Bilibili closed 2025 with a milestone many in Beijing had waited a decade for: its first full-year adjusted profit of RMB 25.9 billion (about $360m). The result should have been an unequivocal victory for a company long derided as unable to monetise its fiercely loyal base, yet markets reacted coolly — a reminder that profit alone does not answer questions about sustainability.
The headline number was driven by an advertising surge. Annual ad revenue topped RMB 100.6 billion (roughly $1.4bn) for the first time, after 12 consecutive quarters of year-on-year growth; AI-related ad sales grew by 180% as large language models and related products flooded advertisers’ briefs. Games, consumer electronics, online services, e-commerce and autos were the top spending categories, and the platform has become a key battleground for advertisers seeking to win young, tech-savvy minds.
But beneath those figures lies a tension between scale monetisation and the emotional ties that built the site. Bilibili’s distinctiveness has always been its creator-led culture — long-form, personality-driven content, threaded together by danmaku (bullet comments) and a shared sense of affinity between creators and viewers. That trust, several creators and longtime users fear, is being deployed as a lever: system-assigned ad placements and platform-driven commercial orders increasingly treat UP creators as nodes in a distribution network rather than independent storytellers.
The maker economy powering that trust is ageing and consolidating. This year’s list of Bilibili’s top creators saw the fewest first-time entrants on record; most winners have been producing for five to ten years or more, while very few sub-million-follower channels broke into the upper ranks. Meanwhile, the platform’s median active user age has risen to 26.5 from about 21 at IPO in 2018. Paid subscriptions are growing — monthly paying users reached 35.66 million and premium members 25.35 million — but the composition of content is shifting toward more mainstream, easier-to-monetise genres such as knowledge, gaming and lifestyle.
That shift helps short-run monetisation but creates a paradox: advertisers are placing high-value ads for AI tools, cars and electronics into an audience that is engaged but economically constrained. China faces a record cohort of graduates and an uncertain labour market; young users spend time on low-cost digital consumption precisely because other forms of spending are out of reach. If viewers are interested in products they cannot afford, advertiser ROI will eventually tumble and media buyers will become more cautious.
AI complicates the picture further. Bilibili has adopted AI for ad targeting, content moderation and creator tools, with more than 60% of creators using AI for writing, editing and thumbnails. Yet the platform lacks a compelling consumer-facing AI product that locks users into a useful workflow, and widespread access to generative tools risks homogenising content. The very uniqueness that created emotional bonds — authenticity, idiosyncratic voices, slow-burn relationships between creators and fans — could be diluted by scaleable, AI-assisted production.
For investors and platform managers the lesson is stark. Achieving profitability proves a business model can work at scale, but it does not prove the business will retain its cultural capital or deliver durable growth. Bilibili’s case is a test of whether a company built on intimacy can convert that intimacy into revenue without hollowing out the social fabric that created its value in the first place. How the firm balances developer tools, creator incentives and ad intensity will determine whether this profit is a sustainable transformation or an overdrawn interlude.