Bilibili returns to the battlefield of medium and long videos, replacing playback volume with playback duration

At 9 pm on June 27, 24 hours have passed since the 14th anniversary of Station B, but more than 4,000 people are still watching the HE Tuber anniversary video.

After being delayed by the epidemic for three years, Chen Rui, affectionately called "Xiao Chen" by users of Station B, appeared at the anniversary celebration and met face to face with users and fans. Compared with facing investors, Chen Rui seems much more relaxed.

At the 14th anniversary celebration of Station B, Chen Rui emphasized his persistence in “good content”, “careful UP owners” and “community of like-minded people”. Correspondingly, playback duration is used instead of clicks, and in addition to live broadcast rewards, incentive plans, and fireworks platforms, monthly charging plans are added to create more ways to monetize content.

In short, after a brief attempt, Station B returned to the battlefield of medium and long videos, trying to find a new commercialization path with medium and long videos.

At the 14th anniversary of Bilibili, Chen Rui announced that Bilibili will usher in a major change - replacing clicks with playback minutes. In Chen Rui's explanation, the number of playback minutes better reflects the video quality.

Using other indices to replace simple clicks is not uncommon on long video platforms. Starting in 2018, iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent Video have successively replaced "view volume" with more complex "hotness". But for Station B, this change means a turn.

In recent years, under the impact of short videos, the living space of long videos has been squeezed. Both Aiyouteng and Bilibili are facing huge pressure in terms of revenue. Previously, Station B’s choice was to embrace short videos, try to introduce vertical screen mode on the platform, and gradually tilt its resources towards short videos. However, this approach has been questioned by many old users of Bilibili and UP owners. In their view,

  Bilibili has "changed its flavor."

Obviously, this adjustment is Bilibili’s response to past practices. This change is bound to have an impact on the video ecology of station B.

"Changing the playback volume to playback minutes is more friendly to medium- and long-form videos." Xiaoming, the chief technology house of UP, gave reporters a calculation: for a short video with a length of 60 seconds and a playback volume of 100,000, assuming its completion rate is 80%, and its completed broadcast minutes are 80,000 minutes. If it is a 10-minute medium-length video, with 50,000 views and a completion rate of 20%, the completion minutes will be 100,000 minutes. Even though the number of clicks and completion rate are lower than those of short videos, the data of medium and long videos are still better than those of short videos.

In fact, videos with an average playing time of more than 1 minute may benefit from this change.

After the revision, a foreseeable change is that the values ​​displayed on some videos will increase exponentially. For a video with 100,000 views, if the average play time is 5 minutes, the number displayed will expand five times, from 100,000 to 500,000. The difference in playback time will further widen the numerical difference between videos. With the same 100,000 clicks and an average playback time of 1 minute and 2 minutes, the displayed data will be doubled.

Regarding this change at Bilibili, many industry insiders said that most brands are still in a wait-and-see mode.

"It makes sense to a certain extent that the longer the viewing time, the higher the quality of the content, but whether it means higher value for the brand requires further measurement and determination." Influence Marketing New Media Group, a subsidiary of Publicis Groupe Cui Yan, general manager of the brand Publicis Influence, explained.

Despite this, Cui Yan is still optimistic about this change of Bilibili, because Bilibili has sent a clear signal to the outside world: Bilibili will take a medium-to-long video path that is different from Douyin and Xiaohongshu. "At least it has found a differentiated development

  direction." Cui Yan said.

2. Find a balance between high-quality content and commercialization

Once again placing high-quality content at the center of its commercialization, Station B must face a problem: How to let UP owners produce better content?

In the past two years, achieving breakeven has become Bilibili’s top priority. Driven by the goal of increasing revenue and reducing losses, Station B has repeatedly reduced platform incentives for UP owners. At the 14th anniversary celebration, Chen Rui directly compared the incentive plan of Bilibili to a "scholarship" and admitted that "scholarship" cannot cover the cost of survival of UP owners in society. He made it clear that the

  incentive plan only applies to novice UP owners.

