Bilibili has relaunched its international app without identity verification, plans an English-language website and is hiring community managers in six cities including London. The company says content on its international and Chinese sites will be the same.
Bilibili is making a serious attempt at the world outside China. The video platform has relaunched its international app, is building an English-language website and is recruiting Western creators to post on it.
The substantive change is who can sign up. Overseas users previously had to supply a passport or other identity document to post, and that requirement has gone, while the app now mixes Chinese and international content in one feed.
The company is not being coy about what that means. Its account on X said the platform is going global and that content on the American and Chinese sites will be “the same.”
The scale behind it is not trivial. Bilibili’s Chinese platform has 376 million monthly active users, largely young, and it has spent a decade building the habits that YouTube depends on.
The hiring tells you where it is aiming. Community manager roles are open in Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, São Paulo, Istanbul and Tokyo, with AI content moderation positions based in Singapore.
The pitch to creators is a familiar one. Bilibili has approached Western names including MrBeast, and its materials describe an audience that is “Gen Z Coded, affluent and well-educated,” with a sponsored content marketplace in development.
American coverage has framed this as a question of whether Bilibili gets the TikTok treatment. That is a reasonable question in a country whose answer to a Chinese platform was a forced sale.
Europe does not work that way, and does not need to. The Digital Services Act applies from the moment a platform serves European users, and at 45 million monthly users in the EU it would be designated very large, bringing audits, risk assessments and researcher access with it.
Brussels has already used those powers on Chinese companies. Temu was fined €200mn under the DSA over unsafe products, which is the template for how this plays out here.
The identity decision is the one to watch. Dropping verification is a growth move, and the DSA requires platforms to assess the risks their design creates, including for minors, which is a harder conversation than a ban.
The competitive story is real underneath all this. YouTube is fighting Netflix for creators and paying for exclusivity, and now faces a rival with 376 million users that has just made the same regulatory bet Temu and AliExpress did.
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