He built an audio Bilibili. But Bilibili itself still has no business model — so what becomes of his? | 100 Entrepreneurs

Whether to build a business for ordinary users or a service for the industry — that is still unsettled.

MissEvan started out as nothing more than a hobby for Shao Bo. "Voice actors already shape which anime I watch and how I judge them."

The site — M Station, as its users call it — is an ACG (anime, comics and games) audio site with danmaku, the comments that scroll across the screen. Like Bilibili, its page layout borrows from Japan's Niconico. It is split into 12 sections — audio comics, radio dramas, recordings ripped from Japanese radio shows and more. Users can listen to audio comics of stories nobody has animated yet, open a light novel and hear someone read it aloud, even find hypnosis tracks meant to help them sleep.

Besides simply listening, users can fire off scrolling comments to say how they feel. 93% of what sits on M Station was uploaded by users, and the site adds more than a thousand new ACG audio clips a day.

When he founded this "audio Bilibili," Shao Bo was a senior studying computer science at Soochow University. In 2010 Japan released an anime called Durarara!!, which assembled about the strongest voice cast of its day — Miyuki Sawashiro, Mamoru Miyano, Kana Hanazawa and others. Inspired by it, and with help from a few volunteers, Shao Bo started MissEvan, handling the engineering and the operations alone in his spare time, updating the site two or three times a year.

He had in fact planned to turn M Station into a startup as early as his graduation from college. His family would not back a business built on ACG culture, so he shelved it. For the four years after he graduated, Shao Bo stayed at the family company. Then in 2014, watching Bilibili grow fast, he decided he could not keep sitting still. Over his family's objections, at 28 he struck out, moving back to Shanghai and taking the kind of programming job he had done in college. Most of his salary went into running M Station, and he stayed up until two or three most nights updating it.

Not long after he put his contact details on the site, investors began turning up one after another. Shao Bo thinks he read the moment well: "Back then … the whole ACG scene was starting to build momentum, but it hadn't really taken off yet."

The reason this business could work, he believes, is that Japanese voice actors really are popular in China.

The term Chinese fans use, seiyuu, is lifted straight from Japanese, and covers the people who dub anime, games and radio dramas. A decade or so ago, Chinese called anyone doing that work a dubbing actor; but as dubbed foreign films faded and Japanese anime spread in China, seiyuu became the word young people reach for.

Young people idolize voice actors. A 2015 report from iResearch, the China ACG User Report (《中国二次元用户报告》), found that 30.9% of users choose what anime to watch because they like a particular voice actor.

Bilibili's scrolling comments show the same thing. Natsume's Book of Friends was the most popular anime on Bilibili this season, and Hiroshi Kamiya, who voices Takashi Natsume, has built a huge following on a voice that is clean and endlessly adjustable. In the newest episode, posted on June 1, Daisuke Ono — whom fans like to pair with Kamiya — voiced a character making his first appearance, and the screen filled up again with "Yeshen," the nickname fans made out of the two men's names.

At first Shao Bo uploaded lines from anime he liked so people could download them as ringtones. Later, at users' request, he opened uploading to everyone, and plenty of people posted the Japanese voice-actor recordings they had been hoarding.

In its earliest days M Station's audio had only two categories: classic lines and Japanese radio dramas, the two kinds of content that lean hardest on a voice actor's voice. As uploads piled up, the site added Chinese radio dramas, music, games and more, until it took the shape we see today.

Shao Bo really had caught the fabled window. Between 2013 and 2015, Bilibili closed three rounds of funding in three years and became a genuine star company, and every investor wanted to build another Bilibili. M Station, carrying the same anime and ACG labels, caught the ride.

The first investor to come to Shao Bo worked for a rival's backer — he later called it "the first big hurdle I hit as a founder." He says he poured out every idea he had about ACG audio to the other side, without once considering that the ideas might be stolen.

Soon after, though, Bilibili chairman Chen Rui came to him with an offer. "I was very clear that I'd do the thing I'm best at, which is audio," Shao Bo said. Bilibili put 5 million yuan into M Station's angel round — though what followed showed that Bilibili's mark on M Station ran far deeper than that 5 million yuan.

