Economic Observer reporter Ren Xiaoning Tao Siyu reports from Beijing.
"I will stick to the end of the year first, and I will withdraw if I can’t." On April 6th, Xie Pu, the owner of bilibili UP, told the Economic Observer. Recently, several UP owners in bilibili stopped working, and he also paid attention to this matter. In fact, since last year, his video revenue has also dropped significantly.
Xie Pu has 340,000 fans in bilibili, and the video content is distributed all over the network. Besides bilibili, there are also content platforms such as Watermelon Video and Tencent. Previously, the revenue of watermelon video was a big head, more than 600,000 yuan a year. Last year, the revenue of watermelon video dropped by half, and Tencent’s revenue dropped by about 70%. Bilibili’s income is stable at present, but it has not been much.
Previously, Xie Pu relied on the high income from other platforms to "generate electricity for love" in bilibili. He likes the community atmosphere in bilibili, and his fans’ barrage and comments are of high value, which can make him feel the joy of creation. However, if we only rely on bilibili’s income, it is difficult to support the five-person team with the current account. If there is no way to increase his income, he may have to stop working later.
On April 2nd, the bilibili UP main stop-watch incident rushed to Weibo for hot search. A person close to bilibili told reporters that the stop was not large, and among the big UP owners with more than 500,000 fans, the stop was in single digits. However, this incident has a great impact, and there are constantly big V voices in various fields. The reporter observed that at present, it is not only bilibili UP owners who are affected, but the whole content ecology practitioners.
A current affairs blogger with tens of millions of fans announced his income on April 3: Although the number of fans on the whole network is increasing, the income in 2023 will "crash". Among them, Weibo’s income dropped by 50% a year, Zhihu’s income dropped by 60%, today’s headline income dropped by 40%, bilibili’s subsidies were almost completely cancelled, and there were few business orders.
In fact, Xie Pu thought at the beginning of his career that the platform could not subsidize and support creators forever. "The era of content profiteering is over."
Stop becoming a trend.
On March 30th, 3.11 million fans, "-LKs-", who has just won the top 100 UPs in bilibili in 2022, released a video saying that they want to take a vacation for themselves, temporarily stop for a while, and it is estimated that they will resume updating in May. The next day, the famous game UP owner, "King Xu who eats by his face" with 3.85 million fans, also sent a video saying "Stop the game, goodbye".
On April 2nd, the topic of bilibili UP stopped to make a hot search in Weibo, which reached 420 million readings that day. In addition to the above two UP owners, there are several other UP owners who send out the news of stopping the shift. However, the reporter found that these UP owners are still being updated, and some of them just released the latest video on April 2.
Previously, the industry’s perception was that bilibili’s fans were more sticky than short video platforms such as Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker; At the beginning of 2022, a statistic also said that the annual income of UP owners in bilibili is about 1.5-2 times the number of fans. If there are millions of fans, the annual income of UP owners is about 1.5 million yuan to 2 million yuan. Do you want to stop working when the income of UP owners is so high?
After boarding the hot search, the two UP owners felt a little surprised. "-LKs-" responded that "it is only on behalf of individuals to announce the suspension of work, which has nothing to do with the economic situation, and the income in bilibili this year is no less than before". "King Xu, who lives by his face" said that it is more personal for him to stop. bilibili is just his own publishing platform, and it has nothing to do with bilibili. It is normal to make profits and losses in content creation, so there is no need to make a fuss.
Although there are not many people stopping this time, it is worth noting that stopping is becoming a trend in the content industry. Last October, several UPs stopped working in bilibili. In January of this year, the millions of fans in the film and television area also announced that they would stop watching the movie.
Xie Pu told reporters that since last year, there have also been a large number of video institutions withdrawing and stopping on watermelon videos, but many of these institutions are water injection videos of platform wool. He feels that the withdrawal of these institutions is not harmful to the content ecology.
The reporter looked up the data of New Shake and New Fast, and found that in the last month, the update frequency of some works of Tik Tok’s top experts and middle-waist bloggers also showed a downward trend. For example, Brother Xiao Yang, the head master of Tik Tok, only updated the short video works twice from March to April.
In addition to the video field, the phenomenon of platform stoppage in the graphic field, such as Weibo, has gradually emerged. In July last year, Weibo workplace blogger "Axiu" mentioned that another big V friend quit the Internet, because he felt that the graphic category made far less money from the media than the video category.
