On April 2nd, a news about bilibili UP owner’s initiative to stop the tide was released, which quickly triggered a hot discussion among netizens and boarded a hot search in Weibo.
Why do bilibili UP owners stop working one after another?
A number of UP owners announced that they would stop working.
On April 2nd, an up owner with nearly four million fans in bilibili said that his account was temporarily suspended and he was not sure when he would return. He said that at present, the whole team is in a state of loss and can’t support a team. On the other hand, at present, the creation has also encountered some development bottlenecks.
Bilibili up, which is still updating, said that the platform incentives are gradually decreasing, and the impact of short videos is also partly due to it. In addition, the number of original personal accounts in bilibili is gradually decreasing, while the number of accounts packaged by companies is gradually increasing, and the cost of video production is also lower.
According to incomplete statistics, those who announced the suspension this time include well-known suspense reasoning bloggers, top 100 UP owners in bilibili in 2019 @ Weird Jun (2.65 million fans), well-known game area blogger @ Xu Dawang (3.85 million fans), @-LKS-(3.11 million fans) who just won the top 100 UP owners in bilibili in 2022, and several middle-waist UP owners with hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands of fans.
"The reward mechanism in bilibili has been greatly adjusted this year." An UP owner with tens of thousands of fans in bilibili said that for a video content with little difference in data from last year, bilibili may only give the creator 1/3~1/2 of last year’s income.
The revenue here mainly refers to the "bilibili Creative Incentive Plan" launched by bilibili in January, 2018, which will evaluate the value of video traffic according to the data such as video playback volume, likes, coins and collections, and give cash rewards to UP owners according to the rules. However, in recent years, with bilibili’s sustained losses, the amount of incentives in bilibili has also continued to decline.
Last year, UP’s revenue was divided into 9.1 billion.
For bilibili UP owners, the realization of bilibili’s content mainly goes through two channels: platform incentive and business cooperation.
Platform incentive mainly refers to the incentive for the content creation of UP owners, that is, bilibili comprehensively evaluates the self-made content created by UP owners and provides corresponding rewards. The evaluation criteria include the amount of play, the amount of fans, and the amount of fans’ coin collection.
For commercial cooperation, the evaluation standard is much simpler, that is, to see how many commercial brands the UP owner can pull for the platform, and the more they pull, the greater the incentive.
In May, 2021, bilibili made adjustments to the creative incentive plan, and introduced a variety of assessment indicators, including broadcast channels, verification after user conversion, and adjusted the weights of different indicators. In fact, it is to increase the weight of business cooperation and reduce the weight of platform incentives. The standard that determines the income of UP owners is no longer the video quality, but who can receive advertisements better than who. As a result, the phenomenon of "traffic merger" has been caused. The income of the head UP owners who are suitable for receiving advertisements and have a large number of fans has been rising with the investment of the platform, while more waist and tail UP owners are simply unable to make a living on the platform.
For a long time, bilibili UP owners spontaneously produce and upload video content for their own interests and love, and the behavior of not pursuing economic benefits first is described as "generating electricity with love", which is also an important reason why bilibili can maintain the content and community activity. However, for most individual UP owners, the long-term "generating electricity for love" will eventually run out of electricity.
"Power generation with love" has never been able to support the "long-term stability" of a pan-community platform, and only by encouraging UP owners to expand their income through commercial cooperation can they really retain creators.
It is worth mentioning that bilibili’s share of the anchor has been relatively high in the industry.The 2022 financial report released by bilibili shows that about 9.1 billion revenues are distributed to UP owners.. In 2022, the operating cost of bilibili reached 18 billion yuan, of which the revenue share reached 9.1 billion yuan, including the incentive/share given to UP owners in the live broadcast and advertising business, which increased by 18% year-on-year.
The loss in 2022 was 7.5 billion.
The share price has fallen by more than 13% in the past year.
On March 30th, 2022 annual results were announced. The financial report shows that in 2022, the company achieved a total net turnover of 21.899 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 13%; The net loss was 7.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10%.
From the perspective of revenue composition, at present, the main revenue comes from mobile games, value-added services, advertising, e-commerce and others. In 2022, the company’s game business achieved revenue of 5 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 1%; Value-added services achieved a revenue of 8.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 26%; The advertising business revenue was 5.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12%; E-commerce and others achieved a total revenue of 3.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9%.
It is worth noting that in recent years, although the company’s revenue has been growing, the losses are also gradually expanding. From 2019 to 2021, the company achieved revenue of 6.778 billion yuan, 11.999 billion yuan and 19.384 billion yuan respectively, with year-on-year growth rates of 64.16%, 77.03% and 61.54% respectively; The net losses were 1.289 billion yuan, 3.012 billion yuan and 6.789 billion yuan respectively, and the accumulated losses in three years exceeded 11 billion yuan. In addition, from the perspective of changes in revenue growth rate, there has also been a slowdown since 2020.
However, in the 2022 financial report, in order to achieve profitability, the company launched a number of measures in 2022 to improve the efficiency of commercialization. And pointed out that the company’s gross profit margin increased from 19.0% in the fourth quarter of 2021 to 20.3% in the same period of 2022.
Meanwhile, according to the financial report data, the number of users in bilibili achieved steady growth in 2022. In 2022, the average daily active users of the platform reached 86.5 million, an increase of 29% compared with 66.8 million in the previous year; The average monthly active users reached 314.5 million, an increase of nearly 26% compared with 249.8 million in the previous year; The average monthly paying users reached 27.8 million, an increase of 24% compared with 22.4 million in the previous year.
In terms of business outlook, he said that new industry changes in 2023 require more efficient operation, and the company will continue to follow this path, putting profit first, accelerating the commercialization process and tightening expenditures. The company will continue to pay attention to the quality of users to achieve the growth of daily users and increase the ratio of daily users to monthly users. It is expected that the gross profit margin will increase and the loss will narrow in 2023.
In terms of share price, as of March 31, it was reported at HK$ 189.6 per share, and its share price fell by over 13% in the past year. The latest market value of the company is HK$ 78.7 billion, which is 80% lower than the high market value of over HK$ 400 billion when it went public in Hong Kong in March 2021.
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