Are you a content creator who wants to share videos in China, or are you more of a viewer who wants to catch up with the latest viral trends or posts from your favorite Chinese vlogger?
Free to use (with paid subscription options) and boasting 333.6 million monthly active users, and 28.1 million paying users in 2022, Bilibili is one of China’s premier video-sharing websites.
In this blog post, I’m going to give you step-by-step instructions on how to set up a personal account on bilibili.com.
Before we begin, it’s worth mentioning that there are two Bilibili websites—bilibili.com and bilibili.tv.
Bilibili.com. is the one everyone uses in mainland China, and it’s where you can see (or even share your) great Chinese content.
The other site is bilibili.tv, which is a forum and not the focus of this post.
A second disclaimer: We will be setting up a personal account rather than a business one.
Personal accounts are useful for posting content, but they don’t come with all the options and features of a business account, such as advertising.
If you’re an individual, an influencer, or a KOL instead of a business, and you’re looking for a place for your content, you’ll want a personal account on bilibili.com.
Getting Started
A Googe Search for Bilibili brings up both versions of the site. So, begin by selecting bilibili.com.
Here’s the Bilibili homepage:
I didn’t translate this page using the in-browser translator because I couldn’t complete certain steps of the sign-up process.
However, to get around it, a tool called “Zhongwen Chinese Popup Dictionary” will display the English translation for the characters.
Creating an Account
To get started, you’ll need to click on the big blue button 登录 here to log in.
Scroll down and select the right-hand side option to register.
The registration page will contain a large QR code and two separate login options. The first one is for passwords; however, you need the second SMS Login option instead (highlighted in the picture below).
Enter your phone number and country code, and then press the blue button on the right to receive your SMS code.
The next page will be a type of Chinese character CAPTCHA security check to ensure you’re not a bot. Unfortunately, your browser tool of choice won’t be able to help you out here, but it’s easy enough.
Select the images in the order they appear (there could be up to four characters).
Clicking the blue accept button at the bottom should send you an SMS code immediately, but if it doesn’t, repeat the process a few times until it works.
Entering the SMS code into the text bar underneath the phone number and pressing the blue button should mean you’re all registered.
If you’ve registered successfully, the SMS registration page will close, and you can check your new account by dragging the cursor over the default profile picture icon (Bilibili’s smiling TV/Robot logo) next to the main search bar at the top of the page.
Success!
As you can see from the image above, I’ve been automatically assigned a random name, which is just a sequence of numbers. Otherwise, it’s a bare profile, but we’ll fix that in the next section.
Changing Settings
Note: Now that you’ve received your SMS code and completed the registration process, you can set your browser to translate the pages into English.
As you can see from the example of the translated page below, the English is pretty easy to follow, but sometimes the pages may take a while to auto-translate, and they might look not so…normal.
You’ll probably want to personalize your profile by adding more basic information, and setting up a password, etc.
If you hover over your default profile picture, you can access the option for the Personal Center.
On the top right, you’ll see an option for Modify Information, which will take you to a page where you can choose a nickname, include your gender, and add your date of birth.
Hit the save option before changing other parts of your profile.
Another important thing you might want to do is check out the security information to change your password in Account Security.
The first option on the next screen is to set your password, and clicking on that will forward you to another SMS code request screen.
After you’ve received the SMS on your phone and entered it, you’ll be asked to change your password.
Note: Changing your password in this way means you won’t have to go through the process of receiving an SMS every time you want to log into your account. Nevertheless, as you’ll see over the next few steps, this isn’t always the case. If Bilibili notices a change in your device, it will request another SMS code.
However, changing your password means you have to log in again and repeat the process of receiving an SMS and completing the Chinese character CAPTCHA.
Click the blue button to start the process of logging back in.
Hopefully, that’s all gone smoothly, and you’ve logged back in.
By this stage, you’ve entered your phone number, and chosen a password, but it’s also a good idea to add an email address in case you need an alternative way of logging in.
Before you add your email address, you have to receive….another SMS code.
At this point, you should have the following things set up:
- Phone number
- Password
Now, head back to the Personal Center page (hold the cursor over the default profile picture again).
Choose the Modify Information option again.
If the page has auto-translated, you’ll find the information by clicking “my message.”
Your username and nickname are displayed at the top, and it’s your username (not your nickname) you’ll use to log in.
Note: You cannot change your username.
To test that everything works, you need to log out and enter your username and password.
There’s a chance you’ll be asked for an SMS code again, but for all future logins on the same device, your username and password combination should be enough to access your personal Bilibili account.
“Cans and Cannots” on Bilibili
Your personal account is all set up, you’re logged back in and ready to go.
However, as a new account, there are a few limitations on what you can and can’t do initially.
Let’s take a look.
The image below is a random video selected from Bilibili’s homepage. You can follow this user by clicking on the blue + button, and, of course, you can watch the video.
Note: The pages don’t always auto-translate.
However, at present, this account can’t post comments on the video or interact with other users because it hasn’t gone through Bilibili’s test process.
It might sound weird, but to become a “real” user of Bilibili, you have to pass a test.
The test will determine whether the account user is “civil enough” to comment on videos and interact with other users.
Alternatively, to bypass the test requirement, you could enter a special Invitation Code, but there’s a good chance you don’t have one.
And without an invitation code, you have no choice but to take the test.
Bilibili’s Test
To do this, go to your icon and select the Individual “My” Area.
If you do happen to have an invitation code, now’s the time to use it. If not, click the pink button to take the test.
The test pages cannot be translated by the browser or the Chinese dictionary extension; therefore, this could be extremely difficult if you don’t speak Chinese.
You may know somebody who reads Chinese to help you navigate the questions.
A lot of the questions on the test are about Bilibili culture. For example, the question in the image below is asking: “What are the people who create content called?”
Are they called “A. Up主 (Up zhǔ) or B.博主 (Bó zhǔ)?” (which means blogger).
The answer is A. Up主 (Up zhǔ).
The other questions relate to etiquette because Bilibili wants users to commit to being civil and polite to avoid any unwanted behavior on the site.
Note: You don’t need to pass the test to watch or publish videos.
Just click the pink button at the top of the screen to start publishing your own videos.
And that’s how you set up a personal account on Bilibili.
Contact Us
If you’ve been following these steps, I hope you’ve successfully set up your account and are already checking out all the Chinese content available on Bilibili or publishing your own.
As you can see from the steps in the post, you may encounter a few obstacles or difficulties (especially when receiving the SMS codes), along with some strange Chinese-to-English auto-translations of the web pages.
Re-requesting the SMS code a few times will usually get it to work.
If you’re setting up multiple accounts, or accounts for advertising, then that’s something Nanjing Marketing Group can help you with.