WHAT IS BILIBILI?
Bilibili (哔哩哔哩) is a Chinese video platform based in Shanghai, built around long-form video, live streaming and mobile gaming. It grew out of anime and gaming culture, and it still carries that DNA in how people watch and comment. The signature feature is 弹幕 (danmaku, literally “bullet screen”): comments fly across the video in real time instead of sitting in a box below it. That single design choice is why Bilibili communities feel alive in a way most platforms do not.
Bilibili was founded by Xu Yi in 2009. He was an AcFun user who wanted something better, spent three days building a prototype called Mikufans.cn as a fan site for Hatsune Miku, then reshaped it into a video platform and relaunched it on 14 January 2010 under the name Bilibili, borrowed from the nickname of Mikoto Misaka, a character in the anime A Certain Scientific Railgun.
Sixteen years later, Bilibili is not a niche anime corner anymore. It has grown into music, dance, science, tech reviews, movies, fashion, daily vlogs and, yes, advertising. It runs e-commerce mini-programs and live commerce alongside the video business.
Read our Chinese Social Media Guide
Philip Chen is CEO of GMA in Shanghai. His team has been briefing UP主 (creators) on Bilibili for gaming and tech clients since 2021, and he still turns down more Bilibili pitches than he accepts, because the platform is not built for every brand.
Here is the number that changes the whole conversation: Bilibili’s average user is now 26 to 27 years old, and the core segment is 25 to 30-year-old working professionals, not teenagers. Daily active users hit 113 million in Q4 2025, up 10% year on year, and monthly active users reached 366 million. Average time on the app is 107 minutes a day, and premium membership renewal runs above 80% a year, according to Bilibili’s own user data as tracked by Digitaling’s 2026 content-marketing coverage. That is not a fandom site anymore. It is a mainstream young-adult platform that happens to have kept its community habits.
That old revenue chart above tells the early story. The current one is more interesting: Bilibili posted its first full-year profit ever in 2025, on 30.35 billion RMB in revenue (+13% year on year), and advertising was the engine behind it, up 23% to 10.06 billion RMB, per Sina Finance’s coverage of the 2025 annual report. Q1 2026 ad revenue grew another 30%, and ad income now sits at roughly 35% of total revenue. Brands are not experimenting on Bilibili anymore. They are budgeting for it.
WHY THE OLD MARKETING PLAYBOOK STILL FAILS HERE
Traditional ad thinking does not survive contact with Bilibili’s audience. Users here read the danmu before they read your brand copy, and they will tell you, in real time, exactly what they think of your video. A few years back, McDonald’s found that out the hard way.
McDonald’s ran a live broadcast built around three steps: anchor introduction, a rotation of influencers and passers-by tasting the new product on camera, then coupon distribution. The tasting segment fell flat. Nobody sounded convinced, the comments turned into a running joke, and the last stretch of the 24-hour stream was mostly viewers spamming “just send the coupons already.” The broadcast did pull in 130,000 new followers in a day, jumping the account from 32,000 to 162,000 fans. But engagement collapsed right after: the next five official videos went from 163,000 views down to 5,000. Followers who arrive because of a bit they are laughing at rarely stick around for your actual content.
KFC’s official account tells a quieter version of the same story: dozens of short videos, most under 5,000 views, an official campaign that struggled to cross a few hundred interactions. Meanwhile an ordinary user posted a video comparing US KFC to a knockoff fried-chicken shop and pulled in over 700,000 views, purely because it was honest and specific. The lesson has not changed in six years: a brand account broadcasting at people underperforms a real person telling a real story about your product, every time.
WHAT ACTUALLY WORKS: XIAOMI, TENCENT, ALIBABA
Funny, self-aware brand accounts do better here than polished ones. The clearest example is still Xiaomi’s Lei Jun.
Years ago, a clip of Xiaomi founder Lei Jun speaking English with a strong accent, saying “Are you OK!”, went viral on Bilibili for all the wrong reasons. Rather than deleting it or staying quiet, Xiaomi leaned in: an official remix video, “Shake with Lei Jun, Are You OK!”, went up during a holiday weekend and turned an embarrassing clip into an inside joke the whole community was in on. That single act of self-deprecating humor did more for Xiaomi’s Bilibili image than any polished campaign could have. The account has kept that tone ever since and now carries close to a million followers.
