The Global Gaming Phenomenon Building Creator Communities on YouTube 🧱 (HBBIP #158)

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I have to confess something: I’ve never been big on video games. Nothing against them in principle, mind you. I just never got the hang of them. At the risk of sounding like a teacher’s pet, or just the world’s lamest person, I’d rather read a book.

But the world, thankfully, doesn’t take its marching orders from me. Video games remain an undeniable cultural force, and as a casual glance at society will tell you, all kinds of people play them. By merging with countless other subcultures, the gaming industry has successfully asserted its dominance throughout the general discourse. That dominance is even more pronounced in creator marketing, where certain gaming brands are achieving social media numbers typically reserved for the world’s biggest brands.

Today, I’m profiling just such a brand. Even a n00b like me had heard of them before, though prior to my research for this newsletter I couldn’t have told you exactly what they did. And if you somehow haven’t heard of them, you will. Because I’ve come away from that research convinced that we’re looking at one of the brands that will define the future of creator marketing.

That’s a lofty statement, but the numbers back it up. So grab your headset, find your comfiest ergonomic chair, and lock in, because it’s time for…

The Top Brand of All Time (of the Week): Roblox

Half of American children under the age of sixteen. Nearly 100 million people per day. Musicians, memelords, animators, gamers, dabblers, and everyone between.

Those are just a few of the people who use Roblox, a gaming platform that allows people to interact, play, and build games of their own. Founded in 2006, Roblox quickly proved popular amongst the gaming community, but the brand broke containment and became a true crossover smash in 2020. As you might recall, we were all spending a lot more time indoors back then. It was a whole thing.

Since then, Roblox has emerged as one of the world’s most popular brands, and a new frontier within creator marketing specifically. By giving users the ability to build their own games, Roblox is essentially a social media platform unto itself, with millions and millions of mini- and macro-creators.

I took a look at how all those creators have fueled the brand’s momentum over the last six years, and came away shocked. This is one of the biggest stories I’ve analyzed in a long time. Without further hype, let’s get into it.

How Is Roblox Performing on Social Media?

Let’s see how Roblox has leveled up over the last six years. What exactly have all these gamers been building?

Roblox Creator Count, 2020 - 2025

From 1.4k creators in 2020 to 32.3k creators in 2025, we’re looking at a 22x increase. As you can see, most of that growth arrived all at once: after making steady gains through 2024, Roblox’s creator count more than quadrupled in a single year, jumping from 7.6k to 32.3k in 2025.

Roblox Post Count, 2020 - 2025

More creators means more posts—usually, anyway. In this case, it means a lot more posts. Roblox’s post count increased an astonishing 68x over these six years, jumping from 11.3k posts in 2020 to 767.4k in 2025. As with creator count, this metric saw a 10x leap from 2024 to 2025 alone. Along with increased volume came increased consistency: after averaging about 7.9 posts per creator in 2020, Roblox saw this cadence rise to 23.8 posts per creator in 2025.

Roblox EMV, 2020 - 2025

Roblox’s Earned Media Value (EMV), which reflects virality and buzz across social media conversations, rose from $379.1M in 2020 to $9.3B in 2025, a 25x improvement. Even for a brand that’s seen so much growth, the path wasn’t perfectly smooth: Roblox’s EMV dipped to $298.4M in 2021 before recovering in each year since. Then came 2025, when the brand’s EMV grew more than 6x in a single year, shooting from $1.5B to $9.3B.

Don’t worry: we’re going to get into exactly what was going on in 2025. But first, I have some more mind-boggling stats for you. For example, Roblox’s impressions:

                                                                                                   Roblox Impressions, 2020 - 2025

These tell a similar story, just with more zeros. Here, Roblox went from 8.1B impressions in 2020—already roughly earth’s population—to 312B in 2025, a 39x increase. Like EMV, impressions dipped in 2021 (5.4B) and then climbed gradually from there. In 2025, they jumped nearly 12x versus 2024’s 26.2B.

Just a few weeks ago, I was marveling at FC Barcelona’s 80B impressions in 2025. While I still wouldn’t shake a stick at that, we’re now looking at a roughly 4x improvement upon that remarkable benchmark. This is akin to everyone on earth looking at Roblox content forty times in a calendar year. I don’t even talk to my friends forty times per year. Unfathomable.

Roblox Engagements, 2020 - 2025

Engagements grew too, if not quite as impressively as impressions. The metric rose from 270.3M in 2020 to 4.9B in 2025, an 18x increase. As with other data points, engagements followed the same pattern of a 2021 dip (170.2M) and a big 2025 surge, up more than 5x from 926.5M.

So where is all this activity happening? How is Roblox doing this?

What's Roblox's Channel Breakdown?

Let’s take a look at Roblox’s 2025 impressions by channel. I think you’ll agree that it paints a pretty clear picture.

Roblox's Share of Impressions by Platform, October 2025 - September 2026

Yeah, so it’s not exactly close. YouTube accounts for a staggering 94.9% of Roblox’s 2025 impressions, with TikTok at 4.0%, Instagram at 1.1%, and Facebook at 0.1%, technically making it onto the graph. As with much of the gaming space, and tech more broadly, YouTube is where nearly all of Roblox’s audience resides.

Roblox's Share of Engagements by Platform, October 2025 - September 2026

YouTube dominates engagements too, with 80.7% of the total, but the split is a little less lopsided. TikTok’s share of engagements (15.5%) is nearly four times its share of impressions, followed by Instagram (3.5%) and Facebook (0.3%), which both see roughly 3x improvements over their impressions marks. While TikTok reaches far fewer people than YouTube for Roblox, the channel punches above its weight on a per-interaction basis.

