Interpretation of the user incentive system of Station B

This article will start from the perspective of B station 's user operations and analyze B station's current user incentive system from three dimensions: platform, creation incentives, and user awakening.

1. Platform

1.1 User Rating System

Membership level is an incentive system that general community platforms will have. Users will gain experience points when logging in and creating content. Different levels correspond to corresponding experience points. Generally, the higher the level, the greater the range, making the number of users at different levels distributed in a pyramid shape. The higher the level, the more benefits you can enjoy, but this is only for a small number of people.

In Bilibili, only after passing the quiz and becoming a formal member can you have a membership level, starting from Lv1. After that, by accumulating experience points and reaching a certain goal, you can be promoted to the next level. The highest level is Lv6.

The key to designing a reasonable scoring rule is to solve the problem of how to select scoring points and distribute weights. When designing the points-collecting system, in addition to the usual binding of mobile phones and email addresses, Bilibili emphasizes daily video watching, coin insertion, creation and sharing. For easy-to-use watching and sharing, a lower experience value of 5 is allocated, while high-cost operations such as video coin insertion can obtain 10 experience points, and an upper limit constraint is set to ensure safety.

It is worth noting that different levels correspond to a corresponding rights and interests system. Basic rights such as publishing, participating in comments and barrage can be guaranteed at low levels, but in order to cater to the barrage culture of Bilibili, high levels are set here to obtain more barrage-related privileges.

1.2 Member

Member value-added is a major source of profit for the platform besides live broadcast rewards and advertising. As of Q3 2019, Bilibili has 7.947 million monthly paying members. Compared with other video platforms, Bilibili's premium members are of higher quality and have stronger stickiness, and annual membership is the main form of payment. Currently, the membership fee for B Zhan is 148 yuan/year, 45 yuan/quarter, and 15 yuan/month, which is lower than the membership fees of other platforms.

Compared with ordinary members, B station members have four major privileges, namely:

1) Content privileges: free viewing of paid content, early viewing, ultra-high-definition video quality, and monthly comic reading coupons;

2) Dress-up privileges: exclusive pendants, independent header images for the space, and comment emoticons. Dynamic card decoration;

3) Identity privileges: game welfare gift packs, member purchase coupons, monthly B coins, pink nickname;

4) Audiovisual privileges: unlimited listening of paid music.

Members are just ordinary users in Bilibili. Real paying users are called VIP members, who have more rights and are more likely to consume videos, comics, games and music because of their privileges.

1.3 Virtual Currency: B-Coins, Shells, Coins

Virtual currency is a design used by non-e-commerce platforms to achieve consumer conversion, and generally adopts an equivalent value design approach.

1) B coin is the virtual currency within Station B, which is obtained by recharging. 1 B coin = 1 yuan, and can be used for consumption within Station B.

2) Coins are used to support excellent videos, change nicknames, purchase logos or participate in activities. Members can receive coin rewards by logging in every day, and UP hosts can earn more coins by submitting videos (10% of the coins invested by viewers will be used as coin income rewards for UP hosts).

3) In addition, Bilibili also uses shells to represent the income that users earn on the site (including live broadcast rewards, recharges, rewards for participating in activities, etc.), which can be transferred and withdrawn. 1 shell = 1 RMB. Taxes will be collected when a certain level is reached.

1.4 Points

The points mall is generally used to manage user loyalty and increase activity, but Bilibili's points system is independent of the membership level system. Currently, membership points can only be obtained by finding and successfully contracting available animation series, which can be used to redeem monthly or annual premium memberships - 1,250 points/month, 11,650 points/year.

When you enter the animation contracting interface, you can find that contracting requires users to pay corresponding B coins. The minimum payment amount can be 5B coins, and there are also 450B coins to choose from. Generally, every 5B coins correspond to 250 points. According to the calculation of redeeming the VIP membership, the monthly payment is 25 yuan, and the annual payment is 233 yuan.

