By SHE Xiaochen
Video-streaming site Bilibili is planning to reduce its number of teams and establish a "transactional ecosystem center," according to a letter to employees on Thursday. The e-commerce division has been swallowed up by the ecosystem center.
The center not only needs to generate more revenue but demands coordination among teams that will directly affect Bilibili's performance. According to insiders, the ecosystem bureau will be headed by LI Ni, currently Bilibili's COO.
In Q1, Bilibili reported a revenue of 5.1 billion yuan (US$700 million) with a net loss of 630 million yuan. Chen said that in 2023, the company will "improve profitability," without going so far as to promise any actual profit.
Bilibili has been through plenty of boardroom upheavals in the past as the company struggles to find a structure that does not require constant tweaking.
Last year, LIU Binxin, head of e-commercial and the main site's business center, left the company, with LIU Zhi taking over.
ZHANG Zhendong, the head of marketing and originally responsible for front-end business, was reported to have left the company in March this year.
Many e-commerce platforms are striving to change their financial reporting. Previous metrics no longer grow as fast as they used to and new ways of measuring stellar performance must be found.
CEO CHEN Rui recently decided that the company would no longer report the number of views, replacing the trusted metric with total minutes spent watching, which, of course, does not require the user to even be awake.
The moving goalposts appear to be part of an effort to change the public perception of Bilibili's content. As creators, users, content and formats expand and diversify, the platform needs better data dimensions – minutes instead of views - that reflect real user patterns.
