11 fragments of observations and thoughts about B station

Bilibili has been around for 11 years. As a senior user of Bilibili for many years (currently working hard to upgrade to Level 6), I sincerely hope that Bilibili can become bigger and stronger.

To celebrate the anniversary of Bilibili, we analyze 11 recent fragmented observations and thoughts about Bilibili. Some have not yet reached a conclusion. I hope to communicate with you all.

1. Content Platform

For video platforms, content is always the first priority. Tik Tok is essentially a content distribution channel platform, while Bilibili is a content platform that can rely on top up hosts’ ability to control content. Whether it is the New Year's Eve Gala or its own variety shows, Bilibili has demonstrated its capabilities in this area.

The content of short videos is short, and the distribution value of supply and demand matching is great; the content of long videos is long enough that it can be consumed normally just by paying attention to certain top content, celebrities, authors, etc. So in terms of channel value, short video platforms are more valuable, and the channel value of long video platforms will be compressed. In other words, channel platforms like Douyin are more valuable in short videos, and the value of channel platforms like iQiyi in long videos will weaken.

Therefore, this is why Bilibili’s market value once exceeded that of iQiyi: Bilibili’s UGC and PUGC content are irreplaceable, while iQiyi’s content is mainly purchased and not irreplaceable.

Why are the UGC and PUGC contents of Bilibili irreplaceable?

From the creator's perspective, there are: low creation costs due to users' generally low expectations for content, creators' private operating space, and a good community atmosphere with fewer nitpickers.

From the consumer's perspective, there are: long video types for different interest circles (iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video, entertainment, and variety shows), the experiences of a large number of grassroots first-line witnesses, and an interactive atmosphere dominated by barrages, etc.

2. Patch Advertising

In 2014, Station B announced its commitment to never adding interstitial ads:

At that time, as a two-dimensional animation website, Bilibili's promise was actually aimed at genuine new animations, and did not mention other types of content.

In 2016, several new TV series on B station had interstitial ads. Chen Rui had no choice but to respond on Zhihu:

(https://www.zhihu.com/question/46667028/answer/102445298)

And reiterated again:

What’s amazing about Bilibili is that it has kept its promise until now. Not only new episodes, but all videos have never had any interstitial ads.

In the commercialization of the Internet, advertising is the fastest and most direct way to monetize traffic. BAT has an inextricable relationship with advertising, and ByteDance is an advertising money-printing machine.

So when it comes to advertising, it’s easy to do but difficult not to do it.

From a business operation perspective, the benefits of advertising can be seen directly, but the benefits of not advertising are unclear. The so-called long-term good user experience cannot be quantitatively proven. This kind of persistence based on subjective belief can probably only appear at the CEO/manager level (for example, Didi’s long-term decision not to do third-party advertising was due to Mr. Yu Jun’s insistence). Even if it is a decision made by the CEO, there will definitely be pressure from the board of directors.

The impact of whether or not to advertise on Bilibili cannot be determined using strict A/B testing, and it is difficult to evaluate its long-term pros and cons. But for me, what I see more is that Bilibili is willing to insist on "not doing something", which is very important. The vast majority of platforms are still driven by business/data, and they try to expand and do as much as possible.

3. Fate

"Fate" has a deep bond with Bilibili.

The second season of "Fate/Zero" was launched on Bilibili in 2012. Although it was a formal introduction, it was broadcast and distributed without a license.

"Fate/stay night UBW" was launched in 2014. It was the first new anime series that B station produced its own subtitles and promoted on a large scale. Since then, users of Bilibili have developed the mindset of watching new anime.

Don’t underestimate such formalization measures. This is how B Station’s predecessor, A Station, declined. Xilin, the webmaster of Station A, said: "Acfun's existence mode has always been unreasonable. Acfun needs other websites to provide living space. To put it more clearly, Acfun has been sneaking around and lingering on until today by stealing resources from other websites."

Station A, which was revived this year, is also supported by "Rick and Morty".

"Fate/Grand Order" was launched in 2016 and is exclusively represented by Bilibili. In 2017, the gaming business of Bilibili accounted for 83.4% of its total revenue, of which the revenue from Fate/Grand Order accounted for 71.8%. "Fantasy Westward Journey" is almost NetEase's only cash cow. (Of course, nowadays, Station B does not rely solely on the revenue from the game "Fate/Grand Order". The revenue structure is more reasonable.)

I recommend going to B station to watch the "Fate" series of animations, which is an excellent entry point to understand the two-dimensional culture.

4. Community atmosphere

I forgot which friend I heard this from: community is essentially a pseudo-concept.

