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Critical moment, the first time to arrive!

Li Ruchao, Deep Net Reporting Team

 

B station seeks to appear on the market rumors, soon with the video website profit curse linked together.

 

However, a financial estimate obtained by Shennet from investors shows that in the four months from January to April this year, B station made a profit of 98.54 million yuan on revenue of 729.2 million yuan. Among them, the revenue of game agency + intermodal transportation reached 641 million yuan, up 267% year on year, accounting for 95% of the total revenue.

 

This is very different from the income composition of ordinary video websites.

 

In fact, Site B has never been, and never wanted to be, a real video site. In the cost and expense composition of STATION B, the game cost still accounts for the largest proportion; As for content cost, a category that ordinary video websites tend to take up a large proportion and which is growing at a considerable rate, B’s proportion in the data for the first four months of this year did not increase but decreased, from 12.8% last year to 8.8%.

 

In contrast, the content cost of IQiyi reached 7.864 billion yuan in 2016, accounting for 56% of the total cost, with a year-on-year growth rate of 121.7%.

 

Chen Rui, chairman of B-site, told Shenzhen.com that b-site’s copyright spending did not double even after many video sites joined the army to snatch Japanese animated series. Not only that, up to now, the copyright purchased by B website still remains in the category of animation, and for self-made dramas that mainstream video websites attach great importance to, Chen Rui told Shenzhen.com that he had no idea.

 

Obviously, site B cannot be applied to any existing model of video sites; It also seems inappropriate to classify it as a game company.

 

A senior manager of a video website has reluctantly admitted to Shenzhen.com that in the field of two-dimension, each company will face a dilemma: even if they spend money to buy another drama, users will still return to B station after watching it. In the ecosystem of SITE B, users spontaneously produce content such as bullets, comments and even videos and interact with each other, which seems to be like a social networking site.

 

Video, games and social networking are intertwined in the ecosystem of STATION B. How to clarify the relationship between them is of great importance.

Why say B station does not calculate video website?

The traditional video website has almost never jumped out of the category of buying content with users —– whether it is to buy drama to attract users by flow cash, or to buy drama to attract users to top up members, the logic of the video website has not undergone essential changes; Since user import almost all comes from the content itself, people follow the play, and it is difficult to obtain qualitative improvement of user engagement.

This chronic disease, which has been unsolvable for many years, is quite different from the current situation of B station. According to aurora’s big Data report, around the time of B station’s mass removal of movies and TV series in mid-July, the daily new users of its mobile terminal increased rather than decreased, with the monthly active users increasing by 40.1% compared with February. The reason lies in the flow source of B station itself, which is not the so-called “big drama”.

 

Deep Net learned that the CURRENT PGC video of UP station B contributed about 70% of the broadcast volume of the whole station. Chen Rui even said that movies and TV series have never been the mainstream content of B station. “If you pay attention to the interface of B station, you should find that if you don’t look hard, you can’t find the content of movies and TV series.”

 

Content that is classified as the long tail of ordinary video sites is the absolute head of B sites. According to the “6-year data” released by STATION B, online and daily life areas occupied the top two spots in the total play volume, while the serial animation area just topped the top three spots, accounting for only 9% of the total play volume. In addition, covers, MAD, the livestock area also won a lot of airplay.

 

This series of important sections, all directly related to the pan-quadratic culture, together constitute the unique content ecology of B station.

 

However, richness is only part of the story. The content such as bullets and comments produced spontaneously by users in the same circle, as well as screening behaviors such as collecting and “throwing coins”, make the community atmosphere of STATION B quite strong.

 

This puts content producers in a virtuous circle. “Where the users are, the creators are. If all the users are here, the creators will come to us first and not to other platforms to create content,” Chen said.

 

In the end, this atmosphere has formed the unique culture of STATION B and become the real core competitiveness of Station B. As long as B station can maintain this spontaneously formed atmosphere through community operation, B station will have user loyalty that is difficult for general video websites to achieve.

 

Under this logic, the behaviors of some video websites need to be reshaped in station B. Take the video website keen to “grab copyright” for example, B station COO Li Ni said that since 2014, B station has not paid special attention to grab exclusive, “we have never been exclusive or not exclusive concept, as long as there is good content users can watch.”

 

Even weirder is the “big member” launched by STATION B. This is considered to be the behavior was B station’s attempt to “pay for content” level, but until now, the main functions of the “big member” is still comment has expression, space autonomous figure, limited to hang free “chicken ribs” functions such as — — — — — — — to pay for content “membership” may be even more should be attributed to the social field, its itself is also more close to the nature of the QQ member.

The boundary of station B

And the rapid development of the game business is to enjoy this unique culture plus.

 

In The opinion of Chen Rui, the game business of B station is fundamentally different from that of other platforms. “We do not make games as a means of realization, but as content. In other words, our operation of games is the same as our operation of videos.”