Compared with the points malls of old video platforms such as Youku, iQiyi and Tencent Video, which cover product redemption in home life, audio and video digital products, game gift packs, etc., Bilibili's points system is currently immature. Correspondingly, in the points acquisition system, the old video platforms have buried more points in the design of daily tasks, which can more easily stimulate users to watch videos.

iQIYI Points Mall

2. Creation + Feedback: Monetary Reward + Virtual Incentive

2.1 Financial Incentives

Money is an external driving factor for users to continue to contribute, and monetary incentives are a major feature of Bilibili. Unlike other UGC communities, Bilibili's generosity lies in its willingness to spend money to attract high-quality content.

Currently, up-loaders can monetize video traffic in the following ways:

1) Charging plan

It was launched in January 2016. Users can watch videos and use batteries to directly reward their favorite up-loaders. 10 batteries = 1 RMB. After deducting external payment costs and taxes, the up-loader’s share is about 70%.

Taking the well-known up-host Banfoxianren as an example, as of the 20th of this month, 830 people have recharged for him. The number of people who have recharged for the up-host Laofanqie, who entered the TOP10 earlier, is nearly 2,300.

2) Bounty Program

That is, the up-host recommends the advertising service. When users watch the up-host's video, they will see the corresponding advertisement below the video. Bilibili will distribute revenue based on the advertising exposure or product sales. It was disclosed that individual up-loaders can obtain 50% of the advertising revenue, and institutional partners can obtain 60% of the revenue (up-loaders of product advertisements can currently obtain the full amount of revenue).

3) Rising Star Program

The Rising Star Program is an incentive currently launched by Bilibili for novice up-loaders to create content. Up-loaders with less than 50,000 fans can participate. Taking this period (3.25-4.25) as an example, the submitted videos are limited to games, animation, and animals (three vertical categories each time). The three dimensions of video data performance, content quality, and user popularity (likes, favorites, etc.) are combined with the opinions of the judging panel to give a comprehensive score, and the most popular videos in each category will be selected, and cash rewards ranging from 10,000/2,000/800 yuan can be obtained.

The Rising Star Program is a creative incentive program. Bilibili's creative incentive plan covers video, column and material creation. It uses "electromagnetic force" as an indicator to evaluate up-masters, and uses creativity, influence and credit as three dimensions as reference. The specific incentive income algorithm is calculated based on the content value of the manuscript itself, including content popularity, user preference, content verticality and other multi-dimensional indexes.

As of the end of the first half of 2019, more than 160,000 creators have joined the creation incentive program.

4) Popular Activities

Popular topics are set from time to time, and activity rewards include avatars, cash, and VIP membership to encourage user participation. Taking the "Spring Vlog Challenge" as an example, the cash prizes include 20 best directors, with a prize of 1,000 yuan per person; 15 newcomer awards, with a prize of 520 yuan per person, in addition to platform virtual rewards (avatars, premium membership).

In addition to the above monetary incentives, after the up-host has accumulated a certain number of fans and has a certain popularity, he can cooperate with a third party to obtain advertising opportunities, or directly jump to e-commerce to divert traffic and realize profits.

2.2 Virtual Incentives

1) One-click triple

Bilibili’s one-click three-click function was launched not long ago. Previously, users had to click “like”, “coin” and “collect” separately, but now they only need to press and hold the “like” button for three seconds to perform the above three operations. Among them, 10% of the coin investment income will be used as the up master's coin income reward.

The famous up-loader Banfoxianren’s "How does Luckin Coffee repay capitalism?" "For example, as of April 20, 2020, the video has been played 7.7 million times, received 525,000 likes, 441,000 coins, and 202,000 collections.

2) Personal homepage image incentives

In addition to displaying creative information such as videos and columns, the Up master's homepage will also show the outside world the number of fans, number of likes, number of people charging, and medals. These motivating behaviors that satisfy a sense of personal achievement and self-efficacy are classified as intrinsic drivers. Bilibili uses identity information disclosure to create the image of the up-master, which is more effective in motivating creators who pursue self-realization and value contribution.

As a member of the traditional incentive system, medals have gradually been marginalized in Bilibili. Only icons are displayed on the first-level page of the personal homepage, and specific achievements will be displayed after clicking in. Different from the experience value system for members, the medal system mainly recognizes achievements based on self-made videos, live broadcasts, fans, and discipline committee members.