At the end of May 2014, Shao Bo moved M Station from Shanghai to Beijing, into the same office space as Bilibili's games division. That was Chen Rui's suggestion too.

M Station's operating strategy also draws on Bilibili's. If user uploads start to diverge from the existing sections and get a good response, Shao Bo says, M Station may carve out a section for them. They weigh their own community's mood as well, deliberately doing less of what Ximalaya FM and Lizhi FM do and pushing instead the ACG character of the audio.

More than 300 groups now update radio dramas on M Station regularly, most of them made up of amateur ACG-audio enthusiasts. Beyond pure ACG audio they also make the "pan-ACG" material young people like, such as Three Lives Three Worlds: The Pillow Book (《三生三世枕上书》) and Ten Crimes (《十宗罪》).

"In its early days Bilibili also served only people who liked Japanese anime, but now it has makeup, TV dramas, everything. Our direction is the same as Bilibili's," Shao Bo said of M Station. On the whole, M Station has kept a fairly unified ACG style, and that is an important reason it gathered a core of users early on.

To pull in users, M Station has also been deliberately courting China's main animation platforms to develop audio IP. "Starting this year we've been working on audio content around domestic animation IP — The King's Avatar (《全职高手》), and some IP from Tencent and NetEase," Shao Bo said.

Once it holds the audio rights to an animated work, M Station hands production to voice-acting studios on the platform, then posts the finished dub. Its collaborations with Tencent Comics include Living With My Best Guy Friend (《同居男闺蜜》) and Psychic Princess (《通灵妃》); with NetEase there is How Do You Fall in Love When Your Art Styles Don't Match? (《画风不同怎么谈恋爱》). An episode usually draws about 7,000 clicks.

The King's Avatar is probably the biggest of those IPs. Lately M Station has handed some of the most prominent promotional slots on the site to it; click through and a whole run of related audio appears — outtakes from the recording booth, interviews with the voice actors, even good-luck messages the voice actors recorded for students sitting the college entrance exam. These clips all clear 10,000 clicks, a good number by M Station's standards. The heat around The King's Avatar anime has turned quite a few people into M Station users.

A King's Avatar voice-actor interview, made by M Station with China Literature.

In 2014, when Shao Bo first began building the company in earnest, M Station had 100,000 registered users. Since it started operating as a company, it has passed 3 million.

That is not a large number, mainly because the audio market itself is still niche.

The most popular content on M Station now is, without question, radio dramas and audio comics adapted from novels and anime. There is also a distinct ASMR section. ASMR is also called the "brain orgasm": some uploaders imitate the sound of a tongue in an ear, of someone eating chili peppers, of a comb pulled through hair, to stimulate listeners. Reportedly, some people put this on when they need to relax.

M Station has tried a "radio station" feature as well, and the site has a test version of livestreaming. Audio livestreaming isn't very different from radio — neither has a picture — except that livestreaming lets viewers trade text messages with the host. Shao Bo told QDaily: "Our livestreaming isn't about chasing last year's livestreaming trend either. It's that a lot of users wanted livestreaming and wanted to interact, so we tested it and plan to open it up." Against Zhihu Live and Ximalaya FM, he thinks M Station's edge in audio livestreaming is being narrower and younger: ACG content.

M Station plans to make money from paid content. For now, though, ACG isn't a profitable business; even Bilibili, the most successful company in the field, has yet to turn a profit on paid content.

Making money from paid audio content is no small task for M Station, especially since how big the audio market is remains an open question. By clicks, M Station's more popular audio runs around 40,000 to 50,000, nowhere near Bilibili's numbers. Largely that is because audio always serves the story and the plot, and the story and the plot are the heart of what ACG audiences consume.

Japan works the same way. Take Love Live!: based on figures from Japan's Oricon charts, Blu-rays and DVDs tied to the anime and the concerts came to an estimated 9.7 billion yen in output value. The radio-drama CDs — the part that is purely ACG audio — came to about 40 million yen. The gap between the two is enormous.

