2019 B Station product operation analysis!

As a gathering place for 2D people, Bilibili has long been regarded as a holy place by anime fans. Just as teenagers have to grow up, today's Bilibili is no longer the small broken site for watching anime, but the most successful UGC community in China. As the website grew, its users became more diverse, and the voices of losing the original intention among the flowers on the market gradually became pervasive.

1. The Birth of Bilibili

Let’s start from the beginning. Bilibili is widely known as a barrage video website. Barrage videos are also the most prominent feature of Bilibili, but barrage is not original to Bilibili.

The earlier barrage video website was the Japanese website NICONICO. Later, A Station appeared in China. A Station, like NICONICO, is a barrage video website.

At that time, Station A's management capabilities were limited, resulting in inconvenient access and occasional downtime. In order to allow users to watch videos during the downtime of Station A, Station B, known as the "back garden of Station A", was born.

This was in 2009, when Bilibili was first launched, it was named MikuFans. Miku means Hatsune Miku, which can generally refer to the two-dimensional world. It is not difficult to see from the name that the core of Bilibili at its inception was the two-dimensional world.

A year later, Bilibili was renamed Bilibili, which, like MikuFans, is a name full of two-dimensional meanings. Bilibili refers to the character Misaka Mikoto in the Japanese anime "A Certain Magical Index".

The left picture is NICONICO small TV, and the right picture is Bilibili small TV

Just as Xunlei's success was due to the boss of NetEase being addicted to World of Warcraft, Bilibili's success was also due to problems within its peers to a certain extent.

Station B was founded later than Station A, and its human resources and other hard power were not strong at the beginning, but the imperfect Station A at that time gave Station B the opportunity to develop: once there was a problem with Station A's server, users could only look for alternatives.

Over time, most users became fans of both Station A and Station B, and Station A no longer had an absolute advantage.

Station B saw hope of overtaking and focused on product design and other aspects, while Station A's development was still slow, and the balance of victory began to tilt towards Station B.

Station A may have also felt the crisis, but it was helpless at the moment as it was facing internal and external troubles. Externally, Station B was rising strongly, and internally, the management was changing frequently and the server was down on a daily basis.

To sum up, the birth of Bilibili was inspired by AcFun, and AcFun was inspired by NICONICO. These three websites are all animation websites. The former name and current name of Bilibili are directly taken from animation. The mascot small TV also makes Bilibili full of the atmosphere of the second dimension. It is a relatively objective conclusion to believe that Bilibili was born from the second dimension.

2. Current B Station

1. Content scope of Station B

Bilibili has been established for ten years. Compared with the small site ten years ago, today's Bilibili has become a behemoth with a market value of 5 billion US dollars.

To date, the number of monthly active users of Bilibili has exceeded 100 million, and users under the age of 28 account for as high as 82%. It is undoubtedly a product built for Generation Z.

The content it covers ranges from the early two-dimensional world to today's animation, movies, games, life and other aspects.

The picture above shows the four first-level tags of the Bilibili Android version. The homepage is the content provided by the recommendation system, and the channel displays all the content categories of Bilibili.

So far, there are 24 categories, among which the five main categories of animation content are dramas, domestic creations, comics, animation, and photo albums, accounting for only 21%. With such a large share, it is difficult to simply classify Bilibili as an animation website. Many users come to Bilibili to watch content that is not related to animation. It is said that some people come to review for postgraduate entrance examinations.

The picture above is a question on Zhihu, which has been viewed 16 million times. The question mentioned that CCTV.com strongly supports Bilibili, reporting that nearly 20 million people have studied on Bilibili in the past year and formed a non-interference circle with each other.

1. UP host of station B

As the largest UGC website, the popularity of UP hosts on Bilibili can also reflect the user composition of Bilibili to a certain extent: if UP hosts want to succeed, they must overlap with the user attributes of Bilibili, otherwise it will be difficult to gain attention.

The above are the top 20 UP masters in the Bilibili rankings. The sections they are in can, to a certain extent, explain what content the majority of Bilibili users like at the moment.

• Anime area: LexBurner (5%)
• Game area: Director Ao, Old Fanqie, Infiltration C Bacteria, A Certain Illusionary Lord, Xiaoyao Sanren, Qi Xiaodian is a Thigh, King Xu (35%)
• Chat area: Papi Jiang, Rage Comics, China BOY Super Gorilla (15%)
• Ghost Zone: Elizabeth Mouse (5%)
• Living area: Swearing, Huanong Brothers, Jing Hanqing, I am Guo Jie (20%)
• Positive energy: Communist Youth League Central Committee (5%)
• Subtitle group: Yuzumu Subtitle Group (5%)
• Film and TV area: Muyu Shuixin, bilibili movies (10%)

From the above classification ratio, it can be seen that although the anime area has the number one UP host, he is also the only anime UP host in the top 20. The number of UP hosts in the most popular game area has exceeded one-third, followed by the life area, the chat area, and the film and television area. There is only one UP host in the ghost animal area.

Of course, this does not mean that no one is interested in anime on Bilibili, because in addition to the UGC of UP masters, PGC is also an important source of content for Bilibili. If PGC content is also included, the amount of attention in the animation area is still considerable. However, UGC is the biggest feature that distinguishes Bilibili from other video websites, and the animation area in UGC is indeed not very strong.

In order to further confirm the statistical results, we expanded the up-host ranking to the top 50 to observe its distribution.

