Reporter Li Yuyang reported from Shanghai
Although the hot search is unpredictable, people can taste some things from it, such as the recent hot search "Li Ziqi YouTube Advertising Revenue" and Station B (Bilibili, NASDAQ: BILI, 09626.HK) "UP main stop more trendy".
Specifically, Li Ziqi, who has been suspended for more than a year, has an estimated income of more than 6.9 million yuan on YouTube (a well-known foreign video website, called YouTube by Chinese netizens) in the latest year; And the UP master "Xu Dawang who eats by his face", who has 3.85 million fans on station B, released a video on March 31 and gave reasons for stopping: first, "it's really not profitable to make videos now", and second, "I'm a little tired and want to give myself a long vacation".
Almost at the same time, the 2022 Top 100 UP masters of Station B "-LKs-" also released a temporary suspension video at the end of March, saying that "give yourself a little vacation". In addition to these big UP owners with more than one million followers, there are also multiple mid-waist UP owners with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of followers who have stopped content updates.
As a result, "Station B UP main initiates a stop and change tide" has become a hot spot on the whole network for a while. However, the reporter of "China Business News" noticed that many UP owners have issued suspension statements before, including many UP owners. Regarding the reasons for the suspension of UP masters, the most discussed are the reduced incentive for creation and the difficulty of commercial monetization, especially for UP owners below the head.
In response to the relationship between the "UP main stop and the tide" and the decline in UP main income, the reporter contacted Station B, and as of press time, no reply has been received. According to surging news reports, station B insiders said that the "stop tide" is not accurate, this is only some UP owners due to personal reasons, not collective behavior.
Up to now, the official station B has not publicly spoken out about this "stop changing turmoil". An industry analyst close to Station B believes: "The UP master also has to live, and the input and output will inevitably stop, which is an economic law." At this point, it is best for station B not to respond. ”
Is "stopping the tide" an illusion?
It is worth noting that in station B, there is actually a traffic password called "stop changing", that is, most of the UP owners who announce the suspension or temporary suspension will have a significantly higher number of farewell videos than usual. This is a very strange phenomenon, of course, under big data, as long as the more users click on, the more the platform recommends this type of video.
Regardless of "King Xu who eats by his face", his suspended video has exceeded 5 million views, far exceeding his recent videos with only hundreds of thousands of views. The reporter noticed that the UP master "Huadu Brothers", which has 500,000 fans, has more than 2 million views of the suspended video submitted by the UP master on March 14, which is significantly ahead of other videos and can be called a hit.
However, there are indeed many UP masters who have stopped changing. According to the reporter's incomplete statistics, since the beginning of this year, UP masters including Huadu Brothers, Have You Watched a Movie, My Distant Cousin, Hua FH0486 Hua and other UP owners have announced the suspension of videos or announced transformation; If you pull the timescale from mid-2022 to the first quarter of 2023, the stop list also includes well-known UP masters such as Discovery Bar Taro Yuan and Tzukawa Kshadow. They have more than 1 million to 10,000 fans, involving food areas, game areas, film and television areas, funny areas and other areas.
In fact, the main stop of station B UP is not uncommon. According to media statistics, nearly 20% of the UP masters of the first 100 UP masters of Station B in 2018 have been stopped. For the reason for stopping the video, "-LKs-" follow-up article claimed: "I stopped changing and had nothing to do with the economic situation, and my income at station B this year is no less than before." ”
According to "Xu Dawang, who eats by his face", now making videos does not make money or even loses money, and he made some money during the dividend period of video production, which lasted so long. "The two hot searches are a bit inexplicable... The reason why I stopped changing is my personal reasons, I have been doing videos for more than ten years, and station B is just a release platform for me, so I keep stopping and has nothing to do with station B... And engaging in content creation is actually no different from ordinary work, some people make money and some people lose money, it's a normal thing, there is no need to fuss. He said.
What makes Station B really alert should be the kind of silent stoppage. Coincidentally, just last January, "-LKs-" published a video "Where did the well-known blogger go after stopping?" Their answer was unexpected", an UP owner said that he stopped working after graduation, but he would still take care of his channel when he was not busy with work; Another UP owner said that he would recharge himself during this period of time to grow up and output better works.
