How to Make Money on Bilibili in 2026: The Playbook for Getting In Early

Bilibili, China's Youtube, just announced its global expansion. That's a genuinely big deal. 376 million monthly users, average watch time north of 2 hours a day, and a Western audience that's about to get a real English-language version of the app for the first time.

Let's look at how and why to move now.

The official international monetization program doesn't exist yet. No ad revenue share for creators outside China. No open marketplace connecting Western creators to sponsors. What already exists is the audience, and an audience converts into traffic toward things you actually own: a mailing list, a Telegram channel, an affiliate link. You don't need Bilibili's permission for any of that.

So the real question isn't whether Bilibili blows up in the West. It probably will, the audience is already there. The real question is whether there's a move worth making right now, before the payment system exists, or whether this is a gold rush aimed at a mine with no shaft dug yet.

This happened before, almost exactly. It's called TikTok, and you didn't need 3 years of waiting to start making money off it either.

376 Million Users, Zero Live Marketplace

On August 19, a tweet about Bilibili's global expansion hit 604,000 views and over 12,000 engagements in under 48 hours. Within days, Semafor, Engadget, and CineD had all run pieces. The shape of the coverage was identical everywhere: massive numbers, a direct comparison to Youtube, and a quote about MrBeast already being courted.

What most of that coverage buried past the third paragraph is the detail that actually matters if you're a creator deciding whether to move now. The sponsorship marketplace meant to connect international creators to brand deals is still in development. Not live. Not scheduled. In development (the same phrase every outlet used almost word for word, which tells you it's coming straight from Bilibili's own talking points, not independent reporting).

That gap between the headline number and the actual product is the entire story here. 376 million users is real. A functioning way to get paid by them, right now, if you're not in China, is not.

376 million users looking for content is not the same thing as 376 million users you can invoice.

What Happened Last Time: TikTok, 2017 to 2020

TikTok launched globally in September 2017. The Creator Marketplace, the hub connecting creators to brand deals, showed up in 2019. The Creator Fund, the first direct payment program from TikTok itself, didn't arrive until July 2020.

That's 3 years between launch and any kind of official payout system. Three years is a long grind for a loot drop that might not even be that good when it finally spawns.

For those 3 years, the only money on the table came from brand deals negotiated directly and affiliate links, both channels that exist entirely outside whatever TikTok itself was building. The creators who spent that window picking a niche and building an actual audience are the ones who had something real the moment the official programs finally opened. Everyone else showed up to a launch day already crowded.

Is Bilibili going to follow the exact same 3-year timeline? Nobody knows. Could be faster, given how much attention this launch is already pulling compared to TikTok's quiet 2017 start. Could be slower, given the extra layer of scrutiny a Chinese platform gets in 2026 that TikTok didn't get in 2017. Either way, the mechanism doesn't change. Whoever builds a niche during the empty window gets picked up first when the algorithm and the sponsors start looking for accounts that already have traction, not accounts starting from zero on launch day.

What Actually Exists on Bilibili Right Now

Inside China, Bilibili's creator economy is not small. The Creator Incentive Program caps out around $278 a month per creator. Fan charging lets viewers pay creators directly. Live gifts work the way they do on most Chinese platforms. There's a domestic brand marketplace called Sparkle. And per Bilibili's own Q4 2025 earnings call, independently corroborated by multiple outlets covering the same disclosure, close to 3 million creators earned money on the platform in 2025, with average creator revenue up 21% year over year, and more than 10 million users actively paying to support creators through fan charging alone.

One figure worth flagging honestly: a widely cited number puts total 2025 creator payouts around 8 billion RMB, roughly $1.1 billion. That specific figure comes from a financial outlet citing Bilibili's disclosures, not from something I found verbatim in the earnings transcript itself. The order of magnitude checks out against everything else in the disclosure (close to 3 million paid creators and 21% average growth both come from independent coverage of the same call), but the precise total is one step removed from the primary source. Worth knowing before you repeat it as gospel.

None of those 5 channels (incentive program, fan charging, live gifts, Sparkle, e-commerce affiliation) were built with a creator in Los Angeles or Mexico City in mind. They were built for a domestic Chinese audience with domestic Chinese payment rails and domestic Chinese verification. Bilibili dropped the identity verification requirement that used to block foreign signups, which is real progress, but removing the wall at the door isn't the same thing as opening the vault behind it. If the domestic system alone is already moving over a billion dollars a year to creators, the obvious question is what happens the day the international version of that system actually goes live, and right now nobody outside Bilibili's own roadmap has an answer.

Picking a Niche: The YouTube Playbook, Reapplied

Forget waiting for an official signal from Bilibili before you commit to anything. The niches that already work on the platform are visible today: anime commentary, gaming content, education, and the specific flavor of internet culture content that doesn't really have a Western equivalent yet.

