China's Bilibili relaunches its international app and plans an English-language website, after already pushing MrBeast and others to post on its Chinese website
THE SCOOP — China's equivalent to YouTube is making a play for the rest of the world and courting non-Chinese creators to boost its appeal.See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Bilibili has spent years patching its economics at home: after its market cap slid from roughly $54B to just over $10B, it launched a video paywall to diversify away from the mobile-games business that still drove 40% of 2020 revenue when it had 54M daily active users. Now it is attacking growth from the demand side instead — relaunching its international app and building an English-language site.
The creator-courting angle is what makes this a competitive story rather than a localization one: per Semafor, Bilibili has been pushing MrBeast and other non-Chinese creators to post on its main Chinese site. That puts it in direct tension with YouTube, which per the relationship data is already spending millions on time-limited exclusivity deals with top creators and penalizing simultaneous posting elsewhere.
First-order effects
- Bilibili gains an English-language storefront for its video library, giving non-Chinese users a direct entry point instead of the domestic app.
- Creators like MrBeast get a new distribution channel into China-adjacent audiences — but only if they accept posting terms alongside their existing YouTube commitments.
Second-order effects
- YouTube faces pressure at the edges of its creator base: it is already paying multimillion-dollar incentives for temporary exclusivity and penalizing concurrent Netflix uploads, so Bilibili's courtship of the same top names raises the price of keeping talent loyal.
- Bilibili's backers Alibaba and Tencent — both investors since its US IPO era — now have exposure to an international expansion that could re-rate a stock whose valuation collapse triggered the earlier paywall push.
Third-order effects
- If Western creators routinely post across Chinese and American platforms, video distribution starts fragmenting along supply lines rather than national ones — though whether regulators on either side tolerate that cross-flow is the genuine open question.
- For Bilibili specifically, the pattern points toward a structural shift from games-and-paywall monetization toward scale-driven ad and creator economics, mirroring the path YouTube itself took.
The trend: Global video platforms are increasingly competing on creator supply across borders, as Chinese services recruit Western talent and incumbents respond with exclusivity payments.