Bilibili: Chinese YouTube begins its overseas expansion

The Chinese video platform Bilibili wants to push more strongly into the international market and specifically attract users and content creators outside of China. The top dog, YouTube, can therefore face significant competition.

Comprehensive plan

The company has now relaunched its previously discontinued international app and is also preparing an English-language website. Job offers and documents for creatives indicate that Bilibili wants to expand in the USA, Europe and Japan, among other places, the magazine reports Semafor. Bilibili is considered the Chinese counterpart to YouTube and already has 376 million monthly active users on its Chinese-language platform. The service is generally available worldwide. However, so far the company has focused primarily on the Chinese market. Now the international presence is to be significantly expanded. To this end, Bilibili is looking for community managers in Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, São Paulo, Istanbul and Tokyo, among others.

The platform also wants to become more attractive for international content creators. In a presentation recently shared on a Discord channel for Bilibili creatives, the company describes itself as a way for influencers to generate revenue and reach a young, affluent and well-educated audience. A marketplace through which international creators can be brought together with companies for paid collaborations is already in development. An English-language version of the website will also follow. In the documents it is announced as “coming soon”. At the same time, Bilibili is showing interest in bringing well-known Western personalities onto the platform. One of the prominent examples is the US YouTuber MrBeast, who already publishes videos on the Chinese-language Bilibili platform.

Open questions

The revised international app also brings with it an important change: Foreign users apparently no longer have to present identity documents. Previous international use of the Chinese service sometimes required a passport or other identification document, which of course massively limited success. The global push could make Bilibili a more serious competitor to YouTube. At the same time, the company is likely to encounter problems that have already plagued other Chinese platforms such as TikTok. This includes, in particular, questions about content moderation, censorship and the handling of user data. According to a job advertisement, Bilibili is also planning global, AI-supported systems for content moderation. The company itself has not yet officially commented on its expansion plans.