Pick one. Narrow it hard, the way YouTube rewarded narrow niches over broad ones for the first 5 years of its own growth, not the broad category everyone else is about to flood into. Publish on a real cadence, not a sporadic one, because the algorithm on every platform like this rewards consistency over sporadic bursts of quality. And do it now, while the field is still mostly empty, the way calling a spawn point before a server fills up gets you the good real estate nobody else has claimed yet.

The mistake to avoid is treating this like a content play only. Every video, every post, every upload should be pushing viewers toward something you actually control. A mailing list signup in the description. A Telegram channel for the niche you're building. An affiliate link to something relevant. Bilibili's algorithm might feed you distribution today and take it away tomorrow, the way every platform algorithm eventually does to everyone. The list and the channel don't get taken away.

What Actually Pays While You Wait

Let's be precise about what's actually accessible right now versus what's promised in a press release. There is no native ad revenue share for international creators. There is no functioning brand deal marketplace for creators outside China. Both of those things are, per Bilibili's own framing, still in development.

What does work today is external affiliate marketing, the same mechanism that kept TikTok creators paid for 3 years before the Creator Fund existed. Links to your own products. Links to relevant affiliate programs. Redirecting the audience Bilibili is handing you toward channels that pay immediately instead of channels that might pay eventually.

This isn't the consolation prize version of the strategy. It's the actual strategy for the next however-many months or years it takes the international program to materialize. Treat the platform as a distribution engine for an audience you're building elsewhere, not as a payment processor you're waiting on. I use a similar discipline-over-speed framework for shipping with AI in my own pipelines, and the same instinct applies here: treat every dependency you don't control as an active risk you check on, not a line item you set once and forget.

The Geopolitical Risk Baked Into This Bet

A Chinese platform growing fast in the West invites exactly the kind of political fight TikTok has been living through for years, up to and including forced-sale pressure in the United States. Add the EU's DSA obligations around content moderation and data handling on top of that, and the regulatory surface gets bigger, not smaller, the bigger Bilibili gets.

One concrete signal that Bilibili already sees this coming: the company has an open role in Singapore specifically for global content moderation at scale, powered by AI. That's not the kind of hire you make if you think this expansion is going to stay quiet and uncontested. Think less friendly Discord mod, more HAL 9000 with a content policy PDF.

Building an audience on a platform that could face the exact same political turbulence TikTok has spent years navigating, is that a reasonable bet or a rerun of a script we've already watched play out once? I genuinely don't know which way this one breaks. Could be Bilibili slips through with less friction because it's smaller and less culturally saturated than TikTok was at its peak. Could be the opposite, and the scrutiny arrives faster precisely because everyone already has a TikTok-shaped playbook for how to fight a Chinese platform in Western courts and legislatures.

Completely unrelated, but worth mentioning since we're on the subject of platforms doing unpredictable things: my own Telegram bot spammed 40 test messages into a private channel last week because of a retry loop I never bothered to rate-limit. Not the same category of risk as a Congressional hearing, obviously, but it's the same underlying lesson. The infrastructure you build on top of something you don't fully control will eventually surprise you, and the surprise usually shows up at the worst possible moment. I've written before about the same table-you-don't-own problem that shows up any time your revenue depends on rules you didn't write, Bilibili is just that problem wearing a different flag.

So Is It Worth Moving Now?

What's actually known: the audience is real and it's massive, 376 million monthly users doesn't need a caveat. The TikTok precedent is real, dated, and specific (3 years between launch and an official payout program). Niches that already work on the platform are identifiable today without guessing. And affiliate options work right now, immediately, with zero dependency on anything Bilibili ships next.

What's genuinely unknown: when the international sponsorship marketplace actually goes live, what it will realistically pay once it does, and whether the same geopolitical pressure that's followed every successful Chinese platform into the West slows this expansion down before any of the rest of it gets a chance to matter.

The real bet is whether you're willing to build for 2 or 3 years without knowing what it pays beyond affiliate income, or even whether it pays at all beyond that. Nobody else can answer that one for you.

Sources

• Semafor, "China's YouTube, Bilibili, plans global expansion, English-language site," August 19, 2026
• CineD, "Bilibili Goes Global," August 25, 2026
• Engadget, "Chinese video platform Bilibili is going global," August 20, 2026
• Technology.org, "Bilibili Goes Global With New International App," August 21, 2026
• Gemlist, "How Much Does Bilibili Pay Creators in 2026," July 3, 2026
• The Globe and Mail, "Bilibili Earnings Call: Profit Milestone and AI Push," March 6, 2026
• Lickd, "Everything You Need to Know About the TikTok Creator Fund," June 2026
• Backstage, "What Is the TikTok Creator Fund?," April 2024

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Building an audience on a platform before monetization exists is exactly the move that worked on TikTok, and it's happening again on Bilibili. The demo-vs-product checklist in the welcome kit shows you how to tell if you're chasing a real opportunity or just vibe coding another side project that'll die when the money finally shows up.

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