Bilibili is not a mass-market platform in China, and it never will be. It is a niche. But it is a niche that spends money, watches for two hours a day, and forgives almost nothing. Nicknamed “B Site” (B站, B Zhàn), the Shanghai-based video platform built its base on anime and gaming and has since grown into something more useful for a specific kind of brand.
This post gives you the 2026 numbers, the audience profile that actually matters, and an honest answer to the only question worth asking: is Bilibili worth your budget, or not?
Written by Olivier Verot, founder of GMA. I have lived in Shanghai since 2012 and my team has run Bilibili campaigns for gaming hardware, industrial tech and education clients, including several that we later pulled off the platform because the audience fit was wrong. Both outcomes taught me something.
What Bilibili actually is
In short, Bilibili is a video platform built around long-form content, live streams, and gaming. In many ways it looks like YouTube. The difference is the community layer sitting on top of it.
Bilibili’s success owes a lot to its “bullet comments” feature (弹幕, danmu), which lets users post short messages that fly across the screen at a specific second of the video. Watching becomes a shared event. People react to the same frame together, years apart. No Western platform has an exact equivalent, and it changes how content is made for it.
Users can buy virtual items, tip creators, and buy from creator shops. Attention on Bilibili is measured in coins, favorites and “charging” subscriptions, not just views.
Bilibili in numbers, Q1 2026
Here is where the old version of this article was wrong, and where most English-language guides still are. Bilibili is no longer a teenage platform, and the “300 million users locked at home” story from the pandemic years is dead. The current figures come from the company’s own first quarter 2026 results, published on 19 May 2026.
| Metric | Q1 2026 | Movement |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly active users | 376 million | Plateau, growth now comes from time spent |
| Daily active users | 115 million | +8% year on year |
| Average daily time per user | 119 minutes | +11 minutes year on year, company record |
| Total user time on platform | n/a | +19% year on year |
| Advertising revenue | RMB 2.59 billion (USD 375.3 million) | +30% year on year, 13th straight quarter of double-digit growth |
| Total quarterly revenue | RMB 7.47 billion | +7% year on year |
| Revenue mix | 39% value-added services, 35% ads, 20% games, 6% IP goods | Ads now the second pillar |
| Creators with 1,000+ followers | n/a | +30% year on year |
| Average creator income | n/a | +24% year on year |
Read the two lines that matter together. User count is flat. Time spent is up 19%. That means Bilibili has stopped recruiting and started deepening. For an advertiser, a flat audience with rising attention is often better than a growing audience with falling attention, because you can buy the same people repeatedly and they will actually watch.
The ad revenue breakdown is the tell. Per Chinese coverage of the results, the top five spending categories are games, internet services, consumer electronics, e-commerce and automotive. Home and interior renovation advertising grew 130% year on year off a small base. Notice what is absent from that list: mass cosmetics, packaged food, beverages, fast fashion.
Who is actually on Bilibili in 2026
The core user is now 26 to 27 years old. Not 19. That cohort joined at university around 2017 to 2019 and never left. They now have salaries, apartments and car loans, which is precisely why consumer electronics and automotive advertising works there.
The profile in one line: young adult, urban, educated, tier 1 and new tier 1 cities as the core with tier 2 and 3 as the growing middle. Strong affinity for ACG (anime, comics, games), video games, technology, DIY, science and self-education. This audience researches before it buys and it reads the comment section as a fact-check.
The 100-question entry test, and why it should change your brief
To become an official member (正式会员) on Bilibili, a user has to pass an exam of 100 questions and answer at least 60 correctly. The questions cover community rules on uploading and posting bullet comments, plus interest topics: anime, music, film, technology, internet culture. Only then can they post comments and upload freely. Wikipedia’s entry on Bilibili documents the system and its history.
This is not trivia. It is the single most important thing a foreign marketer needs to understand about the platform. Bilibili put a barrier at the door on purpose. The people inside passed a test to be there. They see themselves as members of a community, not as an audience. A brand that arrives with a translated TV spot and a hard call to action gets treated as an intruder, and the bullet comments will say so in real time, on screen, forever.
I have watched a launch screen ad get buried under danmu mocking it within an hour. The media spend was real. The damage was also real. On Bilibili, a bad creative does not just underperform. It gets archived and ridiculed.
Creating an account
The platform is only available in Chinese. Like other Chinese platforms, Bilibili needs a phone number to open an account. Unlike most of them, it accepts numbers from outside mainland China.
You confirm identity by uploading a photo of yourself holding your ID. Again, Bilibili accepts identification issued by another country, which is rare.
A business or creator account takes more steps. It is worth the paperwork: verified accounts rank higher in on-platform search and get access to partnership tools. Budget two to four weeks for the process if you are a foreign entity without a Chinese legal presence.
The UP主 system and the internal currency
Creators on Bilibili are called UP主 (UP zhu, “uploaders”). They are not influencers in the Douyin sense. Many are hobbyists with real jobs, and their credibility comes from depth, not from posting frequency.
Bilibili runs an internal reward currency, coins (硬币). Users get a small daily allowance and spend it on videos they rate highly. Giving a coin costs the user something, unlike a like. The algorithm weights coins heavily, alongside favorites, shares and bullet comments. There is also 充电, a direct paying subscription to a creator. Monthly paying subscribers grew 40% year on year in Q1 2026.
What this means for a brand: you cannot buy your way to the top of the feed. Coins and charging come from viewers who value the content itself. If your sponsored video is worth watching, the community pushes it. If it is not, paid distribution alone will not save it.
The format advantage: long video that explains
Douyin sells impulse. Bilibili sells understanding. Videos of 10 to 25 minutes are normal and get finished. That is the whole reason Bilibili exists as a marketing channel.