My experience is that community is not a false concept, but a community must rely on certain deeper values ​​to survive.

For example, Zhihu's organizational structure allows the content to accumulate well enough to attract people. When people are here, there will naturally be a chemical effect. The same is true for Bilibili, where people who share the same passion for long video content gather together, and with the help of interactive forms such as barrages, comments, following, and private messages, a community atmosphere has emerged, bringing in more users and creators.

Therefore, many communities ignore certain underlying values ​​and focus only on how to bring people together, which may not necessarily produce good results.

Mr. Rui himself said:

"By building Bilibili into a content-centered community, we can greatly reduce the impact on existing users due to the increase in user scale. Every time users meet, they only meet under the video. The community has expanded tenfold. As long as this type of content is still there, they will feel that the atmosphere has not changed." "Many people asked me why I didn't do Tieba. I would never do it even if you kill me."

(LateNews "Dialogue with Bilibili's Chen Rui: Too few companies in China treat users as equals")

5. Young people

The users of Bilibili have always been mainly young people. From my perspective, there are three reasons: two-dimensional content is naturally low-age; long video consumption requires a lot of free time; community interaction is suitable for groups with a strong desire to express themselves.

In his 11th anniversary speech, Chen Rui mentioned that the average age of new users at Bilibili over the past three years is still 21 years old, indicating that Bilibili is not like some content platforms/communities that quickly solidify as the age of users changes, but instead continues to absorb new young users. This is very positive data.

In addition, as the cultural level and education level of young people improve, it is expected that the requirements for content quality will also become higher. This is also the main reason why I am optimistic about long videos > short videos in the long run.

6. Circle segmentation

Communities will always break out of their circles, and in the process they will always encounter some integration problems. The problem of Bilibili is even more prominent because the content presentation methods and audience mindsets of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds are very different, and conflicts between users are inevitable. Old users feel that new users are not their own, and new users feel that old users are too superior and speak in jargon.

The best way is not to promote integration, but to avoid conflicts and better separate different contents and different users. Just like although the main content of Toutiao is agriculture, rural areas and social news, the content is rich enough and the matching recommendations are good enough that it can also be trained as a time-killing tool for white-collar workers in first-tier cities.

From this perspective, the partitioning of Bilibili is the most direct and rough division. More detailed and effective segmentation may be based on deeper data analysis and operations of content and users. Some content should only be seen by some users who like it, so that everyone who sees it can communicate in a common language system, which is a good thing.

This is actually more difficult to do on Zhihu. For example, when answering a question related to a scandal involving an internet executive, there would be analysis from internet practitioners, sharing from legal experts, nonsense from various onlookers, and arrangements from joke tellers. All mixed together, making the comment section a mess. It is impossible to communicate if you don't share the same language.

7. Content recommendations

In an era when recommendations have become a standard feature of various Internet platforms, what Bilibili has done is still far from enough. Looking at Bilibili now, it still looks like a traditional video website. The distribution of content relies on classification and editorial recommendations, just like the homepage of an early e-commerce company.

First, more precise recommendation logic is needed. Currently, I discover and follow new and interesting up hosts on my own, and I still rely on recommendations from WeChat Moments, Zhihu, and offline friends. I generally don’t open official recommendations.

Secondly, there is a greater need to reduce manual operations and give more content distribution rights to automated systems.

B Station currently does not have machine recommendations on the PC side, but has begun to try system recommendations on the mobile side. However, the operation of in-site activities is now more like a ground-breaking operation, pulling in various groups, organizing various activities, talking to various authors, and then manually pushing them to the homepage to achieve growth. Of course, it is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is extremely inefficient and a lot of good content is easily buried.

Content recommendation can greatly improve matching efficiency, but it will cause risks on another level, that is, the creator’s self-operated space, that is, the private domain.

8. Creator’s Private Domain

Many of the top Zhihu influencers I knew tried to switch to public accounts when they first became popular. Essentially, they feel insecure on the Zhihu platform. The platform actually has the power of life and death, and has gradually gained the power of distribution through multiple product revisions. The WeChat ecosystem provides a very solid sense of security, and its attitude is always: we are tools, and your users are your users.

The same is true for WeChat e-commerce. Why are merchants willing to use the WeChat system to maintain their own private domain? In addition to the fact that everyone has WeChat, another reason is that WeChat makes merchants feel that the consumers on my WeChat are my consumers.

