Text | Xinyan, author | Ruan Xue, editor| Sang Mingqiang
Every earnings season, Station B is always discussed with the "profit problem".
This quarter is no exception, first look at a set of data: according to Bilibili's Q3 financial report this year, the net loss was 1.613 billion yuan, and the net loss ratio reached 30.98%. In fact, this is not a problem for Station B, and the three giants of Aiyouteng are also difficult to escape the profit trap, but this does not prevent the market from being optimistic about Station B. In other words, jumping out of paper data and looking at the hidden signals under the data is particularly critical for a company like Station B.
Station B's revenue in the third quarter of this year increased by 61% year-on-year, exceeding market expectations, maintaining a sense of continuous good rhythm: Overall, in the 1-3 quarters of this year, the revenue of Station B increased by 68%, 72%, and 61% respectively, and the growth of operating expenses and the losses brought about by investment were the main reasons for the dilemma of Station B increasing revenue and not increasing profits.
This means that the problem of Station B appears in the operational strategy.
According to the convention of station B, "publicity expenses for mobile games" will also be written as the main source of sales and marketing expenses, which represents the publicity of station B in the field of mobile games, which is still increasing; the research and development cost reached 788 million yuan, an increase of 96.51% year-on-year, which means that the investment in research and development of station B is still increasing (in the client, we can clearly feel the changes in station B, such as bullet screen optimization, column plate increase, etc.).
The investment loss of station B is mainly concentrated in the fields of animation, comics and games, but it should be noted that this is the deep ploughing field of station B, and the small-scale investment loss is obviously not enough to affect the next action of station B, an obvious example is that after the release of the Q3 financial report of station B, A-share first animation listed company Aofei Entertainment issued an announcement and agreed to sell 100% of the equity of April Starry Sky to Bilibili at a price of 600 million yuan.
April Starry Sky, is a well-known comic brand "there is a demon" behind the company, B station acquisition of demon gas purpose is very pure, in order to continue to deepen the cultivation of domestic animation, for the content output to do the engine, parallel with the event is that B station got a payment license, which can not help but make us curious: B station profit problem, is there a new solution?
New signals on earnings
More and more people came to the "little broken station".
The MAU (number of monthly active users) of Station B has grown and has been exceeding expectations. 21Q3 company MAU is about 267 million, an increase of 12.70% month-on-month, according to the long-term MAU target of Station B, if the average month-on-month growth rate of MAU in 20-23 can reach 6%, it can reach 400 million monthly active.
For Station B, gao yuehuo is very important. This also explains why Station B should focus on breaking the circle of works and audience circle breakthroughs.
When it comes to the content creation of station B, it must be inseparable from three concepts: UGC, OGC, and PGC. UGC is user-generated content, that is, some personal UP masters in the B station, and even one of your comments can be regarded as UGC. However, with more and more bloggers with professional backgrounds settling in, PGC this kind of professional production content began to appear in large quantities, and the combination of UGC and PGC formed a special model of PUGC (professional user production content) of B station.
According to The New Eye, the biggest contribution to the active growth of Q3 should be the latest OGC column launched by Station B. OGC generally refers to the formed content created by a professional team, such as the website represented by OGC (iYOTENG) and the foreign streaming giant Netflix, whose content is created internally or purchased from the outside.
B station Q3 launched a number of popular OGC content, including the variety show "90 Marriage Agency", "My Music Do You Listen", "Yuanlong Second Season", of which "90 Marriage Agency" has deviated from the two-dimensional positioning of the original B station, and at the same time as marching towards the third dimension, it has also produced a circle-breaking effect, so that more users who were not originally target users of the B station have also paid attention to it.
It should be noted that the OGC content of Station B in the past mainly started with dramas, but with the increase of users, Station B is developing towards documentaries, variety shows, film and television dramas. Therefore, on the content side, you can no longer take the bullet screen version of Youtube to define the B station, it is more like a collection of Youtube and Netflix.
The effect of this change is obvious: the average daily use time of Q3 users in Station B is up to 88 minutes, maintaining a high level in the video field; the number of large members has increased to 18.2 million, an increase of 42% year-on-year; the average monthly active UP main increased by 61% year-on-year, the average number of monthly contributions increased by 80% year-on-year, the number of UP masters with more than 10,000 fans increased by 42% year-on-year; the average daily video playback volume was 2.3 billion, an increase of 77% year-on-year, and the average monthly interaction number reached 10.2 billion, an increase of 86% year-on-year. The number of full members reached 134 million, an increase of 38% year-on-year.
Chart: The number of monthly paid users of Station B and the year-on-year growth rate (Source: Company Announcement, Guojin Securities Research)
"Growth" is the keyword of Station B in the past two years.
