 to $20,000, a full build $30,000 to $250,000 — and then keeps working, provided somebody keeps updating it. Lenta’s world has passed 1.67 million visits and 184,000 favourites; the favourites are the interesting half, because they represent players who chose to come back without being paid to.

The honest version: ads are the right buy when you need reach on a date, around a launch or a seasonal push, and you have somewhere for the traffic to land. A world is the right buy when you want a permanent address on the platform. Most brands that do both use portal ads to feed the world they built, which is the only configuration where the two budgets compound instead of competing.

Before you brief anyone

Three things are worth settling internally first.

Decide what a click is worth to you. On Roblox the useful conversion is rarely a click — it is a teleport, a code redemption, a return visit on day seven. Pick the event before you pick the format.

Check whether your creative can survive being non-clickable. Image ads cannot be clicked at all. If your entire plan depends on a landing page, most of the inventory is closed to you and portals are where your money should go.

Ask any agency to show you the formats they have personally bought and the events they billed on. It is a quick way to find out whether they have run Roblox media or only read about it.