Talking about content platforms, why don't you think Wukong Q&A will poach big Vs from Zhihu and Xigua Video will poach up masters from Bilibili? Because authors who are clear about the logic of public and private domains will know that once they enter the public domain system dominated by the platform, their own users are no longer their own users. In the future, the platform says 1, and they dare not say 2.

In the private domain, Bilibili is still friendly to up-masters. Currently, nearly half of the content is browsed through dynamics (following), which is completely different from ByteDance’s creation and distribution logic. The big up-hosts who were signed probably had to consider semi-retirement because they had to pay a huge signing fee.

9. Commercialization of Creators

The commercialization of creators at Bilibili has always been criticized. Many up-hosts cannot make much money even though they have a huge number of fans. They are all doing it for love. However, relying on platform incentives to provide hundreds of thousands or even millions of full-time jobs is quite unreliable.

As a platform, what needs to be done more is: discover good content and let good content find the most suitable consumers; make the interaction between up hosts and audiences smooth enough and have good enough private space. If we can achieve these two points, the value of the platform is actually enough.

If too much emphasis is placed on commercialization, or even if the platform holds high the banner of making money, it will definitely be counterproductive and the community will become a mess. On the contrary, if you overemphasize the spirit of sharing, and prohibit accepting advertisements, doing marketing, or building social communities, and are too aloof, it will definitely drive away many up-hosts.

As long as there is good enough content and the up-master is given enough operating space, I still believe that commercialization is only a matter of time.

10. When to become an up master

Even though it is already the second half of 2020, it is still a good time to be an up-master and make long videos.

Several reasons.

First, video playback will definitely cannibalize the time users spend on pictures, texts, and audios, and will also cannibalize the time spent on offline content consumption. This trend is unlikely to be reversible.

Second, the content of long videos will be more colorful and more segmented, rather than just national variety shows or national film and television dramas. The variety shows I watch on a daily basis were watched by everyone around me 20 years ago ("Zhengda Variety Show" and "Quyuan Zatan"), by my peers 10 years ago ("Running Man" and "Kangxi Comes Here"), and in the past two years only some of my friends are watching them ("Summer of the Band" and "A String of Life").

Therefore, it is difficult for any content to monopolize all audiences, which gives vertical circles the opportunity to attract audiences with high-quality content. This era will get closer and closer to the environment that Kevin Kelly said one can survive with 1,000 die-hard fans.

Third, the costs of equipment, traffic, shooting environment, etc. are all at historical lows. If you are skilled enough, you only need to spend your spare time to edit the video.

Fourth, as to whether it can be commercialized, make money, or have other clear benefits, I don’t think you need to think too clearly at the beginning. If I had paid much attention to the returns when I first started writing on Zhihu, I probably wouldn’t have this public account, wouldn’t have been able to publish a book, and wouldn’t have met many powerful people in the circle. In fact, I probably didn’t make any profit at all when I output the first 500,000 words. When creating content, you still have to have the mentality that your efforts will not be in vain.

11. Popularize knowledge and be rigorous

The knowledge and financial content on Bilibili is the vanguard in breaking the circle.

The main problems we are facing now are the questioning of the rigor of the up-master's content, the questioning of the entertainment aspect of serious content, and finding all kinds of faults.

When creating content and content platforms, you will definitely face a problem: which users to target and what needs to solve. Once you think about this problem clearly, many strange and incomprehensible phenomena will be easily solved.

Kuaishou and Douyin are despised by many people in first-tier cities, and many people don’t understand why those contents are popular. But if you understand China's population structure and the living conditions of the vast majority of people in third- and fourth-tier cities, towns and rural areas, you will understand it.

Some people look down on the knowledge and financial up-hosts on Bilibili, thinking that their content has various problems, their arguments are not rigorous, and their evidence is insufficient. Some even question their academic background and professional experience, etc. But in fact, the user group of Bilibili is mainly young people who are still studying or just entering the workplace. They want to establish a preliminary understanding of knowledge and finance and have a basic understanding of society. This is their demand. It would be very useful to have positive guidance and to arouse interest in these issues, or even just to know that "this is how society is" or "this is how the world is".

In this scenario, using some old-fashioned content would be counterproductive. For content platforms with media attributes, rigor is sometimes put behind readability. As far as I've seen in terms of criticisms of famous up-masters, most of them are people who also want to disseminate content and run their own media, but they can't make it readable themselves, and they don't want others to succeed, so they have a sour grapes mentality.

In terms of popularizing knowledge, I recommend a few up masters worth paying attention to: @硬核的半佛仙人@老蒋巨靠谱@观视频工作室@汤质看精华

I hope the above can help you.

Author: Liu Yanfei

Source: Liu Yanfei Notes