Earnings decreased by about 1/3
Although there is no need to make a fuss about making a profit or a loss in making videos, in fact, the tonality and operation of the platform are related to the profit and loss of the UP owner. Especially after the revision of the B station creation incentive, the income of most UP owners has been significantly reduced. It is understood that Station B launched the "bilibili Creation Incentive Plan" in January 2018, which will evaluate the value of video traffic based on data such as video views, likes, coins, and collections, and give UP master cash rewards according to the rules.
Then, station B adjusts the incentive income of creation, introduces new assessment indicators including broadcast channels, user verification after conversion, etc., and adjusts the weighting of different indicators to a certain extent, and finally subject to the actual displayed incentive income. Last year, a number of UP owners released videos saying that the income from creative incentives has dropped significantly, a phenomenon that has attracted attention from the industry and appeared in the press.
As a small UP master among all sentient beings, how will it be affected? UP master "Feng Xiaoji", who has only more than 1,000 fans, mainly submitted videos for the secondary creation of Pokémon animation. For a full year from April 3, 2022 to April 2, 2023, he received a total of less than 840 yuan in creative incentives. "In the past, the income was quite good, but now it has decreased by about 1/3, in the past, as long as you made videos, you would give money, make money by contributing, and make money with traffic." He said, "Last year I made two 10W+, and [the creation incentive] was less than 1,000 yuan. Subject to the constraints of real life, coupled with the busyness of the main business, "Feng Xiaoji" does not plan to update videos on any platform in the near future.
Looking at the UP master or vertical UP master in the middle waist, the UP master "One Ginger Tea Tea" with nearly 700,000 fans on Station B has been operating since mid-2020 and has updated more than 100 long videos. "It has been intermittently suspended since 2021, and it will not be updated at all in October 2022. The reason is simple, it doesn't feed the team. "A ginger tea tea" said that he hired 2 copywriters and 2 editors, salary, social security and office rent and other monthly costs of about 70,000 yuan, and the average of 2~3 months to receive an advertisement (60,000 yuan a quotation), plus the signing and subsidy income given by station B, the last calculation, two years did not make much money.
Head Riding Travel UP owner "Xu Yun Wandering China" once posted his creative incentive income in the video, with a total of 180 million views on the platform, and the total current total income is only 170,000 yuan, including video revenue before 2021 and some additional program bonuses.
It can be seen that UP owners only rely on creative incentives to have a surplus after covering costs, and they need other ways to make money. For UP masters with main businesses like "Feng Xiaoji", the creative incentives given by station B can only be used as extra money, and more are "generating electricity with love".
If you compare B site with YouTube, then it will seem very unfair. The latter is backed by Google's powerful advertising recommendation system, and will take out 45% of local advertising revenue as creator incentives, and creator revenue will be different according to the difference in advertising revenue capacity in the broadcast region.
According to the analysis of YouTube channel value estimation, the estimated revenue per thousand views of Li Ziqi's video is 4.02 US dollars, which is equivalent to the estimated revenue range of 25.85~30.17 yuan. Taking its latest video as an example, the video was released on July 14, 2021, with 25,989,500 views, and the estimated revenue is more than one million yuan based on the number of comments, likes, and viewing rate of the video.
It should be pointed out that YouTube has patch ads, but the B station does not have it yet. Compared with other similar platforms in China, the content creation income of station B is at a relatively advanced level, if not the highest, for example, a certain grass platform currently has no platform incentives, and bloggers mainly rely on advertising shares.
Another important background for Station B to adjust the creative incentive plan is the actual performance pressure. The latest annual report released by Station B shows that its loss in 2022 is 7.497 billion yuan, even more than 700 million yuan in 2021, and the net profit margin is still negative. More importantly, in the current lack of a sustained and stable core business replenishment mechanism and the overall commercialization path is still being explored, reducing costs is a realistic option for Station B.
