Station B’s expansion ambitions and road to attack.
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account ” Tech planet “(ID: tech618) , author: Chenqiao Hui Zhou Yifei, editor: Yang industry break.
“Little broken station” is no longer only a secondary element. The ecological layout of bilibili (B station for short) is further expanding, and the “breaking circle” effect is becoming more and more obvious.
In particular, two out-of-circle events have made Station B almost a mainstream cultural platform. The latest circling event was a video of “Houlang”, which was produced by Station B, and it caused a heated discussion among the old and young circles. The other one is a basketball dance dance video, “offensive” to the popular youth idol star Cai Xukun, million iKun claimed to be level B station.
However, when countless iKuns claimed to be pouring into station B, they found it difficult to answer the registration questions of station B. “Which Chinese province do the German heads visit most often?” and “What are the benefits of Jinjila?” It’s a question that Baidu can’t get an answer.
Just when many people think that Station B has built an “ideal country” of subcultures such as secondary elements, ghosts, and animals, Station B has personally dismantled barriers-greatly reducing the threshold for registered members to answer questions, while diversifying the content and attracting different crowd. Station B needs more young people, and even more than young people come to Station B. Station B hopes to become an ecologically prosperous metropolis.
“In the long run, content platforms with a volume of less than US $ 10 billion in China will be eliminated. US $ 10 billion means that the company ’s revenue will be at least 10 billion yuan a year.” Chairman Chen Rui of Station B In an interview with “LatePost”, the ambition of station B was revealed. At that time, the market value of Station B was only about $ 4.5 billion.
B station chairman Chen Rui
Station B is indeed advancing in accordance with Chen Rui ’s plan. The market value not only broke 10 billion after 230 days. In the latest Q1 quarterly financial report, user growth is also conspicuous: month The number of active users was 172.4 million, an increase of 70% year-on-year, and the number of daily active users increased by 69% to 51 million. After more and more users flood into station B, can station B meet all kinds of needs? How Station B builds its product and service matrix and builds a multi-level user ecosystem has become a problem that Station B needs to face directly after crossing the tens of billions of dollars threshold.
In the ever-expanding ACGN (Animation, Comic, Game, Novel novel) field, Station B launched the avatar “bilibili concept version”, “bilibili comic version”, and the main audio “cat ear FM”, The social product “Meet”, the short video product “Light Video”, and even the investment brokerage company Chaodian. Various signs indicate that Station B is no longer a simple niche secondary community. It is trying to upgrade its own ecology and seek an ecological balance.
6 apps including B social networking
Since receiving the investment from Ali Tencent, Station B began to attack the entire AGCN industry chain in an all-round way, not only in the core fields of games, live broadcast, comics, novels, etc., Station B It has also begun to extend to the subdivision of the community.
For example, the current hot short video community is a direction for the ecological force of Station B. In 2018, Bilibili launched a short video app called “Light Video”, which is an original short video community that involves dance, national style, food, vlog and so on.
Unlike Douyin and Kuaishou, which are divided by high- and low-dimensional cities, the short video of station B is divided by the crowd attributes.
For example, the most representative barrage function of station B is added to “Light Video” to allow users to have an interactive feeling. The video content is mainly based on secondary elements and antiquity content, and some are of higher quality Game video. The task of “Light Video” given by Station B is to defend against the rapid shaking, so that the young people in Station B have a short video world that belongs to the second element, robbing the user of the duration.
After more than a year of development, “Light Video” has not been profitable so far. In addition, the video page adds the function of “view full version”. The content of the full version comes from station B. It seems that “light video” has become a traffic transmission point of station B.
Although Station B has always focused on the field of video content, in fact, audio content of different dimensions is also an important supplement. B’s layout in the audio field is to choose to acquire a vertical platform.
Cat ear FM (station M for short), considered by users to be the “audio station B”, was established in 2014 and covers paid radio dramas, hypnotic audio, comics and other secondary and pan-secondary sound contents. In 2015, Station B led the investment of RMB 14 million in the second-dimension audio community Cat Ear FM (Barrage Sound Map App), and helped Cat Ear FM obtain an online audiovisual certificate.
Cat Ear FM page
After Cat Ear FM has successively obtained A and B rounds of financing, in November 2018, B station spent a lot of money to acquire M station, with a valuation of about 1 billion yuan. 66.47% of the shares.
