What information is revealed by the release of Bilibili's 2024 Top 100 UP Owners list?

Written by Wang Yuchan

Edited by Qiao Qian

On January 3, Bilibili announced the list of the new batch of Top 100 UP Masters. Since 2018, Bilibili has been conducting this selection for seven consecutive years. This year, as in the previous two years, the evaluation criteria are the three dimensions of "professionalism, influence, and innovation".

Judging from the performance of public opinion, after the list was released, many discussions focused on "which selected ones are not worthy of being selected at all". On that day, Bilibili users voted on Hupu to select the "Top 10 UP Masters Who Are Least Deserving", and the "dark histories" of many creators were dug up - this is also an epitome of the division of user values and differences in preferences on the platform.

When individuals are generally willing to show their particularity, it makes little sense to analyze the likes and dislikes of some small groups. For the business community. As an award with only honor but no bonus, with relatively abstract evaluation criteria and difficult-to-quantify values, the "Top 100" is more like a "weather vane", used to show "who is the creator most recognized by the platform at this stage" and, "who is the creator that the platform most hopes to show to advertisers".

@Duan Xiaocao, an outstanding answerer on Zhihu's large model and Python topics, has statistically analyzed this year's list and authorized 36Kr to publish his statistical results. The results show that since 2018, after removing duplicates from the 700 Top 100 UP Masters in seven years, there are 390 (last year it was 357), which means that there are not many outstanding newbies who have emerged in the past year.

Image Source: @Duan Xiaocao

As can be seen from the above figure, among the Top 100 UP Masters in 2024, there are only 33 UP Masters who won the award for the first time, the lowest in history, accounting for only 1/3. The vast majority of the other winners are those who have won the award repeatedly.

Image Source: @Duan Xiaocao

From the perspective of sections, the game section, the knowledge section, and the life section have taken up half of the list. After comparing with the first selection of the Top 100 in 2018, it can be found that the number of people in the game section has ended a five-year decline and returned to the "top of the list"; the number of people in the knowledge section has slightly declined, ranking "second on the list"; the Kichiku (MAD) section + the music section has obviously declined, from the initial 25 people to the current 9 people; the life section + the food section (pan-life category) has dropped from the peak of 33 people to 17 people.

Image Source: @Duan Xiaocao

The way @Duan Xiaocao determines the section of an UP Master is based on the "primary section" with the largest number of submissions in the UP Master's historical submissions. Although this method has situations where some UP Masters are difficult to define due to the diversity of their submission forms, there is no dispute in using it to distinguish the majority of UP Masters.

36Kr believes that the return of the game section to the "top of the list" is related to the emergence of some phenomenal game masterpieces this year, and it can be said to have "characteristics of the era". Before this, the number of award-winning UP Masters in the game section has been decreasing for five consecutive years, reflecting that Bilibili, as a platform that started with ACG culture, was also constrained by the era of scarcity of excellent games. This year, even the knowledge section UP Master @Smart Roadblock, who is famous for "talking about Lu Xun", was also classified into the game section because of his addiction to playing "Black Myth: Wukong", which shows the "interdependence" of the game industry and game UP Masters.

Moreover, the contribution of the game industry to the platform's income is also very considerable. In the third quarter of this year, the advertising and game businesses contributed 29% and 25% of Bilibili's income respectively. Commercially speaking, without the financial backers of the game industry, there would be no growth in Bilibili's advertising and game business income. Bilibili stuffed 23 game section UP Masters into the Top 100 list this year, which shows the platform's ambition to "revive" the game section and boost game and advertising revenue in 2025.

From the perspective of video duration, the average duration of the annual submissions of the Top 100 UP Masters is 18 minutes on average, and the median is 13 minutes. Among this year's Top 100, there are no short-video UP Masters with an average duration of less than 1 minute. If the short-video is relaxed to 3 minutes, there are only 6 UP Masters. UP Masters with an average duration of 10-30 minutes per video are the main force in the list, accounting for nearly half of the list.

Image Source: @Duan Xiaocao

It can be seen that although the number of vertical-screen short-video submissions on Bilibili has increased sharply in recent years, and it has benefited from the vertical-screen information flow Story Mode, obtaining more traffic inclination and also driving more performance advertising revenue, in the selection of the Top 100 UP Masters, short videos still find it difficult to obtain the same level of recognition as medium and long videos. When the platform selects creators who are "sufficient to represent the platform", it still chooses UP Masters with more "traditional characteristics" of Bilibili.

Based on the number of fans, the average number of fans of the Top 100 UP Masters is 4.29 million, and the median is 2.77 million. The Top 100 with 1-3 million fans accounts for exactly half (50 people), there are 7 with more than 10 million fans, and 4 with less than 1 million fans.

Image Source: @Duan Xiaocao

Based on the initial submission date, among this year's Top 100, 10 are veterans of Bilibili who have been on the platform for more than ten years. The earliest 3 to submit are Xiaoyao Sanren, Fansi, and Zimin (the first two have been consecutively selected as Top 100 for seven years); 9 are "newcomers" who only started submitting in 2022 and grew into Top 100 UP Masters in three years; another 3 only started submitting last year.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, when the platform selects the list with relatively abstract criteria, the creators who are finally able to be on the list are most likely the ones that the platform considers to have the most positive value, including image value and commercial value.

Then, if we compare it with Bilibili's financial report for the third quarter of this year, the five industries that have contributed the most to Bilibili's advertising business are: games, e-commerce, digital home appliances, online services, and automobiles. They correspond to the game section, the life section, the technology section, the knowledge section, and the automotive section respectively. They are also the sections in this list where either the number of people is at the forefront or the number of people has increased significantly.

Therefore, the Top 100 UP Masters list may not be able to represent the abstract preferences of users, but it can imply specific business issues.