If your product needs explaining, this is your platform. Machine tools. Lab equipment. Audio gear. Software. Cameras. Skincare with an actual mechanism. Medical devices. Language courses and study-abroad services. Anything where a buyer wants to see it taken apart before spending money.
These long videos also age well. A teardown from 2024 still ranks in Bilibili search and still gets coins in 2026. Compare that with short video content that dies in 48 hours. It is closer to SEO than to social.
Who should not be on Bilibili
I will be blunt, because agencies rarely are.
If you sell mass-market cosmetics, your money belongs on Xiaohongshu search and on Douyin, not here. Same for packaged food, soft drinks, snacks, everyday fashion, household cleaning products. Bilibili’s audience skews male on the tech and gaming side, purchase intent is slow, and there is no strong in-app conversion path for low-consideration goods. You will get views. You will not get sales, and you will spend six months learning that.
Bilibili is worth it when three things are true at once: your product needs more than 30 seconds to explain, your buyer is under 35 and urban, and you can accept a payback window measured in quarters rather than weeks. If two of the three are false, spend elsewhere.
Case study: Tomas, Spanish audio equipment brand
Tomas runs a Spanish studio monitor and headphone brand. Strong in Europe, invisible in China. He came to us after 11 months on Douyin with RMB 480,000 spent and 37 units sold through a Douyin store. His products retail between RMB 2,900 and RMB 7,500. Short video was showing them to people who would never spend that on speakers.
What had failed: 15-second product cuts, three livestream sessions with a general lifestyle host, and a price promotion that only attracted people waiting for a bigger one. The format gave buyers no way to hear the difference or understand the engineering.
What we did instead. Six sponsored long videos with mid-tier Bilibili audio and music-production UP主 in the 80,000 to 400,000 follower range, each 14 to 22 minutes, each including a blind comparison against two competitor models. We wrote no script. We gave the creators the products, the technical documentation and the freedom to criticise. Two of the six videos said the mid-range unit was overpriced. We left those comments in.
That is why it worked. The community reads criticism as proof of independence. The bullet comments turned into an argument about driver design instead of an argument about advertising. We paired the videos with a WeChat Official Account and a customer service agent handling technical questions, so the traffic that left Bilibili had somewhere to land.
Result over seven months: 1.9 million cumulative views, 214 units sold at full price, average order value RMB 4,100, and a cost per acquisition of RMB 1,340 against a RMB 2,800 gross margin per unit. Slower than Tomas wanted. Profitable, which Douyin never was for him.
Tips that still hold in 2026
Design for the bullet comments
On YouTube a viewer comments after watching. On Bilibili they react to the exact second. Build moments into your video that invite a reaction: a reveal, a surprising measurement, an in-joke. Creators plan these deliberately. Brands almost never do.
Verify early
The earlier you verify, the more exposure you get. A verified badge also reads as legitimacy to an audience that is suspicious by default. Verification eligibility for foreign companies changes, so check current rules before you promise a client a timeline.
Put a real person from the audience on the project
If you want content that lands with this crowd, have someone from it on the team. Not as a consultant at the end. In the room when the idea is formed. The difference between insider and outsider language on Bilibili is visible within one sentence.
Use the ad formats, but not alone
Launch screen ads and in-feed video ads work for awareness and let you open a landing page inside the app, which matters because apps take far more screen time than mobile browsers in China. Paid alone converts badly here. Paid behind a credible creator partnership converts.
Feed the AI search engines while you are at it
Bilibili video transcripts and their comment threads are indexed and increasingly surface inside Chinese AI assistants. When a buyer asks DeepSeek or Doubao which studio monitor to buy, the model answers from text it has ingested, and detailed Bilibili reviews are exactly that kind of text. Naming your model numbers and specifications explicitly in video descriptions and pinned comments is a cheap way to appear in those answers. This is the same logic as generative engine optimization in China, applied to video.
FAQ
How much does a Bilibili campaign cost to start?
A serious test needs four to six sponsored videos with mid-tier UP主, which typically lands between RMB 150,000 and RMB 400,000 depending on category and creator size. Add media amplification on top. Anything under RMB 100,000 buys you one video and no data. If that number is uncomfortable, the platform is not your priority right now.
Can I sell directly on Bilibili?
You can, through creator shops and links out to Taobao or JD, but it is not where Bilibili is strongest. Treat the platform as the place where the buying decision is made and another channel as the place where the transaction happens. Most of our clients push traffic to WeChat or to a Tmall store and accept the attribution gap.
Is Bilibili still just for anime fans?
No. ACG is the foundation and still sets the community tone, but the fastest-growing content categories in 2026 are AI, cars, technology reviews, podcasts and daily life. The core user is 26 to 27 with disposable income. That said, the anime-native culture never went away, and content that ignores it reads as corporate.
How long before we see results?
Plan for six months minimum. Bilibili videos accumulate views for a year or more, so early reporting will understate performance. Judging a campaign at week four is the most common mistake foreign brands make here, and it is why several of them quit just before the content started working.
Working with GMA on Bilibili
We run Bilibili campaigns for brands whose products need explaining: hardware, audio, gaming, industrial tech, education. We source and brief UP主, handle account verification for foreign entities, and connect the platform to WeChat or e-commerce so the traffic converts somewhere.
We also tell clients when Bilibili is the wrong channel for them. That conversation is free and saves more money than most campaigns make.
If you want a straight assessment of whether your product fits this audience, get in touch and we will look at your category and your price point before talking about budget.
Olivier Verot, founder of GMA, Shanghai. LinkedIn
