Streaming video operator Bilibili at a crossroads with focus on increasing users

When high school student Shan Wenran signed up to join video-and-animation-sharing site Bilibili six years ago, she was surprised to find that membership entailed passing a lengthy examination. The 100-question test included zingers like who was “the lead singer of the Japanese Rainbow band” and “the starting goalkeeper of the German men's national soccer team”.

“I tried to answer one or two questions and then quit,” said Shan, now 24, from the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang. “It was troublesome, and I didn’t know the answers to those questions.” Shan said she took the exam again in college and passed.

Shanghai-based Bilibili, founded in 2009, has become the biggest video-comics-and-gaming entertainment platform for China’s fast-growing Generation Z market segment, made up of consumers born between 1990 and 2009. But the company, according to analysts, has also reached a crossroads, which could hasten its decision to further water down its rigid examination to increase the number of its users and better compete against larger players in the country’s online streaming video services industry.

“Over the years, we have gradually lowered the difficulty of the 100-question exam,” a spokeswoman for Nasdaq-traded Bilibili said in an emailed statement. “This is because we have developed more ways to maintain our community’s environment and enhance our users’ experience. With such capabilities, we don’t have to rely as much on the exam.” Those included community behaviour protocols, user whistle-blowing functions, more accurate content recommendations and a larger inventory of high-quality content.

Bilibili had about 54 million total users who passed its exam as of the second quarter of this year. Qualified members gain the privilege of posting bullet comments, a popular Bilibili mechanism that enables comments to float directly above a video, which can be scrolled on screen. Bullet comments can either be in real time or left by previous viewers pegged to specific moments of a video. It is like chats on US video streaming service Twitch, but superimposed on the video.