Can no longer lose quality UP long videos
Although the creative income obtained by UP owners decreases with the adjustment of station B policy, the total amount of dividends distributed by station B to UP owners is increasing year by year. According to the financial report, the revenue sharing cost of Station B reached 7.7 billion yuan in 2021, a year-on-year increase of 77.1%; In 2022, the revenue sharing cost of Station B reached 9.1 billion yuan, an increase of 18% year-on-year, accounting for half of Station B's total operating cost in 2022.
According to the documents disclosed by Station B, the "content sharing" of 9.1 billion yuan includes the share for game developers, channel costs and payment processing fees, live broadcast revenue sharing and creator-related revenue sharing, and the 1.4 billion yuan increase in sharing costs in 2022 compared with 2021, almost all of which are used to give incentives and shares to UP owners in live broadcast and advertising business. This means that the revenue given to the UP owner of station B in 2022 will increase compared with 2021, but it should not be as much as 9.1 billion yuan.
According to the financial report, the main number of monthly active UP of station B maintained a year-on-year growth momentum in 2022, with year-on-year growth of 3.83 million, 3.6 million, 3.78 million and 3.8 million in the first to fourth quarters, respectively. Simply calculate an account, the share of UP masters has increased, but the number of UP masters is also growing rapidly, which will dilute the share that each UP master can get.
For a long time, Station B has brought together many content creators who "generate electricity with love" with its long videos, and at the same time, due to its unique two-dimensional culture, it has gradually covered multiple fields such as daily life, humanistic society, and entertainment, and the platform users are very sticky.
In June last year, at the keynote speech on the 13th anniversary of Station B, Chen Rui, chairman and CEO of Station B, said, "Being able to continuously produce treasures UP is not only the vitality of Station B, but also the value of Station B." "Looking at the list of the top 100 UP masters in 2022, more than half of the top 100 UP masters are newcomers, and the remarks of the treasure UP owners produced by station B are not exaggerated.
In the past two or three years, due to the influence or impact of short videos, the content form of station B has undergone some changes. For deepin users, they have been keenly aware of the changes in the video ecology of the B webmaster. In 2020, Station B began to test the vertical screen playback function (i.e. Story-Mode) and continued to increase the proportion of short video content.
"The new content format represented by Story-Mode vertical video effectively meets the fragmented needs of users and further promotes the increase of community activity." Chen Rui said. According to the fourth quarter of 2022, the average daily playback volume of Story-Mode has achieved a rapid growth of 175% year-on-year.
Compared to long, time-consuming videos, short videos are easier to produce and stimulate more content creators. "Because it is a popular science UP master, we need to read a lot of materials, and the fans' eyes are sharp, and they can't make mistakes. When it is updated normally, it is generally updated twice a week, and each manuscript is 5000~10000 words. The amount of work involved in making long videos is really a lot. "A ginger tea tea" said.
Station B's emphasis on vertical screen video not only encourages UP owners to try short video content, but also attracts a number of experts from short video platforms to settle in Station B. For example, the 2022 Top 100 UP Lord "Liu Yong Clean and Hygienic" was welcomed by the station, and single-handedly made the aloe vera juice stalk fire. At the same time, short video platforms are also moving into long video. Recently, ByteDance launched "Qingtao", which is positioned as an interest knowledge video platform for young people.
The above-mentioned industry analysts said that most of the division of station B to the UP master in 2022 will flow to the head UP owner or institution, and the UP owner at the waist and tail accounts for the majority, and the prosperous content ecology needs to rely on all the UP masters, so it is not appropriate for Station B to speak out about this stoppage.
Huafu Securities Research Report pointed out that long-term "power generation for love" will lead to a decline in the enthusiasm of UP owners to reduce the amount of video output, and commercial order promotion is the main source of income for UP owners, but due to the number of fans, content tonality, individual differences of UP owners, etc., the UP owners of station B form a large two-level difference in business order income, which aggravates the loss of enthusiasm for the creation of UP masters in the tail.
Now, before achieving breakeven, Station B should probably find a way to do a good job in the operation of the UP owner, retain the talented UP owner, and integrate the new UP owner into the community ecology.