Text by: Lü Xinyi
Simply by introducing a vertical screen mode into a horizontal video platform, such a small change can create significant ripples.
In 2021, Bilibili $Bilibili (BILI.US)$launched Story-Mode, a vertical short-video format on its main platform. According to this year’s Q2 earnings report, vertical videos have continuously driven new viewership growth for Bilibili, with daily average views increasing over 400% year-over-year. CEO Chen Rui noted that some of the newly minted million-follower content creators in Q2 saw their follower growth boosted by vertical videos.
In Chen Rui’s view, even this minor adjustment has resulted in a win-win scenario: reducing the cost for creators, lowering the viewing barrier for users, and attracting more advertisers. Chen Rui has high hopes for the future of vertical screen mode, believing it will be one of the main drivers of both user and ad revenue growth.
According to the earnings report, Bilibili’s average monthly active users reached 306 million in Q2, a 29% increase year-over-year, while average daily active users hit 83.5 million, marking a 33% year-over-year rise. The average daily user engagement time was 89 minutes, with overall community traffic growing 48% year-over-year.
More telling than the numbers is the market response. The birth of Bilibili’s vertical screen mode is built on the maturity of its commercialization strategy, algorithms, and PUGV ecosystem. With a solid foundation laid early on, it has attracted creators from other platforms. They simply need to repost their already published works from other platforms onto Bilibili's vertical screen format to quickly gain followers with minimal effort, bloggers...