China's Bilibili launches a paywall for some videos, as it seeks to diversify revenue after its market cap dropped from ~$54B in February to $10B+ this month
Josh Ye / Reuters : Tweets: @therealjoshye , @therealjoshye , and @therealjoshye Tweets: Josh Ye / @therealjoshye : Chinese video platform Bilibili , has launched a paywall for some of its videos as the company, bruised by Beijing's sweeping crackdown on the tech industry, looks to diversify its revenue sources. https://www.reuters.com/... Josh Ye / @therealjoshye : The move reflects a sense of urgency felt by Bilibili, known for featuring free-to-watch videos, to diversify its revenue sources as its existing growth engines - including live streaming and video games - have been heavily hit by Chinese regulators' harsh crackdown last year. Josh Ye / @therealjoshye : The Shanghai-based company, sometimes referred to as China's answer to YouTube, has started to feature premium videos on its platform. For example, users seeking to watch a series of videos named “The World's Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries” now need to pay ~30 yuan ($4.48) to do so.
Context & Ripple Effects
Bilibili arrives at this paywall from a precarious position: the company that filed for its US IPO in 2018 with revenue of $379M and 72M MAUs had grown into a $54B platform by February, but its engine was never really video — a 2021 profile showed 40% of its 2020 revenue came from mobile games. With Beijing's crackdown squeezing both gaming and live streaming, those engines stalled and the market cap collapsed to just over $10B.
The paywall is also a return to an old playbook for Chinese video. Subscriptions were already climbing a half-decade ago, reaching 13% of the online video industry's 2015 revenue, and rivals backed by Alibaba and Tencent — both early Bilibili investors per Protocol's look at the 'YouTube for China' — have long operated premium-subscription models. What changes today is that a platform built its brand on free-to-watch community video is charging for part of it.
First-order effects
- Some Bilibili viewers who expect free access now hit a paywall, testing whether the platform's community-first identity survives partial monetization of its catalog.
- With gaming and live-streaming revenue constrained by regulators, Bilibili's finance team gains a third revenue line it controls directly rather than one exposed to license approvals.
Second-order effects
- Rivals with established subscription businesses — including the Alibaba- and Tencent-backed players Bilibili has long balanced against — face a competitor no longer competing purely on free reach, tightening the contest for paying subscribers.
- Creators whose videos land behind the paywall gain a direct revenue path but risk losing the view counts and community exposure that made the platform attractive, forcing a split between free-reach and paid-premium upload strategies.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Chinese video platforms converge further on subscription economics, with regulatory pressure on games and live streaming acting as the forcing function that pushes ad- and game-funded sites toward viewer-paid models.
- The deeper question is structural: whether a platform can charge for content while keeping the open-community dynamics that differentiated it — the same tension every free-video giant faces when it adds a premium tier.
The trend: Beijing's crackdown on gaming and live streaming is pushing China's video platforms to retrofit subscription revenue onto free-viewing communities, with Bilibili the latest and most identity-stretched convert.