Compared with Zhihu's personal page design, Zhihu has also added the number of collections, professional recognition numbers, and exposure to Zhihu roundtables and weekly magazines. As a question-and-answer community, the ability of big Vs is a key factor in users' evaluation of the professionalism of their answers to questions, so the more detailed the disclosure, the more it can stimulate big Vs to continue contributing content. But on Bilibili, the ability of the up-master can be more intuitively felt from the quality of video production, so Bilibili has particularly few factors involved in image exposure.

3. Wake-up: PUSH and message

If users do not log in to the platform for a long time, it will cause traffic loss, so how to wake up dormant users is one of the incentive designs that a product must consider. Some previous studies have found that push and notifications with different frequencies, content frames, and emotions have different incentive effects on users' re-login to the platform and whether they contribute content.

The wake-up method adopted by Bilibili is mainly to push videos and personal messages in the form of PUSH. We mainly discuss the design of the latter on the platform.

3.1 System Notification: Honor Weekly Report

A summary of the number of plays, fans, electromagnetic force, likes, coins, and shares is presented in the form of recent battle results. Of course, this move has both advantages and disadvantages. For up-masters who are active in creation, if the data in all aspects perform well, it can stimulate them to continue creating. However, for up-masters who have created but the data is not good, it will instead extinguish their desire to create.

3.2 PUSH: Creative Center Activity Push

Push recent popular activities, most of the themes are life-oriented, to encourage users to log in to the platform to create. The push of Bilibili is more inclined to the framework of personal interests (relying on the quality of content to obtain personal benefits), that is, the purpose is to stimulate creation, without involving competition (content is better than others) and cooperation framework (content is beneficial to others).

3.3 Messages: Reply, @, Like

The icons designed at the top of the B station message interface only include "Reply to Me", "@Me" and "Received Likes". It can be seen that in the one-click three-link, the highest priority is the received likes, and only the number of likes is displayed on the personal homepage.

Awakening users through messages that are directly relevant to them will result in higher conversion rates.

To evaluate whether PUSH is reasonable, it is also necessary to consider its delivery rate, click rate and conversion rate.

Summarize

The user incentive system of Bilibili is relatively complete, and you can continue to pay attention to the following points:

1. Growth in the number of paying members

As of Q3 2019, the number of official members of Bilibili reached 62 million. By Q4 2019, the number of official members reached 68 million, a year-on-year increase of 50%. While the number of formal members is growing rapidly, the number of paying members reached 7.947 million in Q3 2019, a year-on-year increase of 124.5%. The growth potential is huge and the penetration rate is steadily increasing.

2. Improve the points system

The input and output ends of Bilibili's current points system are relatively simple. In the future, it is expected to learn from mature video platforms, expand more channels for obtaining and redeeming points, and improve its points mall.

3. The threshold for creative incentives has become higher, and the review has become more stringent

Bilibili, which is already eleven years old, has accumulated a group of high-quality top up-hosts. At the same time, it is also constantly introducing high-quality knowledge-based up-hosts. Some up-hosts have their own fan effect, making the Matthew effect of the platform gradually apparent. The introduction of the Rising Star Plan is to save a group of long-tail small up-masters. However, judging from the increasingly long review time for submissions to the platform, Bilibili hopes to control the quality of content on the platform.

For creators, the platform's incentive system is certainly important, but what is more important is to grasp the quality and reputation of their own works.

4. Accurate positioning of user groups

Bilibili's user group is mainly Generation Z, with an average age of 21.5 years old. Judging from the average monthly usage time of each user on Bilibili, it increased from 7,391.6 minutes in June 2018 to 7,843.5 minutes in June 2019. The activity level of Generation Z is much higher than that of the old video platforms, and the target audience is more accurate.

Currently, the number of Generation Z in China is around 328 million. Judging from the penetration rate, Bilibili still has a lot of room for improvement. In view of the characteristics of Generation Z, Bilibili has created a community atmosphere with a unique subculture. With the arrival of more learning institutions and knowledge-based up-hosts, the community atmosphere of Bilibili is also changing. New and old users each get what they need from Bilibili. How to coordinate the two and establish a harmonious community atmosphere is the task that Bilibili should think about now.

Author:47
Source:47