Tencent and Alibaba: patience over virality
Tencent built its Bilibili following more slowly, mixing edited clips from classic Chinese films and shows with anime-adjacent content, and grew to over 200,000 followers with videos averaging well over a million views each. Alibaba took a similar self-aware approach: a video of Jack Ma rapping in a thick regional accent, showing the ordinary, slightly awkward side of a founder worth billions, pulled millions of views precisely because it was not trying to sell anything. Both companies figured out the same thing at different speeds: on Bilibili, being likable beats being polished.
WHICH BRAND CATEGORIES ACTUALLY WORK ON BILIBILI IN 2026
This is the question every client asks me first, and it deserves a direct answer instead of a “it depends” agency answer. Based on what B站’s own advertiser data and our campaign results show:
- Gaming works best of all, no surprise given the platform’s roots. Mobile and PC game launches with a Bilibili-first UP主 push consistently outperform other platforms for engaged installs, not just downloads.
- Tech and 3C (digital electronics) works very well. A 15-to-20-minute teardown or comparison video does something a 15-second Douyin clip cannot: it lets a genuinely technical audience evaluate a product before they buy it. Huawei, Xiaomi, Samsung and Sony dominate this space on Bilibili for a reason.
- Anime and pop-culture-adjacent brands (collectibles, apparel with anime tie-ins, mobile games) still have a home-field advantage here that no other Chinese platform offers.
- Beauty, but narrowly. Men’s skincare and younger-Gen-Z-focused domestic beauty brands do well, 42 beauty brands made B站’s 2025 “top products” list, most of them domestic. Mass-market or older-skewing beauty brands do not get the same lift.
- Cars perform well for consideration-stage content: long reviews, comparison drives, owner vlogs.
What does not work: impulse-buy FMCG, mass grocery, and anything that needs a fast, low-thought purchase decision. Trying to sell instant noodles or laundry pods with a Bilibili review video? You will get views and you will get roasted in the danmu, neither one converts 😉. Save that budget for Douyin or Xiaohongshu.
BILIBILI VS DOUYIN VS XIAOHONGSHU: PICK THE RIGHT JOB
I get this question in almost every client call, so here is the short version. Douyin is built for discovery and direct conversion: short clips, a view-based algorithm, live commerce baked into the feed. It is the platform for “see it, want it, buy it in ninety seconds.” Xiaohongshu is closer to a search engine now, people go there to check if a product is actually good before buying it elsewhere.
Bilibili sits earlier in the funnel. Its recommendation model favors follower relationships over raw view counts, which rewards creators who build trust over time rather than chase one viral clip. A 15-minute product review here does not convert on the spot the way a Douyin livestream might, but it builds the kind of understanding and trust that later shows up as a search on Tmall, an order on JD, or a follow on WeChat. If your brand needs a sale this week, Bilibili is the wrong tool. If you are building the kind of brand recognition that makes every other China platform cheaper to run, it is one of the best tools available.
HOW TO ACTUALLY MARKET YOUR BRAND ON BILIBILI
- Open an official account and feed it consistently. A dormant account with three posts from 2023 does more damage than no account at all. Study what your category’s audience already watches before you post anything.
- Work through 花火 Huahuo, Bilibili’s official brand-creator marketplace. Huahuo is where you brief UP主 (creators) directly: hook structure for the first ten seconds, pacing guidance for a 10-to-30-minute video, where the danmu-bait moments go, and localization notes so the script does not read as translated. Picking the right mid-tier UP主 (50,000 to 300,000 followers, not the biggest name available) usually beats a single mega-influencer for both cost and audience fit.
- Use 必火 Bihuo to boost what is already working. Bihuo is Bilibili’s official traffic tool: once a video is getting real engagement, it can push additional plays, follows and live-room traffic behind it. It rewards content that is already resonating, it does not fix content that is not.
