Bilibili’s UP owners stopped working collectively, so what should the content creators do?

Bilibili set off a wave of stagnation.
UP owners have stopped watching, bilibili, what’s the matter?
On April 2nd, the topic of "bilibili UP Master Initiates Stop More Tide" topped the hot search list in Weibo, which triggered a hot discussion among netizens.
A few days ago, many bilibili UP owners released videos that stopped updating. For example, the game area UP owner with 3.85 million fans is "King Xu who eats by his face"; Top 100 UP owners "LKS-"with 3.11 million fans in 2022; 2.65 million reasoning area head UP owner "I am a weird gentleman" and so on have said.The content will not be updated in the short term.

(Source: Weibo)
In response to this incident, many UP owners have responded to the incident. "King Xu who lives by his face" wrote in Weibo that it is a personal reason to stop, and it is normal for some people to make money and others to lose money in content creation.
In addition, "LKs–" responded that the shift stoppage has nothing to do with the economic situation, and the income in bilibili this year is no less than before.
But then again, in the past two years, there are not a few UP owners who have announced that they will stop working.
Previously, well-known UP owners such as "Explore Taro", "Detective Tang Renjie" and "Funny Sichuan kshadow" and many middle-waist UP owners with hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands of fans stopped updating their content.
According to statistics, nearly 20% of the top 100 UP owners in bilibili in 2018 have stopped working.
In addition, when most UP responded to the reasons for stopping the shift, they all said that they were affected.Impact of reduced platform revenue.
According to the data, in the fourth quarter of 2022, more than 10% of UPs in bilibili stopped updating or reduced the update frequency, and more than 60% of them said that it was due to the decline in income.

(Source: bilibili)
It is worth mentioning that last year, bilibili adjusted the creative incentive mechanism, which triggered a heated discussion within the UP owners.
In March, 2022, bilibili UP owner "Midu Dzg" released a dynamic statement that "bilibili’s creative incentive was revised, which directly reduced by 80%". Later, many UP owners all said that after the revision of the creative incentive plan, the income decreased by 50%-80%.
We should know that the main income of UP owners comes from three parts. The first part is creative incentives, including punching challenges and video creation incentives. The second part is advertising, including advertising sharing, offering a reward for goods, etc. The third part is the charging of fans in the form of rewards.
Among them, the "Creative Incentive Plan" launched by bilibili in January 2018 is the most important source of income for most UP owners. Now reducing this income will inevitably lead to the increasing dependence of UP owners on advertising, thusThere is a phenomenon of loss of high-quality content.
Combined with the recent events in which many UP owners stopped working, it is not optimistic that the content ecological situation in bilibili is true.
At present, the creators of "power generation with love" in bilibili are gradually losing.

Bilibili is about to lose its content advantage?
As we all know,Bilibili’s Chinese video content has always been its greatest advantage.
For a long time, bilibili has gathered many high-quality content creators with its unique Chinese video attributes. At the same time, because the content covers multiple fields such as secondary, life, humanities, society and entertainment, platform users are very sticky.
But in the last two or three years,Bilibili’s content attributes are changing quietly.In 2020, bilibili began to test the vertical screen playback function, and continued to increase the proportion of short video content.
In 2022, the vertical screen video of Story-Mode accounted for more than 17% of bilibili’s homepage traffic. At present, the video content of Story-Mode accounts for nearly 50% in one minute, and the short video content accounts for 20% in 30 seconds.

(Source: bilibili)
In addition, bilibili is also increasing the revenue sharing cost of live broadcast and advertising business. The financial report shows that in 2021, bilibili’s revenue sharing cost reached 7.7 billion yuan, up 77.1% year-on-year; In 2022, bilibili’s revenue sharing cost reached 9.1 billion yuan, an increase of 18% year-on-year.
And this part of the increased share cost, almost all of which was used by bilibili in the incentive and share given to UP owners in the live broadcast and advertising business.
It can be said that bilibili intentionally weakens the attribute of Chinese video and moves towards short video platforms such as Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker.
However, due to the increasing number of short video creators, bilibili’s position is gradually blurred, and the original advantages and barriers of Chinese video are being lost.
This is not good news for bilibili, which has been losing money for a long time. According to the latest financial report, the net loss of bilibili in 2022 was 7.5 billion yuan, up about 10% year-on-year.
Bilibili’s revenue structure is mainly divided into four parts: games, value-added services, advertising and e-commerce. In the past, games accounted for the largest proportion in bilibili’s revenue structure.
Based on this, in order to reduce business risks, bilibili began to reduce its dependence on the game business. From 2017 to June 2022, the revenue share of its game business decreased from 83.4% to 21.3%.
Paradoxically, although bilibili has effectively achieved "de-gamification", its value-added services, advertising and e-commerce businesses have never been able to carry the banner of growth.