• Game Zone: Pure Black - Claudius, EdmundDZhang, Bilibili League of Legends Event, Dudubugayou, Black Tong Google, Black Darts Dream Back, Fear of Angry Wang Laoju (23%)
• Life Zone: Xiang Xiang Battle, Witty Party Girl, Taro SAMA who loves cooking, Yamashita Tomohiro, Vegetarian Lion, Saturday Wild Zoey, Foreigner Research Association, Xu Daxia, Food Writer Wang Gang R, Daily Food Diary, Poison Horn Show, Huahua and Three Cats CatLive (40%)
• Dance area: =Cat biting= (3%)
• Anime area: Kaze, Fanshi (7%)
• Film and TV: Gu Amo, Hardworking Lorre, Xi Yi Ah Kan, Bilibili Documentary (14%)
• Music area: Pai Gu Jiaozhu, A passerby (7%)
• Science and Technology Zone: Zhang Zhaozhong (3%)
• Others: Director Itch (3%)

From the results, we can see that even if the scope is expanded to the top 50, the life area and the game area are still firmly in the forefront, the film and television area is third, the animation area is fourth and is on par with the music area, and the proportion of other areas is very low.

Combining the results of the top 20, it can be concluded that UP hosts in the current life and game areas of Bilibili are the mainstream, the film and television area is in third place, and the animation area is at a relatively backward position.

The current Bilibili is undoubtedly no longer the MikuFans of the past. It may be more like YouTube. It is still the largest gathering place for barrage in China, but it is no longer a gathering place for two-dimensional barrage, but has grown into a gathering place for UGC barrage.

1. Video popularity distribution of B station

After analyzing the distribution of UP hosts, let’s take a look at the content distribution. First, let’s take a look at the overall list.

The number of views counted in the overall list is the total number of views of the video from the time it was uploaded to today. From the distribution point of view, animation seems to have an absolute advantage. 6 out of 10 videos are related to anime.

But in fact, such a ranking does not represent any problem. On the one hand, since it is a general list, videos with early upload dates naturally have a great advantage. On the other hand, the above contents are basically collections, and a collection may be a collection of more than a dozen videos, which cannot objectively reflect the popularity of a video.

So let's analyze it from another angle. In order to avoid the impact of collections, we can start with weekly data. The statistical information in the weekly data is based on independent videos, which can objectively reflect the degree of attention paid to each video without worrying about the impact of the collection method.

The above is the weekly situation of Bilibili for two weeks. Although there is no video name, it is not difficult to see from the picture where the corresponding video is located. It is difficult to tell from the picture that this is data from Bilibili. There are basically no two-dimensional videos, but there are a lot of funny videos.

1. B station's revenue

Making money may be a little inconsistent with the beautiful concept of the second dimension, but as a company, revenue is a very realistic issue. Only if the company can survive can it bring a better experience to users, otherwise everything is empty talk.

Bilibili has been making losses since its inception: broadband costs, operating costs, and copyright costs are not low, while its sources of income are few and far between. Bilibili videos do not have interstitial ads, and membership is not very attractive.

Although this mode of operation has brought in a lot of users, it is extremely difficult for the website to generate revenue. There is neither advertising fees from other companies nor membership fees from users. The two largest revenue points for video websites are basically blocked, and the losses are expected.

However, the development prospects of Bilibili are very good. With investments from Tencent and Alibaba, it has developed its own new revenue model that focuses on game live streaming and supplemented by peripheral activities. I believe that with the awakening of the awareness of genuine products and the popularization of the concept of payment, it will not be difficult for Bilibili to turn losses into profits.

Note: The data source is Bilibili.

Conclusion

This article captures two important time points of Bilibili - its establishment and its rise to fame. The span between the two time points is as long as ten years, and the scale of Bilibili has grown from an unknown "small broken site" to a listed company that is well-known in the list of Internet companies' market value.

As the product grows, the number of users will naturally increase, and more users will not only bring more traffic but also more diverse tastes and demands.

Ten years ago, Bilibili focused almost exclusively on the 2D world. At that time, Bilibili’s scale and profitability allowed it to do so. But ten years later, Bilibili has no choice just like its users. As a listed company, it must first satisfy the interests of its shareholders.

There are many comments online about Bilibili losing its original intention. If the original intention of Bilibili is considered to be the two-dimensional world, then there is nothing wrong with saying so. The data above proves that the two-dimensional world is no longer so core to Bilibili. It helped Bilibili to become successful, but in terms of user acquisition and profitability, the two-dimensional world may not be as critical as most users think.

But on the other hand, Bilibili has not lost its original intention. First of all, it is still the largest ad-free barrage video website in China, and it did not start adding patch ads after its listing;

Secondly, users will grow up and transform from young people to parents. Their hobbies may still be the two-dimensional world, but it is unlikely to be just the two-dimensional world. To a certain extent, the expansion of B station’s content is the result of maintaining its original intention to serve old users.

If Bilibili only focuses on the two-dimensional world, it may become a memory for many people like online games such as "World of Warcraft". Although it is beautiful, it can never be returned.

No one is always 20 years old, but there is always someone who is 20 years old.

Today's Bilibili does not only serve those who are in their 20s. It grows together with its users, allowing ten-year-old fans and newbies to find their favorite content and topics. The content ranges from career development plans to children's animation. Although there is overlap between the various circles, there is very little interference. I believe that no user would be unwilling to grow with such a Bilibili.

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Author: Ma Lu

Source: Ma Lu