Station B terminates its decision to completely cancel the display of playback data

Yesterday, Bilibili announced the termination of its decision to completely cancel the display of playback data. A year has passed from the announcement to the cancellation. What was the reason for Bilibili to make this decision?

Station B still hasn't made up its mind to challenge the entire industry and take that decisive action.

On May 22, Fang Fang, head of B Station’s community and product management, responded under a video discussing playback time: B Station officially decided to cancel the revision of the external playback time indicator.

The response mentioned that the functional revision was too idealistic and overconfident, creating something that needed to be accepted and understood by the outside world.

Before Bilibili, there was no platform or product in the world that measured usage by duration.

The person in charge also promised in his response that he would continue to improve B station products and report the progress of product improvements to users on a regular basis.

It has been almost a year since B Station announced the decision to change the display of playback volume (VV) to total playback time (VT). Earlier, the Zhiwei editorial department had already learned that the grayscale test had been launched.

In other words, it took B station more than a year from conception to research and testing.

At that time, the outside world generally believed that the total playback time was the data that showed the advantages of high-quality medium and long videos. B Station, which has the best UGC content ecosystem in China, matched "more suitable" data, which was conducive to maximizing the commercial potential of its content. But is it really so?

From a technical point of view, the calculation and presentation of data is not difficult. Someone from Bilibili mentioned that in addition to spending some effort on tracing back video data from earlier periods, some UP hosts have been able to see the VT data of their videos in the background since the second half of last year.

Making such a decision at this time, to some extent, reflects the change in B Station's mentality.

When calling for the transition from VV to VT, Bilibili was confident in its own voice, believing that data could be reshaped and quickly accepted, making VT a standard for measuring high-quality videos recognized by the outside world, especially brands, in a short period of time.

But the overall environment has changed.

In 2024, continuing to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and accelerating the commercialization process are the top priorities set by Station B. This means that Station B this year urgently needs to prove to the market that Station B can make money, and the UP masters who grow here can also make money. However, the VV to VT conversion actually brings a black box full of uncertainty to short-term commercialization, and it is difficult to prove that it is a truly effective benefit.

A UP host told Zhiwei that during the grayscale test period, the background could display VT data, and the team had handed the data to Party A to prove the quality of the video. Party A also checked the VT data of the past, but the subsequent reaction was relatively flat, "They still care more about the number of views and other interactive data, as well as those rankings."

For a long time, the granularity of B Station’s post-investment data has been coarser than that of other content platforms, which reflects the weakness of B Station’s commercial infrastructure.

But the amazing thing is that brands and agents seem to be generally accustomed to this kind of cognition. "Some brands will look for third-party data platforms to monitor the data of Bilibili, while others pay special attention to the comments in the comment section and the frequency of mentions of the brand name to measure reputation and cognition."

After experiencing the "blind investment" of recognizing the logic of "platform for young people to gather" and the chaos of not knowing how to evaluate the post-investment effect of Bilibili, brands seem to have entered a new stage: they still attach importance to Bilibili, but each has its own evaluation system.

This is also reflected in the financial report. Bilibili's advertising business revenue for the whole year of 2023 was 6.4 billion yuan, an increase of 27% over 2022. Among its four major businesses of value-added services, advertising, mobile games, and IP derivatives, it is the sector with the highest growth rate.

In this situation, it is reasonable for B Station to "slap" itself in the face, which can be regarded as "waking up" itself. In this period when the top priority is to continuously improve infrastructure and services and maintain steady growth in advertising business.

Once the data evaluation system of the entire platform is changed, it means that the platform's video data will be turbulent at least in a short period of time, and even the UP host ecology will be reshuffled.

B station currently has thousands of advertising agencies and dozens of core agencies. The UP master lists in the hands of these agencies will face the risk of losing their persuasiveness. They must first understand the benefits and rationality of B station's VT change, and convey the advantages of VT data to brands. The communication cost has increased dramatically, and the effect is still uncertain.

Fang Fang, head of community and product at Bilibili, also mentioned in his response: After the announcement, we found that the feedback from all sides was not optimistic, and many people did not understand this indicator. This is something that needs to be accepted and understood by the outside world, and we were too confident about it.

Before Bilibili, there was no platform or product in the world that was counted by duration.

Station B is clearly aware that it will take time for the game to make a profit, and at the moment it relies entirely on advertising to support its business. It cannot withstand any shock. Being slapped in the face is not important, what is important is to achieve the goal of turning losses into profits in 2024.

Only by serving the client and UP masters well can we make money, and only by making money can the content ecosystem maintain its basic market. At the same time, the response mentioned that in the current recommendation algorithm, playback time has become a very important statistical factor.

A person close to Bilibili told Zhiwei that Bilibili's logic for supporting medium and long videos has not changed, but it does not necessarily subvert data cognition. More moderate measures are still being implemented, including the allocation of traffic weight, editor recommendations (Bilibili has always been the platform with the greatest editorial weight), and support for hot lists.

Judging from public data, the proportion of UP hosts receiving business orders this year is indeed higher. It is worth noting that after testing the waters with live streaming, Station B began to make efforts to enter the recent 618 promotion. This may be the first time that it has purposefully linked brands, e-commerce platforms and UP hosts for commercial marketing on a large scale. This provides a new option for brands that have long been based on their own product promotion cycle. But the effect is still unknown.

It must be admitted that the switch from VV to VT and then the suspension was an obvious business misjudgment by Station B. Early testing and adjustment, or internal testing and direct termination are what a mature business team should do, but Station B seems to be unable to find the most appropriate time to come up with the best response measures.

After a year, bringing up the forgotten VT again is more like B Station giving itself an explanation and warning to move faster, more steadily, more cautiously, and more resilient.

After all, for ordinary users, how much impact can the change have on watching videos?