B station chose to buy M station, what actually valued is the content resources of Cat Ear FM in the audio field. Cat Ear FM has deep cooperation with Reading and Jinjiang, and has obtained many audio licenses for headline web works. It has a large number of high-quality seiyu resources. Among them, the number of on-demand broadcasts from the head of the Beidou Penguin studio’s paid radio drama “Magic Master” is the highest in history, and it is the first to start a paid radio drama.
At present, we have reached cooperation with Tencent Anime and Buka Comics to jointly develop audio comics. The content output brought about by these cooperations can just meet the needs of some young people who like to listen to secondary content.
In addition, station B also hopes to establish different communities (circles) to decompress and divert the large community of station B.
Game income once accounted for about 80% of the income of station B, so station B has been involved in the game community for a long time.
In 2018, Station B launched the “bigfun” community app. Bigfun’s Chinese name is Bi Fang, which is a community focused on the field of mobile games. Users can share game topics, evaluations, and strategy guides to get acquainted with more games.
However, compared with the frequent promotion of “Bilibili Comics” at Station B, bigfun is more like a free-range child. The main reason is that the current mobile game community is close to saturation, such as Netease’s “Netease Great God”, and Tencent’s recent “flash”, are mainly in the mobile game community, and the two companies’ own game business volume It’s huge and has far more influence on players than station B.
Of course, as time goes on, the aging of NGA players may bring opportunities for bigfun. At present, the task undertaken by bigfun is to maintain the topic of various second-hand mobile games, attract users who are more loyal to ACG on station B, and form a gathering place.
In addition to the game community bigfun, Tech Planet (WeChat ID: tech618) was exclusively informed that Guangzhou Xinyan Technology Co., Ltd., a shareholder of Station B, launched the “Meet Community” in May this year. Community products.
Different from bigfun, the “Meet Community” is a social networking platform that integrates social media and gossip. It can establish a social circle that belongs to its own interests. There are many types of topic discussions in the community service lobby.
Chen Rui mentioned in an interview later, “I deliberately droppedThe low B station’s social attributes allow users to meet less often. Many people asked me why I did n’t post it, and I did n’t do it if I killed him. “B station does not want to improve social attributes too much, it does not mean that B station does not want to socialize, after all, social is still very obvious for promoting the stickiness of the community. < / span>
It is not easy to do social networking, and the prospect of “Meet Community” is still unpredictable. However, the content ecology of B’s social networking has always been a long term, and it is difficult to say how much effect it can accumulate in long-term operation, but once the advantages and barriers are formed in the later period, B will also usher in a huge gain in traffic.
78 investments make up for 5 years of regret
The four core businesses of Station B have been gaming, advertising, live broadcasting and value-added services. Since the release of the “Break Circle” signal in 2019, Bilibili began to optimize its content strengths and make up for its strategic shortcomings.
According to the “LatePost” report, Station B split the Enterprise Development Department and established the Strategic Development Department and the Strategic Investment Department. This split means that Station B changed its conservative development style. According to the data from Tianyan, Bilibili has made 78 public investments, and Tech Planet has also made exclusive arrangements for important corporate investments made by B in various fields in recent years.
B station is known as the leader of the domestic AGCN industry, but Chen Rui also regretted that in the past 5 years, he thought that the biggest miss was that the domestic animation was done late. “If we do it for a year early, there will be no other homes.” After hindsight, B also invested heavily in the comics field.
In December 2017, Station B followed up with the online publishing company “Daily Renewal Plan” for the operation and distribution of secondary IP. In November 2018, launched its own independent app “Bili Bili Comics”; unlike the free mode of the main station, “Bili Bili Comics” adopts “VIP chapter payment + member payment”mode. As the scale of the domestic paid comics market continues to expand, perhaps the comics business will also become another major revenue point for Station B.
One month after launching its own “Bili Bili Comics”, Station B acquired NetEase Comics, including APP, website, some comics copyrights and related usage rights.
NetEase Comics was established in 2015, and has a stable and in-depth cooperation with the well-known Japanese comic book publishers such as “Kodansha” and “Jiyingsha” who started as comics. When it was acquired by Station B at the time, the platform already had more than 600 domestic and foreign exclusive cartoonists, more than 20,000 comic works, and the number of mobile registered users was close to 40 million, making it one of the largest comic platforms in China.
