Because they can’t make money, bilibili bosses choose to stop collectively.
On the last day of March, when I saw Lao Xu (bilibili UP: King Xu who lives by his face) announcing a temporary stop in the new video, I didn’t associate it too much. Because according to Lao Xu himself, he made such a decision under the dual effects of not making money from making videos and being physically and mentally exhausted. He didn’t completely give up the video update. The so-called stop is more like a "spring break" for himself.
As a video creator who started to update the video of League of Legends more than ten years ago, and now the number of fans on the whole platform exceeds 10 million, Lao Xu’s temporary suspension was initially limited to his own circle, but as someone connected it with the suspension of another reasoning UP owner "I am a weird gentleman" with millions of concerns, and the suspension of several waist UP owners who paid less than one million concerns, "bilibili didn’t make money doing content, and UP owners began to retreat collectively".
With the continuous fermentation of this remark, more and more people began to participate in the discussion of "UP quits the pit, bilibili pills". Lao Xu and these UP owners who happened to stop the shift soon became the focus of public opinion. Following this dissatisfaction with my uncle, more related topics quickly rushed to the hot search and became a hot topic …
On the surface, whether it’s Lao Xu, who bluntly makes ends meet, or "I’m a weird gentleman" who chose to stop working because of poor management, the direct reason for their announcement of stopping working is "just less than the meter". Under this logic, the increasingly stingy "uncle" must be the first to take the blame-after all, if it weren’t for his uncle’s cutting creative incentives, a bilibili with no one injured would certainly be realized.
But in fact, even when the media is developing fastest and craziest, the so-called video "creative incentive" has never been the core way for full-time UP owners or media practitioners to make money. Let’s take Lao Xu, who sparked the discussion, as an example. After he set up his own team in 2016, he didn’t persist in going black on video. In order to supplement the expanding team, he started to open his own tb store and tried to expand his income channels by selling goods and receiving business orders.
Although Lao Xu has been exploring diversified ways to realize cash for a long time, for an early video upmaster like him, the "enclosure war" of Internet giants in the media fields such as live broadcast and video at that time was the most important reason why they survived so far.
No matter the tens of millions of signing fees of some live broadcast platforms at that time, or the scuffle between live broadcast and video platforms later, as long as you have the ability to catch this express train, no matter what your previous status, you can become a "brother" or a "sister" by this, and earn a lot of money to envy others while turning your hobby into a job. It can be said that the platform bonus at that time not only became the starting point for the career of media practitioners to take off at that time, but also made video/live broadcast profitable and became a brand engraved on the Internet at that time.
However, with the passing of this money-throwing craze, Internet giants who were once poor and only had money died and sold. The word "Internet Winter" began to appear in more and more media and news reports, and the self-media industry that used to be able to fly with a sigh of relief also fell into the same dilemma. At present, the lively live broadcast platform is only supported by fighting fish and tiger teeth, while the traditional video websites such as Youku and Tudou have been weakened by the emergence of competitors such as Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker, and have to live by holding a group to keep warm.
In addition to the internal volume does not move, the changes in the external environment are even worse. With the gradual destruction of bilibili, the influx of marketing numbers and other platform creators began to make UP owners have to "grab food" with the creators of the whole platform.
Many bilibili-born UP owners started out with interest, and many of them took the road of "generating electricity for love". Some of them quickly gained a lot of attention by bilibili’s breaking the circle, and were fortunate to become the best in some fields in bilibili. However, when the creators of the marketing number and other platforms "break in" with the mature experience of highly efficient AI and MCN, the native UPs without commercialization experience are vulnerable to "dimensionality reduction", which is also an important reason why many native UPs lament that "bilibili has changed" and even choose to stop working.
A typical example of an accident at Chafancha.
For bilibili’s UP owners and onlookers, uncle’s cutting of videos inspired the creation and led to "stopping the tide", which is not only a manifestation of its "deterioration", but also an excellent evidence of its greed. But for bilibili, cutting creative incentives is only a small part of his attempt to increase revenue and reduce expenditure. It is no exaggeration to say that bilibili doesn’t look like a listed company that has rung the bell on NASDAQ at all, because from the beginning, my uncle didn’t make much money.
