Imagine if YouTube, Twitch, and Crunchyroll had a child raised in Shanghai. That is more or less Bilibili, a platform that launched in 2009 as a corner for anime and video game fans and, 16 years later, became one of the most widely used apps among young people in China. Last week, it took a step many had been waiting for (or dreading, depending on whom you ask in the video industry): it relaunched its international app and confirmed that it is going all in on a global audience.
The news was first broken exclusively by Semafor. But there is more to unpack here, so let us break down what Bilibili is doing, why it is betting so aggressively on the West right now and how realistic it is that it could take ground away from YouTube.
Before diving fully into the topic, it is worth clarifying what this platform is for anyone who has never used it or heard of it. In short, Bilibili is a video platform where content creators, gaming streamers, and animation studios all coexist under one roof. If in the West we have to jump between YouTube, Twitch, and Crunchyroll to get a little bit of everything, in China much of that experience lives inside a single app.
Its signature feature is danmu, a function that lets comments from other viewers fly across the screen in real time, directly over the video, synced to the exact moment they were written. It may sound chaotic at first, and the first time you see it, you will probably think, “How do people watch anything with that much text on the screen?” But that is exactly the point: it is like watching a movie in a theater surrounded by friends commenting on every scene, except those “friends” may be thousands of people connected at the same time. According to several analysts, that feeling of instant community is one of the reasons Bilibili has been so successful at building loyalty among younger audiences.
And the numbers support that loyalty. The platform closed the first quarter of 2026 with 376 million monthly active users and 115 million daily active users, figures that represent 8% year-over-year growth in daily users. The average time each person spends inside the app is around two hours per day, a number any video platform would envy.
For years, Bilibili required any foreign user who wanted to create an account to upload a passport or ID document, a requirement that, let us be honest, scared off more than a few people before they even started exploring the app. That obstacle has just disappeared in the new international version. Now signing up is as simple as it is on any other social network.
That is only the first move in a broader plan that includes:
If there is one example Bilibili uses again and again to persuade other creators to join, it is MrBeast. In January 2024, Jimmy Donaldson (the most-subscribed YouTuber on the planet, with more than 500 million followers on YouTube alone) uploaded a 90-second collage featuring some of his most viral clips. The video quickly racked up more than 3 million views and 270,000 likes almost immediately. Today, that piece has surpassed 231 million views.
“It is going to be a fun ride,” Donaldson wrote at the time, inviting Chinese viewers to tell him what they would like to see from him. The community’s response was immediate: one of his new followers commented, “I am witnessing history.” That kind of reception is exactly what Bilibili wants to replicate, but on a larger scale and with more non-Chinese creators on board.
In its recruitment materials shared in a Discord chat aimed at creators, the company describes itself as the ideal place to monetize content by connecting with an audience “coded Gen Z, affluent, and highly educated.” It is a direct sales pitch to influencers looking for new income streams beyond YouTube or Instagram.
This is where the financial story comes in, and it goes a long way toward explaining why Bilibili feels ready to make this leap. The company closed 2025 with its first annual profit since going public; revenue grew 13% to nearly $4.476 billion, with net profit of $175.5 million. Advertising alone contributed $1.484 billion to that total. And the first quarter of 2026 kept up the pace, with advertising revenue growing 30% year over year and net profit reaching $29.8 million in just three months.
To put that in perspective, between 2018 and 2024, Bilibili accumulated losses of more than 25 billion yuan (around $3.7 billion). In other words, we are talking about a company that spent seven years burning cash to build its community and that, as soon as it started seeing consistently positive numbers, decided to reinvest that confidence into going after users outside China. It makes sense because expanding into other countries is expensive, and it is far easier to persuade investors and sustain spending on offices, staff, and marketing in six different cities when you are no longer operating in the red.
That said, the ground is not entirely fertile for Bilibili. Its expansion raises several questions we already know well because we saw them with TikTok at the time:
Bilibili, however, is not directly responding to concerns about censorship or data handling; as of this article’s publication, the company has not answered media requests for comment from outlets covering Semafor’s exclusive.
My view is that it probably will not “beat” YouTube in the sense of displacing it, at least not in the short or medium term. YouTube has years of head start, an enormous creator base, and an advertising infrastructure that dominates the global market. But that does not mean Bilibili cannot carve out a space of its own, especially among younger audiences already used to jumping between multiple apps for different types of content: one for gaming, another for anime, another for viral clips.
That is where Bilibili’s real play lies: it is not trying to be just “another YouTube,” but to offer a different experience, with the real-time community dynamic that danmu provides for a niche it already knows well and has proven highly effective at retaining in China. If it can bring that formula to Los Angeles, Mexico City, or São Paulo without losing what makes it special, it could become a serious alternative for creators and audiences looking for something different from the usual.
For now, the rollout is only just beginning. Over the coming months, we will have to see whether the community managers it is hiring in six cities can translate the Chinese phenomenon for an audience that, until recently, did not even know Bilibili existed.
Image: GPT Images 2.0
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