Photo: Sina Weibo

A slew of vloggers have recently announced they will stop posting content on China’s popular short video platform Bilibili due to the unbalanced income and expenditure that has resulted from reduced income from the platform, as well as the impact of AI technology on video production. 

The vloggers include some popular names such as Guaiyijun, who uploads short videos about suspense and reasoning, and another vlogger named “kaolian chifan de xudawang,”who focuses on commenting on video games. 

According to media reports, the vloggers announced to stop or have stopped uploading new videos since mid-2022. 

An uploader who has nearly 4 million followers announced on Sunday the suspension of renewal of content on his account and cannot determine the date of resumption of uploading videos, 21jingji.com reported. According to him, he cannot afford to sustain his entire team. On the other hand, the current creativity ability of AI technology is also a blow to original videos. 

Another uploader who has tens of thousands of followers on Bilibili told Southern Finance Omnimedia Corp that Bilibili has made great adjustment to its reward system since this year which led to the decrease of half to two-thirds of uploaders’ income compared with last year despite the feedback and influence of videos being almost the same as of those that were uploaded last year. 

This refers to the creativity incentive plan that Bilibili introduced in January of 2018. According to the plan, the program estimates the traffic value of videos based on their views, likes, collections and other data, and awards uploaders cash according to the rules. 

However, due to the continuous loss in income of the video platform in recent years, the incentive amounts of the platform has also continue to decline, media reported.

Observers said that Bilibili made adjustment to its incentive plan in May of 2021 which introduced multiple assessment indicators and made certain adjustments to the weighting of different indicators, which resulted in the increases in the weight of commercial cooperation and decreases in the weight of platform incentives. Which means it’s no longer the quality of the video that determines how much money the uploaders get, but who gets more advertisements. 

As a result, uploaders with a larger follower base and whose content is more suitable for receiving advertisement have increasing incomes while those uploaders in the middle or at the tail end can hardly make a living on the platform, observers said, according to media reports.

It is noteworthy that despite uploaders’ revenue continuously decreasing due to the adjustment of policies of the video platform over the past years, the total dividend paid by the platform to the uploaders has been increasing year by year. 

On March 30, the platform announced its yearly performance as of December 31, 2022 and its dividend of 9.1 billion yuan ($1.32 billion) to its uploaders last year. 

Global Times