The day before Lao Xu updated the video, bilibili officially announced its annual performance in 2022. Although last year’s total revenue increased by nearly 13% year-on-year, at the same time, bilibili’s net loss reached an astonishing 7.5 billion yuan, which is equivalent to 1.5 times of its entire mobile game revenue.
Faced with this situation, Rui Chen, Chairman and CEO of bilibili, said on the conference call that facing the challenges brought by the macro environment, the company actively adjusted its strategy to adapt to market changes, continuously reduced costs and increased efficiency, and accelerated the commercialization process. In 2023, increasing revenue and reducing losses and healthy growth of DAU (daily active users) are still the two most important things in bilibili.
Uncle, I’m going to start selling iron.
In fact, in order to achieve the small goal of "profit", bilibili has been accelerating its commercialization for a long time. In addition to the initial big members, "member purchases" and "magic rewards" that are no different from card drawing, such as the placement of advertisements such as opening screen advertisements, large and small window advertisements, and inserting purchase links in videos, it has also begun to appear in bilibili more and more frequently.
In addition to these conventional brand exposures, bilibili has also prepared a series of integrated marketing activities, such as New Product Day, Evolution Theory and Call-to-Talk Order, to further enhance the effect of commercialization. On the main side of UP, bilibili also launched a special order-taking platform "Huahuo" to create an official commercial route and process for everyone.
Although these actions just mentioned have been implemented as early as two or three years ago, judging from the actual business achievements, stock prices in recent years and the increasing loss figures in financial reports, the effects of these measures are very general, and even the scale of stopping losses has not been achieved.
The reason for the little effect is that there is a problem with project management. We don’t know whether there is a mistake in personnel scheduling and capital flow. However, from the current situation that my uncle has been trying for several years but has been losing money, we can still see more or less the problems in realizing the format in bilibili.
For the peers in bilibili, such as Tubing, Iqiyi and Tencent, after a long period of operation, they all have a mature liquidation system. Whether it’s the "Member Free Advertisement" service launched by Tubing, the advertisement that can be shared by up owners in the video, the advanced on-demand and paid viewing by Iqiyi and Tencent, and the live broadcast with goods behind Tik Tok Aauto Quicker, although they will have an impact on the user experience, the logic of realizing traffic is at least clear, and the promotion of income is also real. To put it bluntly, the advertisement at the beginning of the video naturally belongs to the living soil of the video platform.
Although there is almost no threshold for bilibili to copy this mature income model, in fact, because of his uncle’s promise of "never adding video patch advertisements", bilibili has never added patch advertisements to videos since he became rich. Although bilibili’s user reputation has been maintained for a long time because of this, at the same time, it has also broken uncle’s most intuitive way of making money. Bilibili has achieved today’s achievements because of its promise not to advertise, and this promise has become the biggest obstacle to bilibili’s progress.
Although the promise of "never adding video advertisements" is still there, with the increasing losses year by year, whether bilibili breaks the promise first or goes bankrupt while sticking to it has become a matter of life and death for bilibili.
As a matter of fact, with the appearance of advertisements in Three-body animation and earlier Linglong some time ago, bilibili’s bottom line seems to be loosening, and the promise of "never adding video patch advertisements" is being gradually broken. If bilibili really has no choice, it is not necessarily a distant thing to pick up the old line of video platforms and install all those things mentioned earlier.
After counting my uncle’s so-called "crimes" and returning to the "stop more tide" at the beginning of the article, it is not difficult to find that whether it is Lao Xu who bluntly "can’t make money" or "I am a weird gentleman" who chose to stop more because of the company’s misfortune, the big UP owners who stopped more in those days can actually count it with one hand, and it is far from worthy of the "tide" in both quantity and breadth. And the problems they encounter, such as living beyond their means and poor management, are actually normal from the perspective of commercialization.
Therefore, this "stop more tide" is not so much a hot search, but rather a hot search on the "shelf" under the comprehensive effect of many factors.
And to say the least, even if these big UP owners really choose to retreat and run away, with the size of bilibili today, no matter who chooses to leave, there will be countless creators and teams behind to make up for the vacant position. Although it sounds cruel, this is the reality of the media and even the whole content creation field.
Although this incident seems to be a "farce" promoted by many parties, for those who want to make money from bilibili and the media, this incident is more like a mirror-today’s media industry is experiencing the pain of transformation, but countless new and old creators can only rise and fall in this wave. For them, the current dilemma may be all.
