"I want to tell you one thing here, that is, we will stop for a while from today."
Recently, many users in bilibili were surprised to find that many UP owners who have been concerned for a long time have released videos that have temporarily stopped updating, indicating that no new content will be uploaded in the short term. In terms of the reasons for stopping the update, two up owners clearly stated that it is difficult to balance the income and expenditure, which is the main reason for stopping the update. At the same time, Nancai reporter learned that the more intuitive factor for the middle and tail up owners is the decline in platform revenue.
The other side of the decline in revenue of UP owners is that the total amount of video incentives given by bilibili to UP owners has reached a new high. On March 30th, bilibili released its annual results for 2022. The financial report showed that the content share of bilibili in 2022 reached 9.1 billion yuan, up 17.9% year-on-year.
Rui Chen, Chairman and CEO of bilibili, said in the earnings conference call that increasing revenue and reducing losses and healthy growth of DAU (daily active users) are still the two most important things in bilibili in 2023.
A number of up owners announced that they would stop working.
Nancai reporter noted that although there were up owners in bilibili who stopped the update actively or passively for various reasons, it was rare for many UP owners to publicly announce the suspension of update intensively. 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 timeline has been extended. From mid-2022 to the first quarter of 2023, many UP owners have voluntarily announced that they have stopped watching or never made new videos, including many well-known UP owners, such as @ Explorers Taro, @ Detective Tang Renjie, @ Douchuan kshadow and so on.
The reasons listed by the UP owners who announced that they would stop working are different. For example, -LKs- means that they want to rest more, but most UP owners mentioned the same reason — — Decline in income: Weird Jun said during the live broadcast that the account team was dissolved mainly for economic reasons; King Xu, who relies on his face to eat, admits that making videos does not make money or even lose money, relying on the dividend support of platform development in the early days.
For the head UP owners, the platform incentive is only a part of the income source, and its main income also includes the advertisement of receiving orders, live broadcast of goods or paid realization of knowledge, but for the middle and tail UP owners, the platform incentive accounts for the vast majority of creative income.
"The reward mechanism in bilibili has been greatly adjusted this year." An UP owner who has tens of thousands of fans in bilibili told Southern Finance all-media reporter that 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. In May, 2021, the official customer service in bilibili replied to the question about the decrease of UP’s creative incentive, saying that the incentive income was being adjusted recently: a variety of assessment indicators including broadcast channels and verification after user conversion were newly introduced, and the weights of different indicators were adjusted to some extent, and finally the actual incentive income was subject.
In March, 2022, bilibili UP owner Midu Dzg released bilibili’s dynamic statement that "bilibili’s creative incentives were revised, which directly reduced by 80%". Later, several UP owners released similar contents indicating that the creative incentive income decreased by 50%-80%. According to the reply from bilibili customer service, the revised creative incentive plan has indeed been launched.
The outdoor UP owner "Xu Yun Wandering in China", who relies on bicycle travel to gain widespread attention, has publicly released his gains before. At that time, he had released 240 videos in bilibili, with a total broadcast volume of 180 million and a total income of only 170,000 yuan.
Some insiders also speculate that bilibili’s adjustment of creative incentives is not uniform, but based on the number of fans and divisions, different types of UP owners are piloted, and the reward coefficient is adjusted to a middle value that balances the cost and the creator’s incentives, and then promoted horizontally.
The above-mentioned 10,000-powder UP owner also told reporters that she had received a survey call from a staff member in bilibili at the beginning of this year, and the other party’s main question was "If the reward amount is reduced, will it affect its update speed on the platform?".
However, the UP owner also mentioned that compared with other similar platforms, bilibili’s content revenue is still at a relatively advanced level, even if it is not the highest. For example, Xiaohongshu has no platform incentives at present, and bloggers mainly rely on advertising to get revenue.
Bilibili in a dilemma
It is worth noting that although the video revenue obtained by UP owners in recent years has been continuously reduced with the adjustment of bilibili’s policies, the total amount of dividends distributed to UP owners in bilibili has been increasing year by year. On March 30th, bilibili released its annual results for 2022. The financial report showed that bilibili’s content share in 2022 reached 9.1 billion yuan, up 18% year-on-year, which accounted for half of bilibili’s total operating costs in 2022.
One of the reasons for this situation may be that the rapid growth of short video content in bilibili in recent years has raised the overall traffic pool. In 2021, bilibili launched Story-Mode, a short video with vertical screen mode. In the financial report of the first quarter of 2022, the proportion of vertical screen video broadcast in bilibili has exceeded 20%.
On the other hand, the growth rate of operating income in bilibili failed to keep UP with the overall traffic growth rate, and the income of UP owners was diluted to some extent — — According to the financial report, in 2022, the monthly users in bilibili increased by 25.9% year-on-year, and the average daily usage time of each active user increased by 46.7% year-on-year. Under the superposition of the two, the traffic growth rate is much higher than the growth rate of the creator’s share, and the dividend amount per unit traffic naturally decreases.
For a long time, bilibili UP owners spontaneously produced and uploaded video content for their own interests and love, and described it as "power generation with love", which is also an important reason why bilibili can maintain the content and community activity. However, for most individual UP owners, long-term "power generation for love" will eventually run out of electricity.
Hua Fu Securities Research Report pointed out that the long-term "power generation for love" will lead to the decrease of the creative enthusiasm of UP owners, thus reducing the video output, and the promotion of business orders is the main income source of UP owners. However, due to the number of fans, the tonality of content, the individual differences of UP owners and other reasons, bilibili UP owners have formed a big two-level difference in the income of business orders, which has aggravated the loss of creative enthusiasm of the tail UP owners.
As a video platform that is highly dependent on private domain operation, bilibili’s video traffic largely comes from the private domain distribution of UP to fans, which also brings the advantages of high user penetration, strong stickiness and high proportion of medium and long tails in bilibili. Correspondingly, from the head UP to the middle end UP, choosing to stop or even withdraw from the station due to the decline in income will firmly shake the basic content of bilibili.
In order to solve this problem, bilibili has also expanded the revenue sources of platform content producers by introducing and strengthening the flow realization modes such as knowledge payment, live broadcast with goods, and developing content product placement advertising operations.
In addition, bilibili is constantly adjusting the data dimension to measure the value of video content. In March this year, bilibili held an exchange meeting with more than 100 UPs at the Shanghai headquarters to discuss "which broadcast indicators can objectively reflect the quality of manuscripts". It was reported that bilibili had decided to change the broadcast volume data at the front desk to broadcast duration data.
In this year’s earnings conference call, bilibili Chairman and CEO Chen Rui once said that increasing income and reducing losses and healthy growth of DAU (daily active users) are still the two most important things for bilibili in 2023.
Under the background that the overall flow of streaming media platform in China has almost peaked, high-quality content producers are not only precious high-quality assets in the stock competition, but also a source of cost that cannot be ignored in the operation of the platform. Under the development strategy of further reducing costs and increasing efficiency and accelerating commercialization in bilibili, how to keep and even stimulate the content productivity of UP owners again remains to be answered by bilibili.