 

As the game themes chosen by station B are mostly quadratic meta-games, no matter Fate/Grand Order or Blue Flight, they obviously overlap with the interest points of users of station B.

 

Just like the linkage between each version of station B, the game also acts as a module operated by the community and becomes a part of the linkage —— that is, after users watch the animation, they want to play games similar to the animation. After meeting this demand, the user’s overall loyalty to the community can be improved.

 

Even if the purpose is not to divert, the result is that station B is virtually an efficient diversion platform. According to financial data, the revenue of game agency + intermodal transportation at STATION B was only 100 million yuan in 2015, but it reached 524 million yuan in 2016, with a growth rate of 423%.

 

Products with community attributes often have the potential to become platform – level entry products. And the game, has won the first battle.

 

But for the rest of the exploration, Station B was cautious. In 2014, station B established the Tourism Division to launch customized travel products in Japan and established the brand Bilibiliyoo. But after more than a year of development, the whole project was split from STATION B.

 

The Bilibiliyoo entrance was removed from the main B station a month before the split, a source told Deepnet. Since then, Bilibiliyoo, renamed “Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, has completely lost the diversion of station B, and the relevant data has declined significantly.

 

The only monetisation project that has taken shape outside of gaming is pretty much live streaming, and that doesn’t seem to be going well either. A senior executive of a competing product company of B station live once told Shennet that the audience of B station live is not large, and the ceiling of B station live is the APP itself. This congenital deficiency determines that B station live broadcast cannot enter the ranks of mainstream platforms.

 

In fact, after experiencing rapid development in the early stage from 2015 to 2016, B station live broadcasting has entered a period of stable development with a growth rate of about 20%, far less than the game business which is still doubling. Its share of total station B revenues has most likely never crossed the 10 per cent red line.

 

It can be foreseen that in the short term game agent + combined transport is still the absolute main force of B station revenue. One investor told Deepnet that Site B should be afraid of the impact of the product on the tone of the whole community, after all, secondary users themselves are “more difficult to serve” than the mainstream user group.

 

“It can be seen that Chen Rui is very cautious about the boundary of STATION B. Although station B may become a platform product, it is still too early to make an assertion.”

 

The struggle to maintain

Due to the slowness of commercial realization, it is not a good choice for B to log in the capital market at present. Since 2015, Chen Rui has been completely silent at the capital level of STATION B.

 

A source told Shenzhen.com that it is unwise to conduct large-scale capital operations for B station, which has achieved preliminary break-even. “B station has not been funded since 2015, and investors inside and outside may have some ideas, so they released the news of going public.”

 

At present, the whole operation idea of B station is still to explore how to maintain community culture and consolidate the foundation of B station.

 

No matter it is video, game or live broadcast, all business of STATION B should serve this purpose. This makes STATION B do a lot of behaviors that are against normal business logic at first sight.

 

“Station B does not give priority to traffic in terms of operation, and many operation methods even reverse traffic.” Chen Rui told Shenzhen.com that station B’s promotion of UP’s original works often does not have a positive impact on traffic, but is out of tonality and encouragement. For new users, B station even put out 100 questions in front of new users, to become a full member.

 

This may reflect some anxiety of B station: with the influx of more and more users, the original small circle culture is likely to be diluted in the flow tide; And the loss of this atmosphere brought by the high loyalty of the addition, B station is the same as ordinary video sites.

 

For this reason, station B is also very careful about the fine operation of bullet screen: not only does it prohibit tourists from Posting bullet screen, but also introduces various mechanisms such as little black room and arbitration center for bullet screen treatment.

 

This is not an idle concern. An insider of WEBSITE B told Shenzhen.com that at the beginning of website B’s “popularity”, the second element group of the whole website was diluted unprecedentedly, but fortunately there was no open registration at that time, and the speakers were still the core second element group, so the community atmosphere was not affected too much.

 

Such extreme strictness to new users gained precious time for B station to deal with the integration of new groups. An old user of SITE B told Shennet that the overall atmosphere of site B has changed a lot in recent years. If such a change occurs suddenly, site B may face serious user loss. However, when the time period is extended over several years and the old and new cultures merge, the results will be much more moderate.

 

Even so, with the rapid expansion of the user group, B station has formed an obvious user stratification. The core quadratic group who are keen on animation and the pan-quadratic group who are keen on entertainment music and other videos gather at station B at the same time. Given the exclusivity of clique culture, friction is inevitable.

 

How to deal with the further integration of these two groups while increasing the user base will be a big test for B station.

 

However, it is worth mentioning that with the decline of station A, almost no similar websites exist in China —–, which makes station B still become the first choice of quadratic and pan-quadratic groups in the short term. In terms of content, B station has indeed formed a false dimension competition with mainstream video websites by playing culture card. In the short term, it is still difficult for the latter to steal core users from B station.

Undoubtedly, this gives Chen more room to explore the balance between business and community.

Operations Editor/Chuyi Gao

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