Bilibili targeting more collaboration with e-commerce advertisers to drive growth at video-sharing platform
- Bilibili has Taobao Live adverts on its homepage, which allow users to jump directly to the shopping platform by clicking on the link
- Bilibili’s ads business pulled in 6.4 billion yuan for 2023, up 27 per cent year on year
China’s video-sharing platform Bilibili has added cross-platform links to Alibaba Group Holding’s online shopping platform Taobao in the latest attempt to pull in more revenue from its 100 million daily active users (DAUs).
Bilibili, which is still in the red since going public on Nasdaq in 2018, has posted Taobao Live adverts on its homepage, which allow users to jump directly to the shopping platform by clicking on the link. Alibaba owns the Post.
Last month, Bilibili also collaborated with Pinduoduo, allowing its users to move to the budget shopping platform by using coupons provided by PDD. Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com has also posted ads on Bilibili’s homepage, according to local media reports.
Bilibili’s shocking word of the year is what?
Bilibili narrowed its net loss by 36 per cent to 4.8 billion yuan (US$641 million) in 2023 from a year earlier, according to an earnings release last week. Net revenue was up 3 per cent to 22.5 billion yuan.
Bilibili’s ads business pulled in 6.4 billion yuan for the year, up 27 per cent, and the company attributed the growth mainly to improved “product offerings and enhanced advertising efficiency”.
Bilibili is popular among Chinese millennials and Gen Z, with DAUs exceeding 100 million in the fourth quarter of 2023. The daily time spent on the platform by users remains at over 95 minutes on average, said Rui Chen, chairman and chief executive officer of Bilibili, in an earnings call with analysts last Thursday.
The Shanghai-based platform wants to monetise those eyeballs via products and collaboration with e-commerce advertisers.
“Over the course of 2023, we deepened our collaboration with e-commerce advertisers. We further integrated direct sales conversion tools into our video and live commerce ad products,” said Sam Xin Fan, chief financial officer, on the same call.
Fan said deeper data collaboration with e-commerce platforms has improved the accuracy and efficiency of ad recommendation algorithms, with the number of users engaging in consumption-related behaviour increasing by over 200 per cent year-on-year in 2023.
Although Bilibili has evolved into one of China’s largest video platforms, it is still struggling to turn a profit. Fan added he saw “great potential” and “ample room for growth” in the advertising business in 2024, and Bilibili “would further integrate ads with our content ecosystem in a more native, natural and seamless way”.
Bilibili began hosting an annual anime-themed event in 2017 as a community for fans of Japanese cartoon and comic subculture. But amid the rising popularity of domestic anime-style games and increased scrutiny of foreign materials in recent years, Japanese-made content has faded from view at the event and been replaced by domestic material.
