Nowadays, the social media advertisement is a digital marketing tool, it can spread rapidly through high community participation to ensure attention compared with traditional advertisements (Liu et al., 2025). It involves video, live and interactive topics to influence specific groups and promote the brand products. In this blog post, we will discuss the marketing advantages of video platform and the impact on the relationship between platform, creators and fans as the community ecosystem.
The advantages of video
- Using visuals and audio to convey information and evoke the emotions of the audience (Roldán, 2024)
- Establishing connections and influence on the audience through narrative story (Roldán, 2024)
- Videos can be shared and disseminated to reach a wider range of customers (Robinson, 2024)
- Increasing the conversion rate of potential customers (Roldán, 2024)
Video platforms, based on user-generated content (UGC) as core, the marketing value is heavily determined by the relationship between creators and audiences. Creators are ordinary people who gradually accumulate influence through continuous contents, with good community interactivity and cohesion, it is more convening for audience than celebrities (Boone, 2017). For brands, creators are the connection between products and specific audiences, creators with similar audience groups can generate a higher fan trust and conversion when they recommend products. Thus, we can notice that brand adopt marketing strategies such as sponsoring creators or influencers to advertise. On the other hand, this marketing strategy needs to test the accumulated trust, and the integration of commercial content may affect fans’ perception to the platform and brand. The establishment of community ecosystem to marketing is crucial.
Video platform without advertisements
For the platform, let’s take YouTube as an example first here, the advertisement of video platform refer to skippable and non-skippable advertisements (Creatify Team, 2026), advertisements may appear before, during or after when you watch the video (Biyani, 2024). While as one of the most important video platforms in China, Bilibili, They take the absence of advertisements (at the start and end) as a selling point, make the advertisement to be a part of the content (Sabio, 2026).
It surrounded around specific personality, interests and subcultural groups (Digital Crew, 2026), attracts through the non-commercial purpose of “generating electricity for love” and the model of danmu culture (bullet comments), it attracts creators to share, circulate and create purely based on interest, hobby and enthusiasm. Up to now, they adopt a business model based on creator produced content with brand sponsorship and creative implantation, emphasize the cultural and content environment, quality, relevance and the authenticity of the creators (Sabio, 2026).
During the development of serval ten years onbilibili, in order to follow fashion and popular trend, attract new users through commercial brand activities, continuous content operation and cross-border collaborations, so keep influencer among the “Z Generation” (Pan, 2024). However, the advertising investment and strategic change during this period made users that had been attracted initially based on anime and subculture feel uncomfortable, think of creator force to put their style into advertisement and video so that lose their original creative intention.
But nowadays’s Bilibili have formed a new type of social community within animation, game, music, art, fashion, life and technology, based on young culture (OctoPlus Media, n.d.), while the acceptance and understanding of advertising sponsorship have became more open, it is regarded as “Qiafan”/Eating. Creators no longer seek high frequency and low quality of product placement, thinking about how to integrate advertisements more appropriately with humor, personal touch and fit. While users/fans are no longer merely passively accept advertising information, they have became a part of community ecosystem through bullet comments with interaction. The platform have also launched Sparkle to help brands and agencies connect with creators to adjust marketing strategies and promote good advertising content (Zhao, 2021). Such a community environment avoided predictable and boring advertisements (Zhao, 2021).
For instance, this year, the public personal account of staff attract a large number of followers due to her repeated appearances in a frequent advertisements.
As a second-hand goods trading platform, the frequent appearance of its advertisements led to the audience’s habit and anticipation, when the creator mentions words like “old”, “new”, or “exchange” in the video, the audience will voluntarily say “here it is” or “as expected”. Subsequently, they will welcome the “The mysterious female with glasses” when this staff appeared.
Final thought
A platform based on community show an interactive model that brand provide demands and sponsorship, creators show creativity and content, and audiences participate in the dissemination, rather than merely inserting audio-visual elements. So case of Bilibili indicates that the acceptance of the integration of advertising and content in the platform community depends on the creators and the quality of the content. Under such ecosystem with frequent mutual social interaction, leaving the creators and audiences to provide content more freely as marketing strategy, it is more useful to establish a better connection with the audience.
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