On March 5, 2026, Bilibili delivered an answer sheet that gave the capital market a "sigh of relief."

For the first time, it achieved a "full-year profitable situation."

Behind these six words lies the long evolution of a 17-year-old internet company, transforming from a "niche anime site" to a "Gen Z cultural community" and then into a "comprehensive content platform." From burning money for growth to healthy profitability, Bilibili has finally crossed the breakeven line.

But does this mean it has completely escaped its difficulties? The answer may not be so simple.

Turning on the Green Light of Profitability

If 2024 marked a turning point for Bilibili to reduce losses, then 2025 was the true year of profitability.

In terms of revenue, Bilibili's total revenue in 2025 reached RMB 30.35 billion, up 13% year-on-year, maintaining a strong growth trajectory and successfully surpassing the RMB 30 billion mark. Behind this achievement lies the continuous investment and innovation in content ecosystem optimization, user base development, and commercialization exploration over the years.

From a GAAP net profit perspective, Bilibili achieved a profit of RMB 1.19 billion in 2025, a figure that signifies its complete departure from prolonged losses and represents a qualitative leap from quantitative growth.

For a long time, Bilibili has invested heavily in building a distinctive content community, including copyright procurement, creator incentives, and technological R&D, which put pressure on profits. The current profitability not only proves the effectiveness of Bilibili's business model but also demonstrates its ability to strike a good balance between cost control and revenue growth.

More critically, after adjustments, the net profit reached RMB 2.59 billion, with the profit margin rising to 8.5%, indicating a significant improvement in Bilibili's "hematopoietic" capabilities and providing more funds for future development.

Looking back a few years ago, Bilibili was generally perceived as loss-making and expanding its reach. Chen Rui, Chairman and CEO of Bilibili, also mentioned on several occasions that "profitability is not the primary consideration." During that period, Bilibili seemed like a teenager using investor funds to build its community without much thought about making money.

By 2025, Bilibili appeared to have changed its approach, no longer blindly pursuing extensive user growth but instead focusing on the "value" of users.

Three Major Businesses: A Tale of Two Extremes

As Bilibili achieves its profitability goals, its business structure is undergoing significant changes, no longer dominated solely by gaming.

1. Advertising Business: The "Profit Hero" of Qualitative Transformation

As the brightest spot in this financial report, Bilibili's advertising revenue reached RMB 10.06 billion in 2025, up 23% year-on-year, surpassing the RMB 10 billion mark for the first time and becoming Bilibili's largest growth engine.

Today, Bilibili has moved beyond the traditional model of selling traffic and instead sells "high-quality attention," which is its core advantage over other platforms. With users spending an average of over 107 minutes per day on the platform, demonstrating extremely high stickiness, this immersive attention is precisely what advertisers value most.

AI empowerment has further enhanced this advantage. The deep application of AI technology not only lowers the threshold for UP the Lord's (content creators) to produce advertising materials but also more precisely matches ads with user needs. In 2025, Bilibili's AI-related ad placements grew by over 150% year-on-year, leveraging technology to drive scalable growth in the advertising business. This aligns highly with the current industry trend of AIGC empowering marketing, making ad creation more efficient and placement more precise.

Moreover, the commercialization explosion of video podcasts (long-form videos) has become a bonus for the advertising business. By the end of 2025, Bilibili's video podcast users exceeded 67 million, with cumulative playback time surpassing 8 billion minutes, spawning multiple top-tier programs. For instance, La Mer's sponsored episode of "Chen Luyu's Talk with Zhang Xiaohui" garnered over 240 million exposures, with high-consumption individuals accounting for 60% of the audience. The podcast featuring Luo Yonghao and Li Xiang's conversation even boosted Li Auto's brand comprehensive index by approximately 30% year-on-year. This quantifiable brand value makes advertisers willing to pay a premium.

Currently, gaming, digital appliances, and automotive industries are the main advertisers on Bilibili. The qualitative transformation of the advertising business has completely shed Bilibili's label of "cheap traffic."

2. Gaming Business: Short-Term Pressure, Long-Term Potential

Compared to the smooth sailing of the advertising business, the gaming business is experiencing growing pains during its transition. In Q4 2025, gaming revenue declined by 14% year-on-year, facing significant short-term pressure.

This pressure mainly stems from two aspects: first, the high base effect from the previous year's "Three Kingdoms: Maneuvering the World," and second, the gap during the transition between old and new products, leading to revenue fluctuations due to the lack of blockbuster titles.

However, there is still hope behind the pain. Despite the Q4 decline, gaming revenue in 2025 still reached RMB 6.39 billion, up 14% year-on-year. Bilibili's self-developed game "Escape from Duckov" sold over 3 million copies, proving Bilibili's capabilities in independent game development and publishing. With new titles like "Three Kingdoms Hero Cards" entering the market, the gaming business is expected to gradually stabilize and return to growth.

CEO Chen Rui also stated that in 2026, Bilibili's gaming business will adhere to a "long-term operation" and "vertical category leadership" strategy, aiming to either dominate existing vertical categories or define new niche segments. By leveraging its deep understanding of young players, Bilibili will continue to create games that resonate with them.