Although the original sub-cultural community “NetEase Lofter” was not bought as expected, the NetEase comics that were losing money and selling at the time were also in line with their appetite. With the help of the high-quality content resources of Netease Comics, Station B consolidated its core ACGN user resources, directly and quickly diverted to the comics sector, and rapidly expanded the content ecological territory.
In addition, according to the data of Tianyan check, on May 13 this year, Station B invested in Hangzhou Zhangpai Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Zhangpai Technology, to strengthen the layout of the two-dimensional game. The next day, Station B also bought a share drafting platform “Rice Painter” to provide a professional draft trading platform to meet the art painting needs of game production.
In addition to continuously enhancing the business in the secondary field of comics and games, Station B has also continuously invested in AGC industry chain enterprises. One of the investments was on September 21, 2018. Station B announced an increase in the holding of “China’s No. 1 Virtual Idol” Luo Tianyi, part of its parent company Hong Kong Zelis Group, and increased its holding to become a controlling shareholder.
Luo Tianyi is China’s most famous virtual singer IP, and the earliest profitable virtual singer in China. Her core technology comes from Yamaha, the world’s largest musical instrument manufacturer, and is the first virtual singer with vocaloid (electronic music production speech synthesis software) with a Chinese sound bank.
In addition to holding personal offline concerts, Luo Tianyi, a “net celebrity” virtual idol, has also continuously jumped out of the second-dimension circle and is actively participating in major TV media platforms including Hunan Satellite TV and Zhejiang Satellite TV. He even started to try to cross-border live broadcast of “carry goods” on Taobao. B’s investment in the field of virtual idols can be glimpsed from the acquisition of Luo Tianyi.
B station also did not forget the most important UP main resource of the enterprise. In improving the creator ecology, B station also invested in related companies to strengthen services.
In July 2019, Station B acquired a major stake in Chaodian Culture. The business of Chaodian Culture mainly includes UP main brokerage, animation derivative development, etc., and owns the B generation and offline activities brands BML and BW. It is also the main enterprise that produces and manages offline activities of station B.
According to the official website news, Chaodian currently has more than 200 exclusive UP contractors. Chaodian will provide video originality, live broadcast and other services for it, improve the revenue of B-site artist brokers, and finally activate the entire B-site creative ecology. Chen Rui once said to the outside world that the addition of super-electricity culture can promote the development of brands in offline activities of Station B and enhance the commercialization capability of PUGC.
Challenge of 100 billion content ecology
The core strategy of B station in the future will be content ecology and industry layout. It will do animation and e-sports vertically, and PUGC, big members, live broadcast and video Commercial and offline activities. The implementation of these strategies mainly relies on the two major companies of Station B. Shanghai Magic Electronics mainly deals with mobile game business and Shanghai Broad Entertainment operates video distribution business.
According to the company ’s survey, Shanghai Magic has made 53 foreign investments. It can be found that there are 20 investments in the company, which involve the upstream and downstream stages of the entire animation industry chain, and are mainly content creation companies. These invested companies created IP and derived games, which were eventually released on the B station.
In the long run, the company invested by Station B is strengthening its voice in various fields such as games, animation, and comics. According to the “Q1 China Mobile Internet Industry Development Analysis Report 2020” recently released by Trustdata, the data growth rate of Bilibili comics has reached 1221.0% in the past year, making it the fastest growing comics platform.
B station is also strengthening the connection of different product systems and promoting the coordinated development of ecology. Among the several apps currently launched outside the main station of station B, except MOutside the eet community, they have already connected with the account system of station B, and users can log in directly using the Bilibili account. In the recharge system, the virtual currency of Cat Ear FM is a separate category “diamond”, and the Bilibili comics are purchased with B coins from station B.
As the ecology of station B continues to expand, it is inevitable to touch the boundaries of more and more Internet platforms. An UP host revealed to Tech Planet that if using the technical tools provided by ByteDance to process the video, Byte has the right to restrict users from uploading their works to Station B. Station B, which began to introduce movie copyrights, began vaguely competing with “You Ai Teng.”
For Station B, “burning money” will not stop for a long time in the future until it becomes a huge ecology. Therefore, Station B is also constantly introducing ecological partners. On April 9, Station B, which had just signed a music copyright cooperation agreement with Sony, announced that it had obtained a strategic investment of US $ 400 million from Sony, and would also cooperate in various fields such as animation and mobile games.