(Source: Lei Bao)
At the same time, the high income-sharing expenditure directly leads to the fact that bilibili has not yet achieved breakeven.
On the one hand, it is losing the advantages of medium and long video and the loss of UP owners, and on the other hand, it is difficult to reduce the cost of revenue sharing. bilibili’s survival pressure is already very heavy.
In order to change the status quo, bilibili has accelerated the process of commercialization since 2022.
While adding short videos, knowledge payment and live delivery, we will expand the income sources of content creators. For example, relax the restrictions on live broadcast anchors with goods; Launch the content cooperation platform "Huahuo" platform to promote the cooperation between brands and UP owners; Get through the bilibili class, so that the anchor can take the class live, and so on.
In 2022, the revenue of bilibili’s effect advertising increased by over 50% year-on-year, which was the most growing business among the company’s four revenue sectors, mainly benefiting from the development of paid activities such as live broadcast and big membership.
The data shows that the financial report for the fourth quarter of 2022 shows that the average daily video playback in bilibili reached 3.9 billion times, a year-on-year increase of 77%; Among them, the average daily broadcast volume of bilibili Story-Mode (single stream short video content) has achieved a high growth rate of 175% year-on-year.
It is not difficult to see that,Live broadcast and short video services have indeed brought great growth possibilities to bilibili.
At present, short video and live broadcast services are not without prospects, but for bilibili, which started late, this step is not so easy.

Medium and long videos are still a good business.
In recent years, under the impact of short video, medium and long video platforms are facing great challenges.
The 51st Statistical Report on China’s Internet Development shows that by December 2022, the number of short video users exceeded one billion for the first time, and the user utilization rate was as high as 94.8%.
In addition, from 2018 to 2022, the number of short video users increased from 648 million to 1.012 billion, with an average annual increase of over 60 million users.
In this context,Medium and long video platforms have to start to expand new content forms.Perhaps this is the important reason why bilibili will increase the revenue and cost of live broadcast and short video services even though it is facing losses.
At present, in addition to betting on short videos and live broadcasts, bilibili has also begun to cut into self-made dramas and variety shows, trying to build content barriers and seize commercial space; Tencent Video, Mango TV, Iqiyi and other long video platforms are also incubating a large number of miniseries, with the intention of resisting the surprise attacks of Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker.
And on the other side,Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker are also increasing their investment in medium and long video content.
In Aauto Quicker, not only did it launch a variety of self-made variety shows, such as talk show Super Nice Conference, food social file Yue Hard, time and space shop, etc., but it also acquired ACFUN (Station A), which focuses on secondary content.

(Source: Aauto Quicker)
Tik Tok, for its part, not only launched the Tik Tok Web version to increase the output of medium and long video content, but also launched the "China Video Partner Program" under its watermelon video, and spent 2 billion yuan to support the creation of high-quality Chinese video; In March this year, Tik Tok launched an APP called "Qingtao", which is positioned as a video platform of interest knowledge, very similar to bilibili.

(Source: Qingtao)
In summary,Medium and long videos are still an important battlefield for content platforms.How to tap new increments and attract more creators and users in the future is the primary task of the content platform.
Predictably, at the moment when the traffic growth peaks, improving the content ecology is the top priority.. Under such circumstances, it is not difficult for bilibili, which is trapped in commercialization, to break through.
But in any case, it is better to make efforts than to give up completely. When the danger comes, all bilibili can do is to integrate its advantages before starting.
Author | Pandora



