Another Weibo blogger with 440,000 fans explained why he stopped updating popular science videos, saying that there was no cost from the media. In the previous popular science videos, two or three students worked full-time, and the salary was 20,000-30,000 yuan a month. On average, the cost of each video was about 10,000 yuan. However, the amount of popular science content has dropped significantly, and there is no sense of gain psychologically, so it naturally stops.
Fall into a money-making dilemma
When stopping or reducing updates becomes the choice of some bloggers, it partly reflects the current content creators’ dilemma of making money.
In February of this year, bilibili’s 1.54 million fans "Hilaris" specially sent a video to persuade people not to be full-time video bloggers. He said that 90% of the money earned by people who make videos full-time has not earned much as a security guard in the community. At present, only regional bloggers who have more than 800,000 fans and are easy to receive business orders can support themselves. If there is no commercial list, there will be no live broadcast with goods. Even if there are 800,000 fans, the income is not as good as that earned by screwing in the factory.
"King Xu, who eats by his face" also said that it is really not profitable to make videos now, but fortunately, he has saved some money before to support it until now.
The main income of UP is mainly divided into four parts: platform subsidy, video business list, live broadcast reward and charging (that is, users pay monthly). For some small and medium-sized UP owners who can’t receive advertisements, platform subsidies are an important source of income.
Since the second half of last year, many video platforms, including bilibili, have adjusted their subsidy policies. The adjustment method was not made public, and the creator discovered it only after he felt that the income was decreasing. In October last year, there were some UP main videos that said that the incentive income of the platform was reduced, some by 40%, and some by 80%. Xie Pu told reporters that watermelon video also lowered its subsidy policy last year. In 2022, the revenue of watermelon video was not more than half that of 2021.
While platform subsidies are decreasing, the number of creators is increasing rapidly. Bilibili’s financial report shows that in 2022, UP owners are experiencing rapid growth, with the average monthly active content creators increasing by 45.2% year-on-year, and the average monthly content submission videos increasing by 58.8% year-on-year. At the same time, the revenue sharing cost of bilibili in 2022 increased by only 18% year-on-year. After "more monks than porridge", the creative ecology began to change. UP’s main "Fake Apple Lab" has been releasing videos in bilibili since 2019, and it has not been updated this year. The deterioration of short video content ecology in the past two years made her feel sorry. "The vertical track is almost saturated, the video homogeneity is high, and the UP owners are seriously involved. The short, flat and fast videos crowd out the high-quality videos with long production cycle."
For UP owners above the waist who can receive advertisements, they do not rely on platform subsidies, but rely more on business income. They are also uneasy about the overall decline of Internet advertising.
Overall decline in advertising
According to China Internet Advertising Data Report 2022, the Internet advertising market in China is estimated to be about 508.8 billion yuan in 2022, which is 6.38% lower than that in 2021, and the market scale has experienced negative growth for the first time in recent seven years. QM also released a report saying that in 2022, e-commerce platforms and live e-commerce advertisements maintained growth, while media advertisements showed a downward trend.
Xie Pu said that when he first made a video in 2020, advertisers in the fields of games, e-commerce and smart cars kept coming. But so far this year, there is not a business list. The "golden dads" who were willing to advertise before were themselves mired in the quagmire: in 2022, the overall revenue of the game industry declined, the growth of the e-commerce industry stagnated, and the losses of smart car companies increased.
A marketing company with four years of experience told reporters that in the first two years, emerging consumer goods companies were very willing to advertise on platforms such as bilibili; But this year, big-name consumer goods companies are more concerned about whether they can sell goods. Small consumer goods companies have almost disappeared from the market, and the number of advertisers looking for their companies to launch has dropped a lot.
The decline in business orders is not limited to bilibili. Macey, who has been working in the media for more than two years, found that the number of her business orders on Little Red Book was also declining. Previously, 95% of her income came from Xiaohongshu’s business list, which can have 6-10 orders per month; But now only four orders can be negotiated every month.
Advertisements from media blogger Jiang Chacha said that millions of KOL (key opinion leaders) couldn’t receive advertisements this year. Since last year, the income of KOL in the head has dropped by 20%-30%, and the income of KOL in the middle has halved. She also mentioned that bloggers with a headline price of more than 100,000 yuan in WeChat official account have already laid off half of their teams. "It is no longer time for fans to receive advertisements to make money."