Chen Rui once said that he hopes that Station B will eventually become a cultural brand company similar to Disney. At present, Disney ’s market value is 219.5 billion US dollars. B Station, which has just exceeded 10 billion US dollars in market value, has a difficult and long journey.
The four core businesses of Station B have been gaming, advertising, live broadcasting and value-added services. Since the release of the “Break Circle” signal in 2019, Bilibili began to optimize its content strengths and make up for its strategic shortcomings.
According to the “LatePost” report, Station B split the Enterprise Development Department and established the Strategic Development Department and the Strategic Investment Department. This split means that Station B changed its conservative development style. According to the data from Tianyan, Bilibili has made 78 public investments, and Tech Planet has also made exclusive arrangements for important corporate investments made by B in various fields in recent years.
B station is known as the leader of the domestic AGCN industry, but Chen Rui also regretted that in the past 5 years, he thought that the biggest miss was that the domestic animation was done late. “If we do it for a year early, there will be no other homes.” After hindsight, B also invested heavily in the comics field.
In December 2017, Station B followed up with the online publishing company “Daily Renewal Plan” for the operation and distribution of secondary IP. In November 2018, launched its own independent app “Bili Bili Comics”; unlike the free mode of the main station, “Bili Bili Comics” adopts “VIP chapter payment + member payment”mode. As the scale of the domestic paid comics market continues to expand, perhaps the comics business will also become another major revenue point for Station B.
One month after launching its own “Bili Bili Comics”, Station B acquired NetEase Comics, including APP, website, some comics copyrights and related usage rights.
NetEase Comics was established in 2015, and has a stable and in-depth cooperation with the well-known Japanese comic book publishers such as “Kodansha” and “Jiyingsha” who started as comics. When it was acquired by Station B at the time, the platform already had more than 600 domestic and foreign exclusive cartoonists, more than 20,000 comic works, and the number of mobile registered users was close to 40 million, making it one of the largest comic platforms in China.
Although the original sub-cultural community “NetEase Lofter” was not bought as expected, the NetEase comics that were losing money and selling at the time were also in line with their appetite. With the help of the high-quality content resources of Netease Comics, Station B consolidated its core ACGN user resources, directly and quickly diverted to the comics sector, and rapidly expanded the content ecological territory.
In addition, according to the data of Tianyan check, on May 13 this year, Station B invested in Hangzhou Zhangpai Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Zhangpai Technology, to strengthen the layout of the two-dimensional game. The next day, Station B also bought a share drafting platform “Rice Painter” to provide a professional draft trading platform to meet the art painting needs of game production.
In addition to continuously enhancing the business in the secondary field of comics and games, Station B has also continuously invested in AGC industry chain enterprises. One of the investments was on September 21, 2018. Station B announced an increase in the holding of “China’s No. 1 Virtual Idol” Luo Tianyi, part of its parent company Hong Kong Zelis Group, and increased its holding to become a controlling shareholder.
Luo Tianyi is China’s most famous virtual singer IP, and the earliest profitable virtual singer in China. Her core technology comes from Yamaha, the world’s largest musical instrument manufacturer, and is the first virtual singer with vocaloid (electronic music production speech synthesis software) with a Chinese sound bank.
In addition to holding personal offline concerts, Luo Tianyi, a “net celebrity” virtual idol, has also continuously jumped out of the second-dimension circle and is actively participating in major TV media platforms including Hunan Satellite TV and Zhejiang Satellite TV. He even started to try to cross-border live broadcast of “carry goods” on Taobao. B’s investment in the field of virtual idols can be glimpsed from the acquisition of Luo Tianyi.
B station also did not forget the most important UP main resource of the enterprise. In improving the creator ecology, B station also invested in related companies to strengthen services.
In July 2019, Station B acquired a major stake in Chaodian Culture. The business of Chaodian Culture mainly includes UP main brokerage, animation derivative development, etc., and owns the B generation and offline activities brands BML and BW. It is also the main enterprise that produces and manages offline activities of station B.
According to the official website news, Chaodian currently has more than 200 exclusive UP contractors. Chaodian will provide video originality, live broadcast and other services for it, improve the revenue of B-site artist brokers, and finally activate the entire B-site creative ecology. Chen Rui once said to the outside world that the addition of super-electricity culture can promote the development of brands in offline activities of Station B and enhance the commercialization capability of PUGC.