- Lean into danmu and live interaction. Bilibili’s AI-assisted ad system now covers more than 90% of advertisers, and B站’s own 2026 advertiser playbook reports fill-rate up 15% and click-through up 20% since rolling it out more widely. That means better targeting than a few years ago, but it still cannot write your hook for you. The first ten seconds and the danmu-bait moments in the middle are where a human writer earns their fee.
CASE STUDY: A NORDIC GAMING-CHAIR BRAND FINDS ITS FUNNEL
Erik runs a Nordic gaming-chair brand that entered China through a JD flagship store in 2025. His first move was a Douyin livestream push, heavy discounting, high burn, and a growing problem: comments calling the brand “just another cheap chair” despite a mid-premium price point. Three months in, JD conversion from Douyin traffic was under 2%, and margin was disappearing into livestream commission.
We moved half his budget to Bilibili through Huahuo, briefing three mid-tier tech and gaming UP主 (80,000 to 220,000 followers each) for 15-minute videos built around the chair’s actual engineering: lumbar mechanism, tilt tension, materials sourcing, none of it rushed, all of it demonstrated on camera. No hard sell, just an honest review with a link in the description to the JD store and a WeChat mini shop for people who wanted a discount code instead.
The mechanism behind the result: Bilibili’s audience for this category skews toward people who research before they buy a desk setup, and a 15-minute video lets that research happen inside the platform instead of sending them to a comparison site. In the first six weeks, the three videos reached a combined 180,000 views with an average watch completion of 62%, well above Bilibili’s own benchmark for the category. Branded search on Baidu jumped 340% the month the first review went live. JD conversion rate for visitors arriving from Bilibili links settled at 4.1%, more than double what the Douyin traffic had been converting at, on a smaller but far more qualified audience.
BILIBILI AND E-COMMERCE: DO NOT EXPECT DIRECT SALES
Bilibili still has mini-program checkout and live commerce, and it still partners with Taobao to bring UP主 onto the marketplace side. But treat it for what it is: a discovery and trust layer, not your checkout page. The smart setup is a link from a Bilibili video to your Tmall or JD store, or into a WeChat mini shop if you want to keep the customer in your own private domain rather than handing them to a marketplace algorithm. Brands that expect Bilibili to behave like Douyin’s shoppable feed usually end the quarter disappointed. Brands that use it to earn trust before the sale usually do not.
FAQ: WHAT CLIENTS ACTUALLY ASK US ABOUT BILIBILI
How much budget do I need to test Bilibili properly?
Enough for three to five mid-tier UP主 videos through Huahuo, plus a small Bihuo boost on whichever one performs. In practice that is a more modest test budget than a Douyin livestream campaign, because you are not paying for live inventory or heavy discounting. Six to eight weeks is enough to see whether your category has an audience here.
Do I need a Chinese business license to advertise on Bilibili?
For paid ad accounts and official brand pages, yes, you generally need a China-registered entity or an approved agency of record placing ads on your behalf. UP主 collaborations through Huahuo can sometimes run through an agency without your own license, which is one reason brands test the platform through a partner before setting up locally.
How long before I see results from a Bilibili campaign?
Views and danmu engagement show up within days. Branded search and off-platform sales lift usually take four to eight weeks to show clearly, because Bilibili’s role is building the recognition that pays off somewhere else. If you need a same-week sales spike, this is not your platform.
Can Bilibili replace Douyin or Xiaohongshu for my brand?
Rarely, and we would not recommend it. Bilibili builds understanding and trust for considered purchases; Douyin converts fast; Xiaohongshu gets checked before people buy. Most of our clients running all three run different content and different budgets on each, not the same video repurposed three ways.
GMA runs Bilibili campaigns end to end, from UP主 sourcing through Huahuo to briefs written for danmu culture instead of translated ad copy. We work this platform mainly with gaming, tech, 3C and younger-skewing beauty brands, because that is where it actually performs, not because we can sell it to anyone. If you want an honest read on whether your category fits Bilibili, our Bilibili marketing team can tell you within a week, not a quarter. Contact GMA to talk it through.