The average monthly paid users of Station B in the third quarter of this year reached 29.9 million, an increase of 59% year-on-year, and the overall payment rate remained at 8.9%. The payment rate increases, on the one hand, because station B has a group of users who are willing to accept new things and high stickiness, they are the main force of content payment; on the other hand, because the paid rights of station B members cover a wider range of rights, in addition to content payment to enjoy exclusive works and half-price on-demand, in terms of experience and consumer rights, station B also provides services for its large members (such as supporting Dolby Atmos, providing membership purchases and B coin coupons).
The increase in paid users has improved the revenue ecology of Station B to some extent. Compared with 2017, the total revenue of Station B is 2.468 billion yuan, but games account for 83.4% of the overall revenue of the whole year, and the commercialization of Station B in 2021 has become more balanced, and value-added services and advertising services are slowly shouldering the beam.
The new logic of commercialization
In the past, Station B relied on the second dimension to build a community culture, but it earned money for game intermodal transportation.
In the past two years, the game version number has been suspended, the total amount of distribution has been controlled, and the traffic of developers such as Tencent and NetEase has been strengthened, which has begun to be limited for "publishers" and "agents" such as Station B. In this case, Station B needs a new engine, but the solution of Station B is too direct and rough, on the one hand, it develops its own game, but has little effect; on the other hand, it invests in game companies and uses intermodal transportation to drive its own IP research and development, looking forward to triggering a flywheel effect.
What Station B ignores is that jumping out of the "publisher" and "agent" mode has become a "money-burning game", and accurate judgment is very important.
In stark contrast to the above aspects, B station has developed much more steadily in original animation, constantly acquiring original manga companies to provide raw materials for B station's IP reserves on content. At this time, you can naturally think that with the continuous increase of commercial content, the payment scenarios in the B station are becoming more and more numerous, in addition to recharging large members, the members inside the B station buy e-commerce, live rewards, all require users to complete the transaction action inside the B station.
The problem is that in the past, Station B mainly relied on third-party platforms to complete the payment process, for which Station B also generated a large amount of expenditure, and the service fees paid to third-party payment institutions in the past three years were 10.8 million yuan, 26.8 million yuan and 42 million yuan, which increased year by year. Therefore, for the future B station, it is very important to get your own payment license.
But the market comments on this action verified the "end of the Internet is finance" statement, it is inevitable that there is some far-fetched, for B station, commercialization does not mean financialization.
The change and invariance of station B
The scarcity of the video community is the impression that station B now gives to the outside world.
But this also brings some problems, and the influx of a large number of users means that B station needs to make more new changes. For example, in 2018, Station B canceled the strict answering method in the past, and new users need to answer 60 questions correctly in the 100 questions related to the two-dimensional animation before they can become a regular user, and after becoming a formal user, they can unlock privileges such as bullet screens, comments, and coin-operated.
After changing from the access system to the open system, the content direction of the B station is no longer limited to the secondary element content, and it has begun to develop in the direction of pan-entertainment, so there is also the B station you see now: the partition gradually increases.
The mechanism of inserting ads in the video and sharing with the Up owner has been implemented on YouTube for a long time, and the B station has also followed this logic: CEO Chen Rui once promised never to add video patch ads, which also explains why the ads did not bring considerable revenue to the B station, and now the B station has obviously found a better way to balance the community culture and advertising monetization.
Do not do patch advertising, B station pursues the organic combination of advertising marketing and video content.
Station B integrates the commercial traffic management system and the advertising system, builds the commercial middle office of the B station around the fireworks system, becomes the middleman of the advertiser and the UP owner, provides better commercial resources for up, on the one hand, ensures the quality of the content, on the other hand, helps to improve the efficiency of monetization, and achieves a win-win situation for advertisers and UP owners, and then B station collects service fees from it.
At present, the advertising of Station B can be divided into two parts: brand integrated marketing and information flow advertising. B station Up owner can choose advertising forms include "bullet screen, video window (e-commerce advertising), video advertising" three forms, B station unique PUGC content and UP main brought by the "fan effect", so that the B station advertising becomes a unique style: UP main fans advise up master to eat properly, like receiving a secret code for brand interaction, and then in an entertaining way to show the cooperative advertising to target customers.
The theme song of Michelle Ice City, "flooding" Station B, is the most typical case of integrated marketing.
The success of station B lies in the formation of a sustainable monetization route: advertisers can choose UP masters based on the scale and tonality of the creator audience in station B, quickly gather traffic at the same time, but also accurately hit the user's consumption preferences, and the creator's creative content in a scenario-based way for consumers to bring more authentic display, B station's comment area also provides an interactive place for it, in the case of high-quality content is not affected, users' tolerance for "just food" is obviously higher.
Reading this, perhaps you can draw a conclusion, no matter how the content sector and business proportion of station B change, the quality of works and community ecology will always be the constant focus of station B. In other words, if Station B can open up the closed-loop model of "content-business-feed content", it is not impossible to break through the "loss" spell.