Bilibili at a crossroads with focus on increasing users

This article is co-written by Iris Deng.

When high school student Shan Wenran signed up to join video and animation-sharing site Bilibili six years ago, she was surprised to find that membership entailed passing a lengthy examination. The 100-question test included zingers like “Who was the lead singer of the Japanese Rainbow band?” or “Who was the starting goalkeeper of the German men’s national soccer team?”

“I tried to answer one or two questions and then quit,” said Shan, now 24, from the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang. “It was troublesome, and I didn’t know the answers to those questions,” Shan said. She took the exam again in college and passed.

Cosplayers dressed as Bilibili’s mascots in front of the Nasdaq building. / Photo credit: Bilibili

Shanghai-based Bilibili, founded in 2009, has become the biggest video, comics, and gaming entertainment platform for China’s fast-growing Generation Z, made up of consumers born between 1990 and 2009. But the company, according to analysts, has also reached a crossroads, which could hasten its decision to further water down its rigid examination to increase the number of its users and better compete against larger players in the country’s online video-streaming industry.

“Over the years, we have gradually lowered the difficulty of the 100-question exam,” a spokeswoman for Nasdaq-traded Bilibili said in an emailed statement. “This is because we have developed more ways to maintain our community’s environment and enhance our users’ experience. With such capabilities, we don’t have to rely as much on the exam.” Those included community behavior protocols, user whistleblowing functions, more accurate content recommendations, and a larger inventory of high-quality content.

Bilibili had about 54 million total users who passed its exam as of the second quarter of this year. Qualified members gain the privilege of posting bullet comments, a popular Bilibili mechanism that enables comments to float directly above a video, which can be scrolled on screen. Bullet comments can either be in real time or left by previous viewers pegged to specific moments of a video. It is like chats on US video-streaming service Twitch, but superimposed on the video.

Plans to overhaul Bilibili’s exam process come as the company sharpens its focus on user growth, helping it develop into a major industry contender behind Chinese video-streaming giants iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent Video, which are backed by internet titans Baidu, Alibaba Group Holding, and Tencent Holdings, respectively. Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.

With the world’s biggest internet population of more than 800 million, China has seen increased consumption of online video content. Baidu’s iQiyi leads this market with about 588 million monthly unique device users, followed by Tencent Video with 549 million and Youku with 398 million, according to iResearch estimates in September. By comparison, Bilibili plans to reach 220 million monthly active users in 2021, up from 120 million to 130 million by the end of this year.

While its time-consuming exam has helped Bilibili build up a loyal community – more than 60% of its early users in 2009 remain active at present, according to its spokeswoman – the number of users have not grown as rapidly as other video-streaming platforms.

“Balancing the growth and culture of the community is at the core of the issue,” said independent internet industry commentator Zhang Dingding, former head of Beijing-based research firm Sootoo Institute. “I don’t think the decision [of lowering the standards of its examination] would have much impact on existing users, but Bilibili needs to be more considerate about the sentiment of its early users.”

Bilibili currently allows a qualifying score of 60 for a user to pass its membership exam. The Post recently took the exam – which covered community rules, bullet comment items, and other topics – and spent half an hour to achieve a pass, with some help from Google search.

“If I needed to pass a 100-question exam to become a member, then Bilibili may not be in my life right now,” said Sean Feng, who works in Hong Kong’s finance industry and became a Bilibili member before the company set up its exam. “I’d rather pay to be a Tencent Video member.”

Bilibili founder Xu Yi officially launched the site in January 2010, with a focus on building a community of anime video-sharing users. It has since expanded that community to cover a wide array of genres and media formats, including live broadcasting, mobile games, and so-called professional user-generated content. Xu, who received his associate degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2010, has served as the company’s president since 2013.