Bilibili (“哔哩哔哩” or “B站” in Chinese)(NASDAQ: BILI and HKEX: 9626) is a video sharing and community platform for young generations. It was founded in 2009. At the very beginning, Bilibili was focusing on animation, comics, and games (ACG) which helps it gain lots of target users and high engagement.
With over 10+ years of growth, Bilibili has become a multicultural community that covers over 7000+ topics. The contents are based on professional user-generated videos(PUGV). And all users can upload and share their videos on Bilibili.
To be honest, I’m not a fan of ACG videos. But I do like the education & knowledge and How-to video tutorials on Bilibili. (similar to YouTube)
Bilibili provides users with “All the Videos you like” as value proposition. Users and content creators discover and interact with diverse content encompassing different interests, from lifestyle, games, entertainment, anime, tech & knowledge, etc.
It has become the welcoming home of diverse interests for young generations in China and the frontier to promote Chinese culture across the world.
Why Bilibili is popular in China?
Loyalty: Bilibili is the biggest video-sharing platform for animation, comics, and games. The users are all fans of the video content and they created and built the community. And share it with others.
Highly engaging community: there are many video platforms like Youku, iQiyi, Tencent Video, etc at that time. But none of them has a highly engaging community.
Bullet comment (Bullet screen comment): the bullet comment began with ACG (Anime, Comics, and Games ) video-sharing by Japanese. Bilibili uses it not only for ACG videos but also for other videos.
You might wonder how comments make Bilibili unique? What’s bullet comments?
The comments will fly across the screen and overlaid the video while the video is playing. The comments fly out from right to left like a bullet. Moreover, all comments have a timestamp. That said, the comments will only fly out while the video is playing exactly matching the time that the user left comments.
For me, I do prefer to read comments. Because the comments make me laugh all the time. Because the comment culture on Bilibili is really great and fun. However, some might don’t like it at all as it’s really distracting. In this case, you can turn off the bullet comments at any time.
No Ads: you won’t see ads while the video is playing. While you will ads on YouTube video if you don’t have a premium account. You don’t need to pay for no-ads video on Bilibili. It’s all for free.
User-generated content: The video contents are user-generated, and Bilibili will pay for high content creators to make sure the platform has enough high-quality and valuable videos.
Livestream, TV/movie/ drama streaming: Bilibili not only has user-generated videos but also has the introduction of movies, drama, and TV streaming.
The exhibition/Meet up: Bilibili arranged to Meet up or exhibition activities from time to time for fans.
Bilibili slogan: To enrich the everyday life of young generations in China
Young generations are who were born from 1985 to 2009.
Founding Rounds
Bilibili has raised a total of $3.7B in funding over 11 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Nov 19, 2021, from a Post-IPO Debt round. Tencent, Alibaba, Sony, IDG Capital invest Bilibili.
Now let’s take a quick glance at YouTube vs Bilibili.
YouTube vs Bilibili
Actually, Bilibili is so similar to YouTube. They both are video-sharing platforms. And users can upload video content to the platform to become YouTubers or Up主. (The content creator is what we call “Up主”. Like a YouTuber on YouTube.)
Monthly active users
YouTube has over 2 billion monthly active users and nearly 43% of all global internet users access YouTube every single month.
However, Bilibili has 2.67 million monthly active users and most are Chinese users. Only a few global internet users. And you should know that Bilibili is available for foreigners. I will show you how to sign up for Bilibili account later.
Content
The contents of YouTube are almost cover everything. And so does Bilibili. But some topics should be really careful to talk about (especially political content). Besides, Bilibili is focusing more on animation, comics, games, and technology.
Revenue
YouTube will insert Ads into videos, or users pay for premium accounts. That’s the main way for Youtubers and YouTube to make money. But Bilibili doesn’t support inserting ads into videos. For users, that’s a good thing that makes the platform clear and neat. But for video creators, that means they can’t earn the money like the way of Youtubers.
YouTube generated $19.7 billion revenue in 2020, however, Bilibili only generated $1.8 billion (¥12 billion) revenue in 2020.
Users Geo Distribution
YouTube has localized versions in over 100 countries and 80 languages worldwide. India has the highest number of users, estimated at 227 million, followed by the US with 127 million users.
Bilibili is available for over 200 counties or regions to use. Actually, it’s not worldwide used at all. Basically, used in China. And the video contents’ language are in Chinese mostly.
How to sign up for Bilibili (哔哩哔哩)
To sign up or sign in to Chinese social media platforms requires you to provide a mobile phone number. Why does Chinese social media requires a phone number? That’s for anti-fraud purposes (Especially to prevent online fraud).
There are always other options to signing up or signing in Chinese social or website. That is logging in with WeChat, QQ, or Weibo account. If you don’t have any one of them, maybe you should create one to make it easier to access Chinese social media platforms or websites. They are all available for foreigners and free to use.
If you don’t want to create Bilibili account then you can explore the video content as a guest. With a guest account, you can watch low-quality (480P) videos only. If you are a fan of ACG or need high-quality (720p,1080p,4k) video with commenting then you should create a Bilibili membership account (at least LV0).
Bilibili language
As I said, Bilibili is mainly for Chinese users, so Bilibili only supports Simplified and Traditional Chinese languages on website and App. Besides, most of the subtitles of video content are in Chinese that’s all depends on the creators. You will see English, Japanese, Korean video contents as well.
If you know Chinese language well, then it won’t be difficult for you to sign up Bilibili account. But it still won’t be easy to level up Bilibili account. It’s not because of verification, or SMS code error. It is Bilibili requires you to pass the exam to sign up an account.
How to change Bilibili language
For foreign users who can’t read Chinese characters, let me show you how to get Bilibili English on the webpage.
Google Chrome browser supports language translation webpage with just one click. Please check it out on Google Chrome Help. This is really helpful, you should know and share this tip with your friends. Once you get the language setting done. Let’s get started. Don’t forget to click on Chrome Translation every time you need it.
- Go to Bilibili website.
- Click on”点我注册”
- Select your region code and enter your mobile phone number.
- Click on “获取验证码” to get SMS verification code.
- Enter the SMS code.
- Click on “登录/注册”.
That’s all, you can log in Bilibili account now. And once you make Bilibili account successfully, your account will be the LV0 account. If you want to level up your account to LV1, then you can either use Bilibili invitation code or get pass the Bilibili answers test.
Or you can try to register Bilibili account from subdomains’ Bilibili comics, Bilibili TV. The page is in English, but the contents and features are limited. Only a few contents you can find on subdomain or website.
Account level
You can’t comment or leave a bullet comment or upload contents on the basic account (LV0), you will need to upgrade account to LV1 (Official membership). From LV0 upgrade to LV1 is not easy for foreigners, even Chinese. You need to get pass the Answer Test.
Let’s take a look at Bilibili account levels:
Why need Answers Test on Bilibili?
In order to prevent bot registration, low-quality content, spammer, and to make a comfortable, engaging community, Bilibili uses Answer Test to get loyal, passionate users. That is really a smart move. Quantity doesn’t matter, but quality matters.
And the test will let you know the terms of Bilibili well, in case you violate it. Evey users need to use account properly without violating the laws or terms.
Well, I’m not able to bypass bilibili answer test, because there are 100 questions that randomly showing up and you need to answer at least 60 questions correctly.
Tip: you can copy the questions and search on the Baidu search engine. That’s how Chinese search for answers.
If you have any questions, please comment below or contact me, thanks.