3. Value-Added Services (VAS): The Steady "Ballast Stone"

As Bilibili's largest revenue source, value-added services reached RMB 11.93 billion in 2025, up 8% year-on-year. Although the growth rate lags behind advertising, its stability makes it the ballast stone of Bilibili's cash flow.

Its core supports are premium memberships and live streaming tips. By the end of Q4 2025, Bilibili's premium membership count reached 25.35 million, up 12% year-on-year, with approximately 80% being annual subscribers or auto-renewal users, demonstrating extremely high user payment stickiness. Meanwhile, the average monthly paying users throughout the year reached 35.66 million, up 21% year-on-year, with over 10 million users charging UP the Lord's and watching paid content. This bidirectional interaction between creators and users further solidifies the community ecosystem.

More critically, Bilibili's average user age has increased to 26-27 years old, entering a stage with greater spending power. This lays an important foundation for the sustained growth of value-added services.

With advertising surpassing RMB 10 billion as the leader, value-added services steadily surpassing RMB 10 billion as the foundation, and gaming under pressure but charge up (building momentum), Bilibili's new pattern (landscape) of "two steadies and one advance" has taken shape.

Slowing User Growth and Ecosystem Challenges

Despite Bilibili's impressive achievements in 2025, this financial report also reveals some underlying issues that cannot be ignored.

In terms of user growth, Bilibili is encountering the problem of gradually slowing growth rates. In 2025, Bilibili's daily active users (DAUs) and monthly active users (MAUs) growth rates declined to single digits. In Q4, MAUs reached 366 million, down 10 million from Q3's 376 million, falling short of the previously set target of 400 million MAUs.

How to enhance user activity among existing users while attracting new ones has become an urgent challenge for Bilibili.

In the realm of content ecosystem, Bilibili has recently seen a surge in "repost accounts" and "4K restoration" accounts, which repost non-original content such as film and television resources. Although this type of content has boosted platform activity in the short term, it may squeeze out the living space for original UP the Lord's in the long run, damaging Bilibili's proud original content ecosystem.

After all, high-quality original content is Bilibili's core competitiveness and the key to attracting users.

In terms of gaming business dependency, although Bilibili is striving to diversify its business, it still suffers from "blockbuster dependency." As mentioned earlier, "Three Kingdoms: Maneuvering the World" performed exceptionally well in 2024, making the gaming revenue in Q4 2025 appear relatively lackluster in comparison.

From relying on gaming for its early growth to still being affected by gaming fluctuations today, Bilibili's cyclical risk of "success through gaming, failure through gaming" has not been completely eliminated. How to get rid of (break free from) dependency on single blockbusters and achieve stable growth in the gaming business remains a challenge for Bilibili to overcome.

Difficulty in retaining users, mixed content quality, and challenging profitability—Bilibili's high-growth myth is facing severe tests.

Betting on AI and Overseas Expansion to Rebuild Growth Momentum

Facing these challenges, Bilibili has clarified its next strategic focus, emphasizing two key directions: "AI penetration" and "ecosystem cultivation."

On one hand, AI will be fully integrated into all aspects of Bilibili. Not only will ad placements be empowered by AI, but Bilibili is also incorporating large models into its commercial algorithms, with AI-related content in the community growing rapidly.

In Q4 2025, AI content playback time increased by 53% year-on-year, with over 120 million people consuming AI content monthly. AI has become a new growth driver for Bilibili's content ecosystem. Bilibili will also open up more search traffic and test native ads on video playback pages to make ad placements more natural and further improve conversion efficiency.

On the other hand, vigorously cultivating the community ecosystem and promoting creator prosperity has always been Bilibili's long-term commitment. CEO Chen Rui emphasized during the earnings call that Bilibili will continue to ensure the production of high-quality content and enable UP the Lord's to earn more commercial revenue, relying on creator prosperity to feed back into the community ecosystem.

In 2025, nearly 3 million creators on Bilibili earned income through multiple channels, with average income per creator increasing by 21% year-on-year. This model of benefiting creators, prospering the community, and achieving commercial closure will become Bilibili's core competitiveness.

Additionally, the expansion of gaming overseas business and the commercialization of video podcasts will also be future growth highlights for Bilibili, further expanding its revenue scope.

As AI becomes the new main battlefield for content growth, creators become the strong guardians of the ecosystem, and overseas expansion and podcasts explore new incremental spaces, Bilibili's second growth curve is taking shape.

Conclusion

Bilibili's 2025 financial report is a rational and pragmatic scorecard, proving the sustainability of its business model and its departure from mere growth through burning money.

Profitability is just the beginning. Issues such as plateauing user growth, gaming business fluctuations, and content ecosystem hidden danger (hidden risks) will not disappear on their own due to a single profitable year. Bilibili must find a balance between maintaining community atmosphere and pursuing commercial efficiency.

In any case, in 2025, Bilibili proved that it can make money. In 2026, it needs to prove that it can continue to make money.

This marathon has just begun. Let's wait and see.