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Bilibili
TechBig Tech

Explainer | What Bilibili is, how it makes money and what’s next for ‘China’s YouTube’

  • First established as an online home for China’s young anime fans, Bilibili now hosts a variety of video, comic and mobile game content
  • The platform is hoping to expand its user base to embrace older audiences beyond millennials and Gen Z

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Bilibili got its start appealing to fans of anime, comics and games (ACG), but it has recently expanded into new content areas as it seeks to expand beyond its core user base. Photo: Bloomberg
Karen Chiu
Bilibili, the Shanghai-based online entertainment company, debuted on the Hong Kong stock exchange on March 26. It marks the company’s second listing after it went public on the Nasdaq in 2018. 
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One of the few companies to count both Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding, the owner of the South China Morning Post, as backers, Bilibili has often been described as China’s answer to YouTube. 

What is Bilibili? 

Bilibili, which markets itself as the online home for fans of anime, comics and games (ACG), is one of China’s biggest video-sharing sites. Known affectionately to loyal users as the “B station”, it started in 2009 as a scrappy platform for teens to watch Japanese cartoons, mostly pirated and unlicensed.

 In the beginning, one signature feature that set Bilbili apart from most other video-streaming sites is “bullet comments”: one-line viewer comments that float directly above a video. They can be in real-time or left by previous viewers pegged to specific moments in a video, but all of them fly across the screen simultaneously, silently screaming for attention. 

PattyCake Productions’s Disney-inspired videos covered in Bilibili’s characteristic “bullet comments” or “danmu.” Bullet comments can seem pretty distracting, but users have the option to disable them. (Image: PattyCake Productions via Bilibili)
PattyCake Productions’s Disney-inspired videos covered in Bilibili’s characteristic “bullet comments” or “danmu.” Bullet comments can seem pretty distracting, but users have the option to disable them. (Image: PattyCake Productions via Bilibili)

The idea of bullet comments is to make users feel as if they are watching a video along with a bunch of friends.

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