October 7, 2022

Bilibili Vs Douyin Vs Kuaishou – Key Comparison of China Short Video Platforms

【Posted on: 2021 March】

As live streaming & video consumption has increased dramatically, we see 3 apps as clear front runners in this space. In this blog post, we compare & explain the 3 different apps.

Bilibili – a platform that originated as a manga site, now a very active video platform, often dubbed as “youtube of China”
Douyin – the short-form video app and Chinese version of TikTok – although Douyin existed long before TikTok
Kuaishou – similar to Douyin, but more popular in lower-tier cities.

User Profile:

Kuaishou:

Male: 50.1%
Female: 49.4%
80%+ are born in the 90s, most users from lower-cities.

Douyin:

Male: 45.98%
Female: 54.1%
Most users from 1^st and 2^nd tier cities.

Bilibili:

Male: 57%
Female: 43%
The average age of most users is 21 years old.

Core Algorithm:

Interactive Features:

Kuaishou is good to create interactions, while Douyin prefers to use content recommendation algorithm to bring higher public traffic. Users on both platforms prefer thumbs up to comments; Humorous KOL has the highest number of interactions on both platforms.

Compared with Kuaishou and Douyin, Bilibili’s users prefer to express their support for bloggers through interactions such as forwarding, comment, and like. The real interaction is bullet comments, it has become a unique culture for Bilibili.

Content:

Kuaishou: The content of the platform is more life-oriented and diversified, users are more inclusive for content. The top five most popular content are beauty, fashion, humour, music, drama, and games.

Douyin: The content is younger and more fashionable, using popular songs to attract young users to pursue fashion trends, and the content can be easily imitated. The top five most popular content on Douyin are Little Sister, Little Brother, Drama/Humour, Dance, and Music.

Bilibili: The content is mainly from PUGC. What impresses users most is the bullet comments, ACGN (二次元) and the non-mainstream users （非主流）. The video of Bilibili has more than 7k main categories and over 800 content labels.