For those UP owners who have left the "newbie village", since last year, Station B has launched the UP owner business cooperation and service platform "Huahuo". Through the "Huahuo" platform, brands can directly contact UP owners to complete the conversion of business orders. However, the platform cannot solve the contradiction between business orders and the community atmosphere of Bilibili. UP owners need to find a balance

  between business orders and content.

"Just like when we watch a TV series, if there are a lot of commercials, even if the plot is exciting, the audience will feel uncomfortable." Xiao Ming expressed his understanding of the fans' confusion. "The key is to improve the visibility of commercial orders," he said.

Making the content of business orders more interesting and better-looking is also the solution proposed by Chen Rui at the 14th anniversary celebration. But in fact, for UP

  owners, this still requires a trade-off.

Every year, 618 and Double 11 are the peak seasons for Bilibili UP owners to receive business orders. Brands will choose vertical category UP owners one or two months in advance to customize business orders. This is also the busiest time of the year for Xiao Ming, the main technology house of UP. During this year’s June 18 shopping period, he rejected nearly 70% of business orders.

"Mainly due to energy and adaptation considerations." Xiao Ming explained that for a waist UP owner like him, the production cycle of each video is about 10 days to one month, and the update frequency is two to four times a month. Even. In order not to affect the viewing

  experience of fans, he usually controls the number of business orders.

In order to ensure the quality of video content and reduce fans' negative emotions towards commercial orders, he will also conduct word-of-mouth research on the products in advance and spend a week or two trying out the products. "In the video, I will also try to be objective and will not say that I only talk about the good aspects of the product." Generally speaking, he will not accept business orders that do not suit his style.

"Fans are quite understanding," he said. "As long as the quality can be guaranteed, they generally don't have any objections." As one of the areas where Bilibili is easiest to receive business orders, Xiao Ming, the UP owner of the technology area, does not have much influence at the moment. stress of living.

But for Bilibili, how to find the balance between content and commercialization and cover business orders to as many UP owners as possible is a top priority.

This is not difficult to understand. Just three days after the 14th anniversary of Bilibili, on June 29, Bilibili issued an internal email stating that it would integrate multiple teams to establish a new first-level department "Transaction Ecological Center", headed by COO Li Ni. As the concurrent person in charge, he aims to strengthen the company's infrastructure in commercial transactions; at the same time, the original "E-commerce Division" was renamed as the "Member Purchase Division" and continues to focus on the needs of the ACG crowd for secondary derivatives.

On the road to commercialization of Bilibili, users of Bilibili often become the target of public criticism. But this does not mean that users of station B have no spending power.

During June 18 this year, Station B once again tried its live broadcast e-commerce business. According to the official data of Station B, the top UP owners "Bao Jiansao" and "Brother Yu Run Everywhere" jointly launched the first broadcast on the evening of June 10, which reached 28 million GMV, allowing the outside world to see the consumption

  potential of Station B users.

However, in the view of Zhang Yi, founder and CEO of iiMedia Consulting, most users of Station B are young people of Generation Z who have just graduated and are not price-sensitive users, so the path of live streaming e-commerce may not be the most suitable. Zhang Yi said: “If Station B wants to find its own commercialization path, it must find a way based on the characteristics of Station B’s users.”

Different from other platforms, Bilibili’s unique community atmosphere attracts a large number of high-quality users. Although their requirements for content are more demanding, these users often show stronger professionalism and higher stickiness. "For some unpopular content, it may be difficult for you to attract audiences on other platforms, but you can do it on Bilibili." Zhang Yi said.

When Xiao Ming started making videos 2 years ago, he never thought that he would become a full-time UP host. Although many people around him think that his video content is too professional and has a small audience, Xiao Ming has now accumulated more than 300,000 fans thanks to the hard-core atmosphere of Station B.