And even Japan's voice-acting industry, the thing that inspired Shao Bo to found M Station in the first place, keeps producing news about how badly voice actors are paid. In 2013, Daisuke Namikawa, one of Japan's best-known voice actors, said on a variety show: "There are more than 10,000 voice actors now, and only about 300 of them can make a living at it."

In 2016, Japan's NHK aired a documentary called Catch Tomorrow (《抓住明天》), which followed Minami Fujii, a voice actor five years into her career. Her monthly income from voice work was unsteady, and at its best only 110,000 yen, under 7,000 yuan, while her part-time job alone brought in 180,000 yen a month, about 11,000 yuan.

Whether it is voice actors' incomes or audio products like radio dramas, the value they produce simply isn't that high. That follows from what audio products are.

Voice actors dub anime, but the anime itself remains the most important thing drawing viewers, and the people and money it takes just to animate a show dwarf what the dubbing step takes. The same goes when voice actors dub radio dramas, games and other entertainment products. They can make those products more appealing, but they are not the key selling point.

Abroad, meanwhile, M Station is trying to make money as a middleman. By Shao Bo's account it already has a subsidiary in Japan: "We had a user in Japan who had connections there, and he was willing to become part of us, open a branch and connect the resources — it just clicked." M Station holds more than half of that Japanese company.

The Japanese company's main job is to deal with Japanese voice-actor agencies, serving Chinese companies that need Japanese voices. "Onmyoji hired a lot of Japanese voice actors; if a Chinese company comes through us to find Japanese voice actors, they get the cheapest, first-hand price," Shao Bo said. "Besides voice actors, we've also opened up Japanese rights and Japanese animation production, so a lot of companies can find Japanese animation studios through us."

In China, according to M Station's chief operating officer, Cai Mao, they plan to work more closely with voice-acting studios. Cai Mao sees M Station's future and the studios' growth as feeding each other.

"When a voice studio is pushing a newcomer, it needs a platform to promote the work, and we're a good platform for that. At the same time, we'll be pushing paid content, and that depends on their voice actors rising and gradually bringing us more traffic."

Seen this way, it is the middleman service aimed at animation and game companies and voice-acting studios — rather than the business facing ordinary users directly — that could make M Station money.

The advantage of that strategy is that China's animation and game industries are growing fast. One big selling point of Onmyoji, which swept the mobile game market in the second half of last year, was the well-known Japanese voice actors it hired for the game's characters. Since then, more and more mobile games have used voice actors as a selling point.

The limits are just as plain: China's supply of voice actors is still very small. As in many industries, this field has little to show for itself, from experienced talent to any system for training more.

Not long ago, because domestic TV dramas were so bad, the actors who dub them became a topic too. Several reports noted that the whole country has only about 600 full-time dubbing actors, far fewer than Japan's more than 10,000, and that dubbing an entire TV series pays only a few hundred yuan.

Worse than in Japan: Japanese voice actors can also grow into idols. Top ones like Nana Mizuki and Mamoru Miyano release records, hold concerts, even act in films alongside the dubbing work, and all of it makes up for how little the voice work itself pays. China's dubbing actors, by contrast, still get work mainly through personal connections, and have almost no shot at any of that.

Cai Mao told QDaily: "On the surface our site does ACG audio content, but the logic behind it is really the future of the whole domestic voice-acting industry and the turning of ACG into idols. Only once they rise will our content pull in more fans."

"In the end it comes down to constantly developing newcomers and the front end," Teng Xin, co-founder of Beidou Penguin Studio, once said. "As for the industry chain of the dubbing business, it starts with training; we need more talent coming through … We hope this chain produces more stars, more people with standing, because then people will pay attention to this industry, more and more newcomers will be willing to go into this line of work, the industry will get better and better, and it will become a healthy cycle."

Yet M Station has so far shown little appetite for training voice actors or ACG idols itself. That isn't only a question of capital; it also has much to do with M Station having started life as a platform, with technology rather than talent development as its strength.

If M Station can only prosper when the industry prospers, then for now it cannot be called a complete business.

Cover image: a still from Durarara!!.