Okay, I promised that I’d explain how Roblox has achieved this incredible growth, and exactly what went down in that remarkable 2025. Time to make good on my word:

Who Are Roblox's Creators?

1. Three Games Are Dominating Roblox’s Content Spread

I took a look at the top 1k posts by EMV that creators authored about Roblox from October 2025 to September 2025. Of those posts, 983 were on YouTube. TikTok contributed only 12 posts, while five came from Facebook. Clearly, the brand’s natural format is long-to-medium YouTube videos or YouTube Shorts.

Three specific Roblox games account for the overwhelming majority of the top leaderboard content, collectively generating $81M EMV. ‘99 Nights in the Forest’ is the most dominant game, appearing across multiple top creator accounts. Many gaming accounts, such as RealRosa, mention Roblox in a challenge format, with their content continually reinforcing how little I know about video games. Meanwhile, the adjacent game ‘Steal a Brainrot’ (which was almost the name for this newsletter, btw) generates a distinct sub-cluster of creator activity from accounts like Vindooly, who posts enthusiastic in-the-know snippets about “The Usual Steal a Brainrot Experience.” Continuing the brainrot theme, ‘Escape Tsunami for Brainrots’ rounds out the trio, appearing across the accounts of pieeanimation and several others. I think I can definitively state that the brainrot aesthetic—deliberately chaotic, zany, meme-dense, low-production-value—is the dominant creative register for this game cluster.

Additionally, ‘Grow a Garden’ is one notable new game breaking through over the last 12 months, surfacing in Vindooly’s top posts and suggesting an expanding content community that, while not at the level of more established games, still has significant momentum. ‘Dress to Impress’ (DTI) contributes a smaller but still coherent content cluster, spinning things off in an interesting new register: a distinctly fashion-forward Roblox game, DTI inspires content that looks far more outfit-of-the-day than brainrot.

2. Content Revolves Around Animation and Storytelling, Rather Than Gameplay

The single most striking content insight I gathered from this leaderboard is that the highest-EMV Roblox creators are almost universally animators and storytellers, rather than traditional gameplay streamers or gaming commentary creators. That cohort is there too, but not front-and-center.

For example, Roblonarium ($18.6M EMV via 62 posts) makes fully produced short films featuring Brookhaven, the game’s suburban neighborhood map used as a stage for custom character scenarios. Meanwhile, HuyPro2k ($18.3M EMV via 64 posts) is a Vietnamese-language Roblox animation channel with a visual format featuring Shorts-style animations using Roblox characters, which consistently perform in the $350K EMV per-post range, an extremely impressive benchmark. This genre is robust enough to garner competition: Ngao va Kemy ($12M EMV via 43 posts) follows the same format, confirming that Southeast Asian Roblox animation is a major, often overlooked driver of the game’s global content footprint (more on that below).

Here’s a familiar name for you: KPop Demon Hunters ($3.7M EMV via 12 posts) is perhaps the most formally ambitious of Roblox’s many top creators, drawing from multiple areas of pop culture to craft a scripted animated series featuring crossover from the universes of Grand Theft Auto, k-pop, and more. This is the closest thing in the Roblox leaderboard to a licensed character ecosystem, all created entirely by and for the creator community, with no official Roblox involvement.

Finally, the Hamood Habibi Tower cluster adds yet another content format to the mix, producing both animated videos and physical toy unboxing content. The blend reinforces the unique nexus at which most Roblox consumers operate, drawing from multiple influences to produce something genuinely new.

3. Roblox’s Community Is Global and Multipolar

Working through Roblox’s full creator list reveals that the brand’s earned media footprint by no means stems from a monolithic English-language YouTube gaming community. Instead, it’s a collection of parallel communities in multiple languages, operating largely independently of one another.

I’ve already mentioned the Vietnamese community, as seen from accounts like HuyPro2k, Ngao va Kemy, and others. But that isn’t the only hit I saw in Southeast Asia: Indonesian creators also appear prominently, whether it’s via various accounts that walk users through how to make Roblox characters using their own faces or Emma & Mami, a family channel that uses Roblox as a backdrop for typical lifestyle and parenting content. These accounts represent the brand’s deep saturation of Southeast Asian media.

While TikTok contributed a smaller share of Roblox’s overall hits, and a skinnier slice of the leaderboard, the signals from that channel remain quite interesting, and reinforce Roblox’s status as a cultural touchstone across many different communities. With the game earning mentions from everybody from Barstool Sports to Subway Surfers, it’s clear that Roblox is a reference point across multiple distinct subcultures. Meanwhile, the brand’s Facebook content paints an even more definitive picture of Roblox’s crossover appeal, with the brand receiving blessings from, no joke, the Catholic Church. A real-world church shared the establishment of its Roblox presence as a social media post that quickly went viral, which I don’t think I’ve seen previously in my 10+ years in the industry.

Together, these outliers confirm that Roblox has moved beyond the boundaries of gaming content and into the general cultural vocabulary, a transition that creator marketers should track carefully, as it reframes who the brand’s most relevant creator partners actually are.

More than anything, what my analysis and research of Roblox shows is how thoroughly the brand has already performed the hard work of building a creator community. Drawing from all across the world, and across major industries, Roblox has stitched together an incredible array of advocates, cementing its status as a hub for creators. Now the challenge becomes continuing to build upon that cultural expansion without losing that spark that makes Roblox so unique—and making sure that all those creator marketing operations run smoothly in the meantime.

It’s a tall task, but something tells me Roblox can get it done.

*All data, unless otherwise specified, stems from CreatorIQ's public-facing brand leaderboards. We will never share performance metrics from a customer's CreatorIQ profile, or any brand's private information.

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