Written by | Wen Yehao

Edited by | Wu Xianzhi

"Join Bilibili and celebrate the Spring Festival Gala with 300 million young hearts."

On January 9, 2025, this captivating slogan graced Bilibili's homepage, instantly igniting excitement across its vibrant community.

Reports indicate that Bilibili has forged a landmark partnership with China Media Group for the 2025 Spring Festival Gala. The platform will broadcast CCTV's iconic event in real-time on New Year's Eve, solidifying its position as the exclusive danmaku video platform for the Gala.

From its origins as a niche community of meme videos and anime 15 years ago, Bilibili has evolved into a content powerhouse, now sharing the spotlight with the Spring Festival Gala. This stride marks a significant milestone, yet questions remain about whether Bilibili can strengthen its foundations post-collaboration.

In recent years, securing broadcast rights to the Spring Festival Gala has become a fiercely contested battle among internet giants, with platforms like Tencent Video, iQIYI, Douyin, and Kuaishou all vying for this prestigious content. Bilibili's entrance, however, brings a fresh breeze to the Gala with its high-profile move.

Notably, nearly all internet players pursue collaborations with the Spring Festival Gala to attract users and expand their reach, a common narrative in industry media. The partnership between Bilibili and CCTV's Gala is particularly intriguing—while undoubtedly aiming to broaden its audience, it also underscores Bilibili's strong desire to transform and educate its existing user base.

More subtly, the role of the Spring Festival Gala in the eyes of internet players is evolving. Today, the Gala's significance extends beyond mere traffic competition; it has become integral to content and commercial strategy.

Aiming for Broader Horizons?

During the Spring Festival season, the Gala stands as an indispensable topic in marketing.

First, as a colossal traffic magnet, the Gala reaches an unprecedented audience worldwide, uniting people in remote towns and cities alike to gather around the TV on New Year's Eve. This universal appeal offers an unparalleled opportunity for players to expand their horizons.

Second, backed by CCTV, the Gala carries an inherent "authority label," ensuring deep psychological penetration across China.

Historical examples abound: in 1995, Guizhou Changshou Changle Group's sponsorship of the Gala's 8 PM countdown propelled its medicinal liquor to fame, briefly surpassing Moutai in price. Meidi, a frequent sponsor of the midnight countdown, shone alongside China's burgeoning home appliance industry. And in 2015, with the rise of mobile internet, integrations like WeChat's "Shake It" and "Collecting Five Blessings" created shared memories, spawning numerous internet marketing classics.

Thus, one of the Gala's greatest values lies in its catalytic effect—when a brand hits a growth plateau due to category or audience limitations, the Gala becomes a "fission engine" to break barriers and activate potential users. This could be precisely the breakthrough Bilibili seeks.

All internet platforms face the ultimate challenge of "breaking out of the circle," or expanding from niche user groups to broader audiences. Bilibili, initially an "anime" community, gradually introduced knowledge content, film and television shows, sports events, and more, successfully broadening its reach.

However, this expansion primarily targeted "a handful of young people" to "a large group of young people." Compared to other content platforms, Bilibili's user base remains narrow. While once dominant in vertical fields, its niche advantage is diluting as it accelerates its outreach and introduces new formats like vertical short videos.

Financial reports reveal that in Q3 2024, Bilibili's monthly active users hit a record 348 million, still short of Chen Rui's 2023 goal of 400 million. Additionally, monthly active user growth slowed to 2%, suggesting the platform's expansion is nearing its ceiling.

Against this backdrop, the Spring Festival Gala, as a top-tier cross-circle communication platform, presents a "golden opportunity" for Bilibili to leap to a broader user base. For most internet players, the Gala remains an untapped goldmine; for Bilibili, while valuable for outreach, it also poses significant challenges in achieving compatibility and maximizing its potential.

Currently, Bilibili's young user base holds a dominant position, with "youthfulness" bringing diminishing marginal growth effects. Each new young user contributes less growth potential—Bilibili remains the platform of the youth, but relying solely on them is insufficient for sustained growth. To achieve further expansion, Bilibili must attract users from other age groups.

The Spring Festival Gala may offer implantation opportunities. For instance, embedding the platform logo in Gala sketches' props, as Xiaohongshu did, could enhance familiarity. Alternatively, leveraging existing young users to "bring the small to the big" on New Year's Eve could draw in elders. However, Bilibili's underserved middle-aged and elderly users face a content tone gap, posing a significant challenge in marketing effectiveness.

Shifting perspectives and transforming quantitative growth into qualitative growth may offer deeper insights into Bilibili's bet on CCTV's Spring Festival Gala.

Reluctant to Let Go of Live Streaming

As a content platform, Bilibili's content demand is dynamic, closely tied to users' actual needs. The current slowing growth rate reflects the typical content ecosystem transition from "traffic dividends" to "content supply."

Many non-native Bilibili users contribute to monthly active users but often perceive the platform solely through anime or specific vertical fields, lacking a comprehensive understanding of its content ecosystem. They might watch postgraduate entrance exam resources on Bilibili but prefer Douyin for daily video browsing or use Bilibili's movie reviews as "meal companions" without engaging in live streams.

Xiaohongshu, a similar content community, surpasses Bilibili in daily active users despite lower monthly active users, reflecting a user stickiness difference. Bilibili needs to draw users into more content consumption scenarios, boosting user activity and stickiness through high-quality content.

In September 2024, Lu Fanxi, Bilibili's former vice president, resigned. Media reports suggested that, besides personal health reasons, Lu hoped to explore more content forms, while Bilibili adhered to a "high-quality strategy."

