How to break through the circle of marketing of Bilibili from the screen-sweeping "Hou Lang"

On 2020-05-03 17:00:55, the official account of Bilibili uploaded a video titled "bilibili's speech dedicated to the new generation "Houlang"" . The narrator of the video is Teacher He Bing.

I really like Teacher He Bing’s speech in “Seeing Words as Faces”, especially the description of the letter Teacher Cai Chunzhu wrote to his son, “The Day You Were Diagnosed with Autism”, which made even a grown man like me cry.

This time, Teacher He Bing also gave a perfect four-minute speech using his infectious body movements and elder-like tone.

The whole set was extremely simple, with just a black screen and a few white words.

Teacher He Bing perfectly interpreted the voice that Bilibili wanted to express to "outsiders" .

01

The video’s creative team is led by Ma Xiaobo of industry leader Shengjia. Yes, he is the man who wrote the "Oil Fume Love Letter" to Fang Tai and set the goal of "Spending a Lifetime to Complete" for Tibulan .

(Message from Mr. Ma Xiaobo)

Fairy tale king Zheng Yuanjie said: "The biggest difference between humans and animals is that humans can tell stories."

Shengjia is definitely a storytelling book full of human touch, and Ma Xiaobo is the writer holding the coffee.

Teacher He Bing is the storyteller selected by the Shengjia team this time. It is pointed out at the beginning that these are words spoken by people born in the 60s, 70s and even 80s to people born in the 90s and 00s. This is a conversation between people of two generations.

The new generation here is probably the "Generation Z" defined by Bilibili.

The sentence that touched me the most in the entire video was: "You don't have to live the way we imagine. Our generation's imagination is not enough to imagine your future."

This sentence always makes people feel relatable. I don’t know how many years ago it became difficult for me to explain some things to my parents. It’s not that my parents’ ideas can’t keep up with the trend, but because they are in different circles and have different areas of expertise, it is difficult for their knowledge to overlap. The obstacle for Bilibili to break out of the circle also lies in the "exclusivity" of the circle.

But just like Teacher He Bing's earnestness, my father said something similar to me a while ago: "No matter where you go, as long as you are happy."

This is another circle that doesn't understand my circle but has high expectations for it.

02

After talking about the feelings, let’s take a look at the data. "The Next Wave" was released by the official account of Bilibili. As of the time when Jiangyou collected the statistics, which was 02:36 on May 4, the video had received nearly three million views, and the official account had gained more than 50,000 followers.

However, simply looking at the number of views does not reflect the actual effect of the video. The truly exaggerated data lies in its like rate, barrage rate, and sharing rate. The indicator here is the ratio to 100 views rather than the number.

The video achieved very good results, with a like rate of 93.69%, a barrage rate of 61.44%, and a sharing rate of 86.36% . It can be seen that the user participation rate and self-propagation rate are very high, which is data that no major domestic video websites can achieve.

Chen Rui is right, Bilibili may be the community with the best atmosphere in China .

03

Behind these user behaviors is another move by Bilibili to break out of its circle .

However, behind the climax of the audience, there are different words.

Some people said: "This is a self-entertainment activity for middle-aged people" and "This is a speech that touched middle-aged people."

Some people said: "Middle-aged people feel emotional after watching it, while those born after 1995s and 2000s find the BGM a bit noisy."

This is indeed true for middle-aged people, especially when I saw this video on my uncle’s circle of friends. If it is not recognized by the younger generation, does that prove that the purpose of this video has failed?

Think about it this way. Station B used a very clever idea:

Bilibili examines the "Z generation" from the perspective of middle-aged people, and uses speeches dedicated to the new generation as an excuse to show middle-aged people the core of Bilibili's breaking circle, and uses the empathy of outsiders to expand the sense of identity with the circle .

This video was originally made for middle-aged people or people outside the B station circle. Just look at my uncle, who didn’t even know about Bilibili, he forwarded “The Next Wave” on his WeChat Moments. Its purpose has been achieved (although the elders forwarded it for us to see).

Bilibili has established a subconscious impression for users outside the circle: the new trend among middle-aged people is to understand youth, and Bilibili is your first step in building a good relationship with the next generation.

But this does not mean that Bilibili wants to turn middle-aged people into its target users. This group of people will definitely not be able to integrate into Bilibili, and even if they are integrated, it will be a challenge to the community atmosphere of Bilibili.

The real purpose of Bilibili is to show outsiders the youth power represented by Bilibili. To put it jokingly, " After this video, I can openly say that I learned at Bilibili ."

Since then, Bilibili has become a positive representative of young people in the eyes of middle-aged people, and the middle-aged people here have many of the "capital" that Teacher Banfo mentioned.

Bilibili is being favored by "capital" .

04

Chen Rui said last year: "Within three years, the market value of Bilibili will reach 10 billion US dollars."

