Marketing on Bilibili: when a foreign brand should actually bother
Short version: most foreign brands should not be on Bilibili, and the ones that should are usually there for the wrong reason. Bilibili is not a reach channel and it is not a sales channel — it is a depth channel. If your product genuinely rewards being explained, demonstrated, or argued about for fifteen minutes, it can earn a young, skeptical, fiercely loyal audience that no other Chinese platform will give you. If it doesn't, you'll spend months making earnest videos nobody finishes. Bother only when the category and the patience are both real.
Every China deck I see now has a Bilibili slide, usually right after the Douyin slide and styled exactly the same way. That's the tell. People treat "B站" — B-site, as users call it — as one more short-video box to tick, and it is the one platform where that approach is guaranteed to fail. So before the how, the harder question: should you be here at all?
What Bilibili actually is
Start with the shape of the place. Bilibili crossed roughly 368 million monthly active users in early 2025, with daily actives north of 100 million — big, but small next to Douyin or WeChat. What matters more than the number is who they are and how they watch. The average user is around 26 now (it was about 23 a few years ago — the platform is aging up with its first generation), and the overwhelming majority are under 35. This is China's most-educated, most online young cohort: students, fresh graduates, early- career professionals, hobbyists who go deep on things.
And they watch long. Bilibili grew up as China's answer to YouTube — long-form video, full-screen, lean- back — not a swipe feed of fifteen-second clips. The signature is danmu (弹幕), the "bullet comments" that scroll across the screen in real time, so you're effectively watching alongside everyone who watched before you. It turns a video into a shared room. It also means the audience is paying attention in a way a thumb-flicking Douyin scroller is not.
The part brands underestimate: this crowd will tear you apart
Bilibili's community is the most authenticity-policed audience in Chinese social. A creator who posts a sloppy, padded, or obviously-paid video gets shredded in the comments and the danmu — publicly, wittily, and at length. That cuts both ways for a brand. It means a hard-sell ad read drops like a stone. It also means that when you do earn a genuine endorsement from a creator the community trusts, it carries weight that a Douyin product-drop never will. You can't buy your way past the bar. You can only clear it.
This is why "we'll just repurpose our Douyin cuts" is the most expensive mistake on this platform. The audience reads it instantly as a brand that didn't bother to understand where it's standing.
When you should bother — and when you shouldn't
The honest filter is whether your product gets more persuasive the longer someone looks at it. A fifteen-minute teardown helps a complicated, demonstrable product and actively hurts a simple impulse one. Match yourself to the table:
| Your situation | Bilibili verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Tech, gadgets, software, gaming gear, cameras, EV/auto | Bother — strong fit | Reviewers and "knowledge" creators already do deep dives; your product survives scrutiny it would never get in 30 seconds |
| Skincare/beauty with real formulation or process to explain | Bother — selectively | Bilibili's beauty niche rewards ingredient-level honesty, not glamour shots |
| Education, courses, tools, hobby/craft, niche B2C | Bother | "Learn something" is the platform's native mode; tutorials and explainers spread |
| Fast fashion, snacks, low-consideration impulse buys | Skip — go Douyin/Red | Nothing to explain; the long format works against you and conversion tracking is weaker |
| You want quick, measurable sales this quarter | Skip for now | Bilibili is an awareness-and-trust engine, not a direct-response one |
If you do bother: how to not waste the budget
The mechanics are the easy part; the patience is the hard part. A few things that separate the brands that get traction from the ones that quietly give up after a quarter:
- Lead with creators, not feed ads. Bilibili's creators — UP主 — fall into rough camps: tech reviewers, lifestyle/beauty, ACG (anime, comics, gaming), and knowledge/education. Find the ones whose existing content already overlaps your category and let them make the video their way. A tight brand-control brief is how you get a flop.
- Give them something worth fifteen minutes. A real demo, a teardown, a problem the product genuinely solves, access the creator couldn't otherwise get. The format is a gift if you have substance and a trap if you don't.
- Treat in-feed and brand-zone ads as support, not the main act. CPMs run cheaper than Douyin, which is tempting — but paid exposure here buys attention, not affection. The affection comes from the creator content the ads point toward.
- Connect the path, don't expect it to close on-platform. Bilibili has added clickable "blue link" placements and commerce hooks, but conversion tracking is less mature than Douyin's or Tmall's. Use it to drive consideration, then close on the storefront where you actually measure.
- Check entity and access rules early. Paid account access on Bilibili has had restrictions by company region; a local agency or partner is often the practical route. Sort this before you build the plan, not after.
How to know it's working
Don't judge Bilibili on the metrics you'd use for Douyin. Views are the vanity number here. Watch instead for completion and danmu density on creator videos — are people staying to the end and talking over each other while they do? Watch whether your brand name starts showing up in comments unprompted, and whether searches for it on Bilibili and Baidu tick up after a campaign. Those are the signals that a skeptical audience moved from "who's this" to "I get it." That shift is slow, and it's the entire point of being here.
Bottom line
Bilibili is a commitment, not a checkbox. It pays off for brands whose product rewards depth and whose team has the patience to earn a famously hard-to-please young audience one honest video at a time. If that's you — tech, autos, gaming, education, substance-led beauty — it's one of the best trust-building channels in China. If you're chasing this quarter's sales or you've got nothing to explain, save the budget and put it on Douyin and Red, then come back to Bilibili when you've got a story long enough to be worth fifteen minutes.
If you're trying to decide where Bilibili fits — or whether it fits at all — in a Greater China plan, that's the work I do; reach out. For the platform it's most often confused with, read Red vs Douyin: which to build on first.