The Measurement Gap
Brands and agencies have been investing meaningfully in virtual worlds for several years now. Roblox alone accounted for 65% of all branded activations in virtual worlds in 2025. One question has consistently followed those investments: how do you explain their value?
That is what estimated Media Value – eMV – is designed to address.
Virtual world activations generate real engagement. Visits, session time, likes, favourites. These are metrics that matter, but they don’t map neatly onto the KPIs that the rest of the marketing organisation runs on.
The problem isn’t unique to virtual worlds. Gaming has always had its own measurement language. But the gap is sharper here because attribution is limited and the metrics are unfamiliar to anyone outside the space. Most marketers accept that Roblox has value. The difficulty is demonstrating that value in terms that hold up in a budget conversation — against a paid social campaign, a programmatic buy, or an influencer partnership.
Without a standardised framework, a successful Roblox activation is difficult to present in terms that connect to the rest of the media mix. What does 1.2 million visits mean in media terms? How does 40 minutes of average session time compare to a social campaign that costs the same amount? These are answerable questions that, until now, haven’t had a consistent answer.
What EMV Is, and Where It Comes From
Estimated Media Value is an established methodology in social and influencer marketing. The core idea is straightforward: take the reach and engagement generated through non-paid activity and calculate what it would have cost to achieve the same exposure through paid advertising.
The most common formulation is:
EMV = (Impressions / 1,000) × CPM
More sophisticated versions weight individual engagement types — likes, comments, shares, saves — at their equivalent paid cost per action. The result is a single monetary figure that expresses the media value of non-paid activity in terms any media planner recognises.
The methodology has its critics. There is no universal standard — CPMs and engagement weights vary by platform, agency, and tool, which makes cross-company comparisons unreliable. EMV also says nothing about business outcomes: a high eMV score doesn’t tell you whether anyone bought anything. Used well, it is a directional efficiency metric, not a measure of commercial impact.
What it does well is translation. It converts engagement data into the currency that budget conversations happen in.
GEEIQ has taken that framework and applied it to virtual worlds — the first tool to do so.
How GEEIQ’s EMV Tool Works
The tool lives inside the GEEIQ platform and runs in three steps.
Define your activation
Select your campaign type — either an owned world or a brand integration — and name the campaign.
Pull your performance data
GEEIQ tracks hundreds of experiences across virtual worlds. For tracked activations, metrics populate automatically: visits, session time, likes, favourites, and launch date. For everything else, you can enter figures manually.
Set your benchmark and calculate
Choose the social platform you want to benchmark against — Instagram influencer spend, for example — or enter custom CPM values. Optionally, input your actual campaign cost to see spend against estimated value.
The output is a single figure broken down by contribution: what proportion came from visits, from likes, from favourites, each translated against real social CPM equivalencies. Netflix World, as a worked example, generates £1.8 million in estimated media value, 5.6 times the equivalent Instagram influencer benchmark.
Results can be saved, shared, and tracked over time.
Why the Methodology Matters
The value of borrowing an established framework rather than building a new one is that it doesn’t require internal buy-in to the metric itself. EMV already has credibility with media planners, analysts, and finance teams. Applying it to virtual worlds means the output speaks a language that those audiences already trust.
That matters practically. One of the persistent barriers to scaling brand investment in virtual worlds has been the difficulty of presenting results in terms that resonate beyond the team that ran the campaign. A comparable, benchmarked figure — one that sits alongside social and influencer data rather than in a separate report — changes the nature of that conversation.
It doesn’t resolve every measurement challenge in the category. Session time and visits aren’t impressions in the traditional sense, and the CPM equivalencies are approximations. But they are consistent approximations, applied the same way every time, which is what makes comparison possible.
Who It’s For
Brand and campaign managers
Those who need to justify virtual world investment internally. EMV produces a business case in terms the wider organisation already understands, without requiring anyone first to learn what a Roblox activation is.
Media and marketing analysts
Benchmarking channel performance. EMV provides a consistent framework for comparing virtual world activations against social, against each other, and across time.
A First, Not a Final Word
GEEIQ’s eMV tool is the first of its kind applied to virtual worlds. That is a meaningful starting point, not a solved problem.
Mature channels have measurement infrastructure: standardised frameworks, comparable benchmarks, and recognised limitations that practitioners understand and account for. Virtual worlds are building that infrastructure now. EMV is one component of it: a way of making the engagement that already exists legible to the people who decide where budgets go.
EMV is available inside the GEEIQ platform. Request a demo to see it in action.