On April 17, 2020, Bilibili’s closing price was $29, with a market value of $10.02 billion .

This is an expected result.

Compared with TikTok, which has a DAU of 400 million, Bilibili, with its DAU of less than 40 million and MAU of only 130 million, seems to be left far behind. The acceleration of Bilibili's breaking out of the circle also confirms the limitations of the user growth ceiling behind it.

But Bilibili is still favored by the market. Why?

The 2019 financial report shows that Bilibili's total net revenue in 2019 was RMB 6.7779 billion (approximately US$973.6 million), an increase of 64% over the same period last year. The net loss in 2019 was RMB 1.3036 billion (approximately US$187.2 million), compared with RMB 565.0 million in the same period last year. The scale of net loss increased by nearly 130% from the previous year. MAU reached 130 million, a year-on-year increase of 40%, DAU reached 38 million, a year-on-year increase of 41%, the number of B station members reached 68 million, a year-on-year increase of 50%, and the retention rate of new users in the 12th month was over 80% .

The retention rate is generally measured on the next day, 3 days, and 7 days. It is rare to see a retention rate as high as 12 months like Bilibili. The comparison may be more intuitive. For example, the seven-day retention rates of Douyin and Kuaishou, two national short video apps, are 81.7% and 84.4% respectively .

However, despite its excellent user community atmosphere, Bilibili has always been hesitant about monetization .

05

Bilibili’s revenue structure has always been distorted, and it has even been called a “ video website in disguise of a game .” It was not until the latest quarterly financial report that Bilibili announced for the first time that its gaming revenue had fallen below 50%.

(The black color in the picture represents the revenue from games. It can be seen that the reason why Station B was able to survive in the past few years was entirely due to games, or FGO)

Unlike other video websites that rely on advertising and membership fees, Bilibili's revenue is divided into four parts: games, advertising, membership and live streaming, and e-commerce.

This is mainly due to what Chen Rui said back then: " Bilibili will not add patch ads ."

This was the key reason why Bilibili was able to quickly attract a large number of users in addition to the animation series. When I first joined the site, my first reaction was why there were no advertisements?

Of course, currently on the Internet, except for some companies that use financing as a profit, advertising is the most profitable way to monetize. What Bilibili did is tantamount to cutting off one's own arm, or even directly paralyzing the lower body.

This also led to the distorted income structure of Bilibili in previous years.

In 2019, games remained Bilibili's main source of income, but after a year of business diversification, the proportion has gradually decreased.

In the past year, Bilibili’s gaming revenue was 3.6 billion yuan, accounting for 53.1% of its total revenue, compared with 70.9% the year before. In the fourth quarter of 2019, the proportion of game revenue fell below 50% for the first time, falling to 43%.

Of course, games are another path taken by Bilibili, but advertising is ultimately unavoidable. If B station wants to monetize its traffic to a greater extent, advertising and membership are the future of B station.

In the fourth quarter of 2019, iQiyi's membership service revenue was RMB 3.9 billion (approximately US$554.6 million), a year-on-year increase of 21%. Full-year membership service revenue was RMB 14.4 billion (approximately US$2.1 billion), a 36% increase from 2018.

Compared with iQiyi, one of the best members in the industry, in 2019, Bilibili had a payment rate of 6.77% among its 130 million monthly active users, and the combined revenue from live streaming and value-added services was only 570 million.

However, Bilibili's revenue cost was 5.588 billion, a year-on-year increase of 71%; total operating expenses were 2.685 billion, a year-on-year increase of 69%; sales and marketing expenses were 1.1985 billion, a year-on-year increase of 105%.

Bilibili is " generating electricity with love ".

On the other hand, due to Chen Rui's restrictions, Bilibili has always been very cautious in its advertising business.

Even now, users can only see ads in the waterfall flow on the home page.

Others are some "wild advertisements", which are the promotional advertisements of the up-host himself.

But it has to be said that Bilibili's native advertising ecosystem is the best in the country .

In order to make money, up hosts use all kinds of ways to promote products. Behind all the "unexpected" events is the careful arrangement of the up-host.

The advertisements in the waterfall flow on the homepage have also been carefully crafted by Bilibili's commercial monetization team to make them fit perfectly into the video stream.

At least I thought it was a video and clicked on it many times. Reduce the impact of advertising on user experience to a controllable range.

Although these attempts were relatively restrained, Bilibili has indeed found its own path to monetization .

06

Starting from "Houlang", I talked about Bilibili in my first article because the little broken station had such a profound impact on me.

Recently, many actions of Bilibili have made more people know it.

"People are afraid of becoming famous just like pigs are afraid of getting fat." Bilibili's breaking out of the circle has brought many crises.

I want to promote this little website that I have watched grow up at this time, so that B Station can witness a new beginning for me, and record some of my thoughts here.

Thanks for reading.

Author: A bottle of silent soy sauce

Source: A bottle of silent soy sauce