Station B is reforming, and the UP owner has swallowed another piece of pie
A few days ago, at the celebration party for HE Tuber the 14th anniversary of the establishment of Bilibili, Chen Rui, chairman and CEO of Bilibili, delivered a speech with the theme of "Nice to meet you", in which Bilibili will replace "video playback minutes" with "video playback minutes". The adjustment of "number of plays" was highlighted by Chen Rui, and this new measure has also become the focus of discussion. There are supporters and opponents, but this is actually not what Bilibili did first, and the reasons for doing so are actually very clear. There is more information, let's take a look at the author's interpretation.
At the celebration party for its 14th anniversary, Station B presented another big cake to UP owners.
At the celebration party for the 14th anniversary of the establishment of Bilibili, Chen Rui, chairman and CEO of Bilibili, delivered a speech with the theme of "Nice to Meet You". During the speech, Chen Rui also announced many of the upcoming reforms of Bilibili. measure.
Among them, Station B’s adjustment to replace “number of plays” with “video playback minutes” was highlighted by Chen Rui. He explained this move as “whether it is popular content, vertical content, or even niche content. , as long as your quality is good, it will be reflected in the number of playback minutes.”
The adjustment of explicit data at Station B has also sparked heated discussions among self-media creators, and is even regarded as the second spring for creators of medium and long videos at Station B. But can this kind of uncomplicated mechanism change at the product level really reverse the current predicament of Station B?
1. iQiyi has already done this
In fact, it is not the first time for Bilibili to cancel the display of playback times of video content. Many platforms have already made similar adjustments in the field of medium and long-term videos.
As early as 2018, iQiyi announced that it would close the front-end playback volume display on the entire site, and gradually replace the original playback volume display on all terminals based on content popularity based on user discussion, interaction volume, and multi-dimensional playback indicators.
iQiyi calls this change "farewell to the traffic-only era" to prevent "a large number of high-quality works from being buried due to the lack of a comprehensive and objective evaluation system."
This approach was quickly recognized by industry insiders. Since then, in 2019 and 2022, Youku and Tencent Video have successively announced the cancellation of front-end playback volume display.
From a basic logic point of view, Aiyouteng replaces the front-end playback volume in the form of popularity value, which is also to allow more high-quality content works to be objectively and fairly evaluated, and then be seen and paid attention to by more users, and can even provide advertisers with Bringing reference suggestions for placement decisions.
The original intention of this change is somewhat similar to the current approach of Bilibili, but it should be noted that the advantage of Aiyouteng's move is that it has a large amount of copyrighted content as support, as well as self-made dramas and self-made variety shows every year As a filler, the content supply side of the platform is stable and controllable, and high-quality exclusive content can continue to bring new users to the platform, and even directly bring paid income.
Station B still relies heavily on UGC content. Although it also has self-made content and purchased copyrighted content, the proportion in the platform is not high, and the main content production is still provided by UP. Although changing the explicit data will help Bilibili screen out attractive content to a certain extent and enhance the competitiveness of the platform, whether it can form a commercial closed loop remains to be tested by cases.
According to the financial report of Station B, the monthly activity data of Station B has continued to decline since the fourth quarter of last year. In the Q1 quarter of this year, the monthly activity of Station B was 315 million, while in Q3 last year, this figure remained at 330 million.
When the overall number of users cannot achieve long-term growth, Station B tries to change the existing traffic distribution rules on the site. In fact, it is adding and subtracting between short video users and medium and long video users to attract new users. , we can only place our hope on insufficient competitiveness such as "community atmosphere".
