Data via SimilarWeb
ROBLOX enjoyed a breakthrough year in 2021, with a spectacular IPO last March and increasing talk that it's the leading metaverse platform, with growth to 43 million daily active users late last year.
According to SimilarWeb, however, there's one thing ROBLOX didn't grow in 2021: Website visits.
Since at least June 21, visits to the official site have remained flat at around 1 billion visits per month, give or take. (Which is, of course, an insane number of visits.) Unlike most other metaverse platforms, the ROBLOX experience is very tightly integrated with the website, with an online shop and a directory of popular/engaging/recommended worlds. So web traffic offers a pretty accurate insight into overall ROBLOX user activity.
And to go by that standard, ROBLOX usage is stable -- but not growing.
Why? The likeliest answer is something I've discussed before:
The Metaverse age cliff. In other words, it's likely that ROBLOX has fully saturated its target market of teens and pre-teens -- literally half of kids in America play ROBLOX! -- and is not growing, because older players age out of the platform while their younger peers take up the reins.
None of this is a negative against ROBLOX, I should say. While serious policy concerns continue to exist, as a platform, it's effectively won its category, as a metaverse for kids. So far it hasn't grown outside that category, but even maintaining its existing user base where it is now would be a huge business success.
At the same time, this usage plateau should put some brakes on prematurely declaring ROBLOX the leading metaverse platform. Because while 43 million teens and pre-teens is quite an audience, that still leaves the field open to hundreds of millions of users more.
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