Bilibili started as a Hatsune Miku fan site during a rival's outage
When the Chinese video site AcFun went dark for a month in 2009 amid internal feuding, an early user called Xu Yi spotted an opening. He built Mikufans.cn, a fan community for the virtual singer Hatsune Miku, on 26 June 2009. Within months it had become Bilibili, now among China's biggest streaming platforms.
The name, adopted at a relaunch on 14 January 2010, is a nickname for Mikoto Misaka, heroine of the anime A Certain Scientific Railgun, and the homepage still marks her birthday every 2 May. By 2012 the whole operation had just nine staff, all steeped in Japanese language and culture. An early deal to stream Fate/Zero with Chinese subtitles was halted after three episodes, and the operating company was fined 10,000 yuan for unlicensed broadcasting.
Its signature feature is danmu, or bullet comments, remarks that stream across the video from right to left like projectiles in a shooting game. Registered users may post up to 120 characters in chosen colours and sizes, while anonymous viewers are capped at 20. Joining once meant passing a 100-question test, mostly about anime, comics and games; the quiz was cut to 50 in 2015, with 20 on comment etiquette, before the longer version returned in 2017. A volunteer Discipline Committee, set up in 2017, votes on reported misconduct.
Growth accelerated after Chen Rui, the fifth person to join and its earliest investor, became chief executive in November 2014. Bilibili sponsored Shanghai's basketball team, bought League of Legends and Overwatch squads, listed on NASDAQ on 28 March 2018 and added a Hong Kong listing in March 2021. Sony paid 400 million dollars for a 4.98 per cent stake in 2020, valuing the company at 8 billion.
The platform now spans documentaries, variety shows and original series, and by late 2022 averaged about 332.6 million monthly users, 28.5 million of them paying. It also operates under strict national rules: since February 2017 only certified organisations may upload political videos.
Source: Bilibili