Xie Pu said that in the past, everyone could tolerate the decline in traffic subsidies because they felt that there was still a chance to receive business orders. After seeing no hope, some people would choose to give up. Back in 2020, Watermelon Video took out 2 billion yuan to subsidize Chinese video and competed with bilibili for the UP owner. Advertisers were also willing to do brand promotion, regardless of the effect of bringing goods.
At that time, Xie Pu’s account income was very high, and the team expanded from 2 people at the beginning to 10 people. But now there are fewer subsidy income platforms, and advertisers reduce their delivery. He needs to consider what to do next.
The era of content profiteering is over
After the decline in earnings, Xie Pu also thought about moving to Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker.
But the idea of the latter is to do everything possible to encourage bloggers to bring goods. Xie Pu is a little disgusted with this. He still wants to make money by making good content. In addition, he has no ability to carry goods, and there is no supply chain to talk with mature anchor PK. But Xie Pu has to face the fact that there are fewer and fewer platforms and advertisers willing to pay for good content, and the end of short videos is live broadcast.
This is in contrast to the living conditions of YouTube creators. At the same time when UP stopped playing, another news also attracted attention. According to the analysis of YouTube channel value estimation, after Li Ziqi stopped playing YouTube for more than one year, the average monthly video playback still generated advertising revenue of 780,000 yuan, and the estimated revenue in the most recent year was more than 6.9 million yuan.
Li Ziqi’s latest video was released on July 4, 2021, with more than 26 million hits. After the click, two advertisements will be played first, one for 10 seconds and the other for 5 seconds, and then enter the feature film. According to analysis, this video alone can bring Li Zikai advertising revenue of 1,448,500 to 2,607,300 yuan.
Youtube’s patch ads rely on Google’s data and algorithms, and the advertising accuracy is high, so bloggers can receive direct incentives when uploading videos. But even on YouTube, there are now bloggers in online celebrity who complain that their earnings are declining. Japanese blogger Purotan sent a video in January this year, saying that the income in that month was only 1/5 of the previous one.
During the interview, many UP owners hoped that bilibili could post advertisements online like YouTube, so that both UP owners and bilibili could make money. But as early as 2014, bilibili made a promise of "never adding video patch advertisements". Last year, at the Q3 earnings conference call, Rui Chen, chairman of bilibili, reiterated this view again.
Zhang Yi, CEO of Ai Media Consulting, told reporters that the commercialization ecology of bilibili is not well built, which is one of the challenges facing bilibili.
At present, for Internet video platforms that are strategically biased towards "reducing costs and increasing efficiency", reducing losses is becoming the main theme. Taking Aauto Quicker as an example, the adjusted net loss in the fourth quarter of 2022 was 45.3 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 98.7%. Bilibili’s losses increased last year, and Rui Chen put forward the goal of breaking even in 2024.
"At the end of all Internet content platforms, it must be UGC (User Generated Content) that can live well." Xie Pu thinks that there will be fewer and fewer PGC (professional content production) video teams in the future, because this account can’t be calculated from the content cost.
At present, Xie Pu’s team has been reduced to five people, and it has also entered a state of loss. "The money earned in the previous two years is now lost." Next, he may use the popular AIGC(AI Generated Content) technology to improve efficiency and continue to reduce the team size; Or do it all by yourself.
Even if he earns only a few thousand yuan a month, he can support himself in a small town in the third and fourth tier. Xie Pu is still waiting to see. If the situation is still the same by the end of the year, we will not rule out stopping.
As a part-time UP owner, Macey did not choose to stop working after the income decreased. She likes to record her life, and her long-term self-media operation has made video shooting a living habit like "eating and drinking water".
On March 14th, "Huadu Brothers", a food blogger with 3 million fans on the whole network, sent a video saying: I will not do it in the future. With more than 2 million hits, it became the video with the highest number of hits. Usually this number is only 200,000-300,000. After "quitting", "Huadu Brothers" bought a big truck and set up a stall to sell fruit. They made their own experience of setting up a stall into a video, and they also got high hits.
Interestingly, the "Huadu Brothers" had no business list for a long time before; After switching to selling fruits, there were three business orders within one week, two of which were dynamic advertisements of Hailan House (600398), and a pillow company also launched them.
Now, from time to time, there are fans who buy their fruits online. In the comment areas of bilibili and Tik Tok, you can see the shopping screenshots posted by fans. The career change experience of "Huadu Brothers" seems to verify that: the end of the short video is to bring goods.
