Bilbili, a Chinese video streaming platform known for its content targeting younger audiences, booked a wider net loss for the third quarter due to high content cost and  excessive business expansion.

Detail:

The Shanghai-based company booked a better-than-expected revenue of CNY5.2 billion for the third quarter, but net losses widened to CNY2.7 billion compared with net loss of CNY1.1 billion for the corresponding period of last year.

Bilibili reported a 35 per cent rise in monthly average users (MAUs) to 267.2 million. Mobile MAUs rose 36 per cent to 249.9 million.

Bilibili blamed the widened loss to the high cost for its marketing, branding and research and development.

User mostly associate Bilibili with cartoons and comics, but since the middle of last year, Bilibili has been expanding into more serious content verticals like lifestyle and technology. Increasingly, the parallel with YouTube is getting more vivid.

China’s livestreaming sector has been dealing with a tighter regulatory landscape since October last year as the country’s regulators vowed to clean up irregular activities and chaos in the sector.

In August, China’s Ministry of Commerce outlined proposals for an industry standard for live-streaming industry, in which the authority detailed the guidance about how live-streamers should dress or speak in front of the camera,

Under the draft rules, platforms need to manage live-streamers to dress properly, products such as sex toys, medicines, spy devices can no longer be sold in these live-streaming sessions.

China also wants to build a credit system for live-streamers, merchants, and agencies based on their e-commerce sales records. The credit information will be shared across platforms and regulators, live streamers who sell fake products will be banned by the platforms.

Teenagers under 16 will no longer be allowed to live-stream and live-streamers should speak Mandarin when they host live-streaming sessions.

Context:

Bilibili is no longer just a niche platform that focus on vertical market- anime, comics, and games (ACG). It now covers a wide range of contents, including fashion, lifestyle, beauty, music and technology.

The platform also made efforts to diversify its revenue stream, mobile games only accounted for 26.7 percent of its third-quarter revenue, compared with more than 80% contributed by mobile game a year ago.

Bilbili is also seeking for new opportunities from Metaverse as games has long been the backbone of Metaverse and its online games business can offer access to the emerging tech trend.  

During the earnings call on Wednesday, CEO Chen Rui said his company has great potential to develop the metaverse concept, signaling Bilibili could join peers such as Tencent, NetEase to develop its own metaverse.