As Bilibili nears internal content operation bottlenecks, external impetus is crucial for stimulation. However, a scattershot approach is costly and unrealistic for a platform that recently achieved profitability through blockbuster games. The Spring Festival Gala, as a cross-group, emotionally connected bond, plays this role of unifying strength.

Yet, the Gala's broad coverage transcends specific content areas, and its strong timeliness means Bilibili's focus isn't purely on content but on its presentation form. The user acquisition from the Gala's "super symbol" is one aspect; the other is leveraging the Gala's "explosive power" to pave the way for platform content format transformation.

Live streaming is likely to bear this overwhelming exposure.

For Bilibili, live streaming is intrinsically linked to commercialization, and without a live streaming mindset, significant commercial transformations are difficult.

While Bilibili achieved growth through the mid-year "Three Kingdoms: Strategic Domination" game, the game's lifecycle determines long-term stable revenue is challenging, regardless of operational efforts. Game companies often replicate "blockbusters," but as a platform with weaker gaming genes, Bilibili relies on external factors, lacking full control.

Relying solely on games entails high uncertainty risks, and Bilibili's content community attribute complicates user scale conversion into sustainable profit models. Thus, finding a user-bound business for monetization is urgent.

Despite early live streaming growth dividends waning and macroeconomic effects, Bilibili's live streaming reward growth struggled last year. However, this doesn't diminish live streaming's strategic importance.

Taking e-commerce as an example, Bilibili's current strategy promotes the "open-loop" model, with shopping content divided into video and live streaming. However, development shows a clear imbalance—video shopping is maturing, while live streaming shopping, despite successes like "Baojian Shao" and "Yingwuli," remains thin overall.

Chen Rui, Bilibili's chairman and CEO, mentioned in the year's initial financial report meeting that 2024's focus is on "enhancing live streaming business operations' quality." To this end, Bilibili launched the "Bi star" live streaming shopping recruitment plan, customizing incentives for eligible UP masters. It also introduced the "Taobao Seckill" certified account to further promote live streaming shopping.

As a late live streaming entrant, Bilibili faces challenges—lacking Douyin and Kuaishou's rich content supply and huge audience, or Douyu and Huya's vertical field dominance. Most users still perceive Bilibili as a video platform, struggling to form a live streaming mindset despite watching elsewhere.

This isn't unique to Bilibili. Few platforms can flexibly switch content forms. Even though many platforms have undergone videoization, communities like Tieba still prioritize text, and Xiaohongshu's notes are mostly images and text.

To address this, Bilibili has purchased esports and football match rights, opening "watching together" links for UP masters, transforming passive viewing into interactive experiences. While somewhat effective, this hasn't brought revolutionary changes.

However, compared to niche content like esports, football matches, and tech launches, the Spring Festival Gala, as a "nuclear explosive" event, is better positioned to ignite live streaming potential. Bilibili will customize new interactive and viewing functions for the Gala's live stream, with renowned UP masters watching together potentially becoming a gameplay option.

Thus, for Bilibili, partnering with the Spring Festival Gala is not just a mainstreaming attempt but a critical moment to detonate the "depth charge" of live streaming, implanting it deeply into users' minds.

Can Bilibili make young people fall in love with the Spring Festival Gala? The platform bears great responsibility in finding out.

Since its official inception in 1983, the Spring Festival Gala has accompanied several generations of Chinese people over 42 New Year's Eves. For this "middle-aged" Gala, bridging generational gaps and fostering deeper connections with younger audiences has been a focal point of discussion in recent years.

While program formats and cast selections are undeniably crucial in engaging younger viewers, the Spring Festival Gala, as a comprehensive entertainment event catering to both young and old, may not always align perfectly with the tastes and aesthetics of younger demographics at the content level. Furthermore, as a highly influential content IP, the Gala's full potential in the digital age remains untapped.

On one hand, past collaborations with internet platforms, such as red envelope interactions, have been more utilitarian, leaving room for enhanced content integration. On the other hand, despite the 2024 Spring Festival Gala generating buzz with trending topics like "Liu Qian's Magic", "Xiaoni's Gaffe", and "Re-employed Boy Band" trending on Weibo, user engagement was still delayed, failing to achieve genuine real-time feedback.

Therefore, the partnership between Bilibili and the Spring Festival Gala signifies a format innovation in live streaming. However, before this, Bilibili must ensure a seamless integration of the Gala into its content ecosystem.

Examining Bilibili's collaboration with the Spring Festival Gala, the label of "exclusive danmaku video platform" underscores a key aspect: Bilibili's live broadcast is not a linear, one-way experience but rather interactive, featuring danmaku (user comments that scroll across the screen). The retention of live streaming danmaku transforms it into an integral part of the "Bilibili version of the Spring Festival Gala" – potentially more appealing to younger audiences due to its communal nature. Consequently, when news of the collaboration broke, some netizens quipped on social media: "The danmaku might even steal the show."

Moreover, acquiring the Spring Festival Gala's copyright opens up opportunities for user-generated content (UGC) and secondary creations. Each danmaku and fan work represents countless young users reinterpreting and deconstructing the Gala content from their unique perspectives, fostering broader discussions within and beyond the community. In this role as a "danmaku co-creator," Bilibili bears significant responsibility, not only for captivating young audiences with the Gala but also for its own platform.

This may explain why the Spring Festival Gala chose to partner with Bilibili, posing a challenging yet rewarding opportunity. For Bilibili, leveraging this collaboration with the Gala to deliver an impressive and flawless performance, maximizing its value through innovative content and gameplay, is paramount.

Ultimately, the marketing buzz around the Spring Festival Gala will undoubtedly persist. However, for platforms hosting the event, beyond leveraging traffic for growth, delving deeper into the Gala's potential and exploring new gameplay strategies merits serious consideration.