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Since 2024, the leverage for raising the price of Bilibili's traffic has been in the hands of an AI unicorn.

On the homepage of Bilibili, or in the video recommendation area, you can always see a link called "Kimi AI Smart Assistant” promotional link.

Behind Kimi is an AI unicorn with a valuation of over $3 billion.Dark Side of the Moon". Starting from the Spring Festival in 2024, Kimi's marketing and customer acquisition focused on Bilibili.

Several practitioners told Intelligent Emergence that the CPA (Cost Per Action, average cost per user conversion) quote given by Dark Side of the Moon on Bilibili was as high as around 30 yuan.

"Recently, for every user conversion on Kimi's PC terminal, (Yuedan's offer) is 38-40 yuan per person." said a practitioner. This means that for every registered user Kimi obtains through Bilibili, Yuezhidangfang has to pay at least 30 yuan.

"Such high marketing expenses are rare for a company that has been established for less than two years and has not yet achieved scaled commercialization," an investor commented on "The Emergence of Intelligence."

△Kimi’s promotion on the homepage of Bilibili.

The 30 yuan per person customer acquisition offer is a dimensionality reduction blow to most startups. In the marketing circle, Kimi has become a "catfish" because of his high customer acquisition offer, which puts other AI companies that invest in B Station under great pressure.

"Bilibili also uses bidding to allocate traffic. Once the price quoted by others becomes higher, the traffic allocated to me by the market will decrease."AIGCthe company told Intelligence Emerge.

In mid-2023, the above-mentioned company used a CPM (Cost Per Mille) price of around 5 yuan to obtain a registration conversion rate of more than 70% on Bilibili. However, after the Spring Festival, when it quoted a CPM of 5 yuan again, the result was shocking - the registration conversion rate of 70% was almost halved.

In the traffic market swallowed by the Dark Side of the Moon, only profitable game companies could grab a place. In addition to Kimi, the only advertisements that can be seen on the homepage of Bilibili are Lilith's game "Sword and Expedition".

Kimi has become popular, but other AI companies are more anxious

“Before October 2023, the focus of the marketing department of each large model company’s meeting will beOpenAI, after October, it all became Kimi. "

A marketing employee of a large model company summarized the focus of his work in the past six months to "Emergence of Intelligence": studying the channels for Kimi user fission, and knowing better than Dark Side of the Moon how to promote another Kimi.

With the technological changes brought about by the big model, many players are looking forward to seeing "WeChat" and "Tik Tok" emerging in the AI ​​era.

However, since 2023, most AI products have been short-lived, and few phenomenal products have appeared. The once popular Miaoya Camera and Honghong Simulator also found it difficult to escape the inverted U-shaped curve of user growth rate and quickly lost their popularity.

Amid the industry's anxiety about creating a hit product, in October 2023, Kimi, labeled "long text generation", emerged and became a phenomenal product.

What has stimulated AI practitioners is that the curse of being a flash in the pan seems to have failed for Kimi. In April 2024, six months after its release, Kimi still ranked first in the AI ​​product list with a 60% increase in PC visits.

If the label of "long text" is Kimi's first shot to break out of the circle, then investing in the right channel of Bilibili is the key to maintaining the rapid growth of Kimi's visits.

△Data source: Similarweb, Map: Intelligent Emergence

Similarweb's monitoring data shows that in March 2024, after the promotion of B station, Kimi's visits showed a significant growth trend, with an increase of 402.9% at one point, andZhipu AIThe gap between Zhipu Qingyan and MiniMax's Conch AI has opened up an order of magnitude.

Kimi's popularity has made Bilibili a hot commodity in the AI ​​marketing channel. Many AI companies have found that Bilibili's user profile of "young, liking new things, and being creative" coincides with the seed players that early AI applications were looking for.

Since April 2024, under the keywords such as "AI tools", "useful products" and "App" on Bilibili, AI products such as ByteDance's "Doubao", Tiangong AI, and MiniMax's "Xingye" have appeared.

The battle of AI traffic investment soon spread to Xiaohongshu, which has a strong atmosphere of grass-planting, and Douyin, which has a huge user base. As online channels become increasingly crowded, the hot battlefield of marketing has also spread to offline. In subway stations and elevators, Zhipu Qingyan’s app can be seen everywhere; ByteDance’s big model Doubao has also made its presence felt at airports.

△Byte Doubao’s plaza at the airport. Image source: Photo by the author

With hundreds of investment flows, according to Similarweb statistics, the five AI unicorns (Zhipu AI, MiniMax,Baichuan Intelligence、Zero One EverythingThe total visits to products such as "The Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Dark Side of the Moon" soared 963% in 6 months.

How long can the AI ​​marketing war with a price tag of 30 yuan per person last?

However, the dark side of the moon that makes others anxious is also trapped in the high marketing cost of 30 yuan per person.

An investor once revealed in March 2023 that Kimi's average customer acquisition cost was 12-13 yuan per person, and the daily customer acquisition cost was at least 200,000 yuan.

Kimi is still in its early stages of commercialization, and marketing can only burn financing. An insider told Intelligence Emergence that Kimi's high marketing costs have made some shareholders feel unsustainable, "Everyone will doubt whether your product strength is enough to maintain the natural growth of users without marketing."

On the bright side, several AI unicorns still have ample financing to support this money-burning marketing game. But outside of the unicorns, a large number of AI startups that have not yet started commercialization have been hurt by the marketing quotation of 30 yuan per person.

"At the beginning of 2023, the general CPA quotation of Bilibili was less than 10 yuan per person. The current quotation has more than doubled." An AI practitioner told "Intelligence Emergence". Because it is unable to compete with the quotations of large companies and unicorns, the effect of investing in traffic on Bilibili is far worse than it was a year ago.

An AI video platform entrepreneur recently shifted her market focus to overseas markets. The increasingly low cost-effectiveness of marketing in China was an important reason for her to "withdraw from the competition".

She told Intelligence Emergence: "On overseas platforms such as Google and Twitter, CPM (cost per thousand impressions) is the more mainstream marketing model. The platform will also adjust the push model based on the client's target user portrait to make customer acquisition more accurate."

With the same marketing expenses, she found that the marketing of overseas platformsROI(Return on investment) is generally 20%-30% higher than that in China.

When will the 30-yuan per-person marketing war come to an end? An investor estimated to "Intelligence Emergence" that the money-burning war will continue until the first half of 2025: "At that point, AI companies will not be mainly concerned about acquiring customers, but rather screening out a wave of core users who can pay and deliver commercial results."

It remains to be seen whether the high marketing costs can bring corresponding commercial returns to AI companies. The only certainty is that the winners of the AI ​​marketing war are the traffic platforms.

An AI practitioner made a joke about "Emergence of Intelligence": "In the AI ​​era, the most successful commercialization is Bilibili."