(Yicai Global) April 25 -- A Bilibili video blogger with more than 10 million followers said that the creative incentives the Chinese short-video platform offers him are not even enough to cover the office rent, after a slew of vloggers recently stopped uploading new videos to the streaming site.

Muyushuixin, one of Bilibili’s top 100 vloggers last year, denied rumors on April 23 that he had stopped posting content, but added that the situation has been really tough. He noted that his team has not received any advertising orders so far this year, and the creative incentives it received from Bilibili were insufficient to cover the office rent.

Swathes of vloggers said at the beginning of the month that they would stop posting content on Bilibili site because of lower income from the platform. Shanghai-based Bilibili has yet to comment.

Life has become difficult for Bilibili vloggers after the video streaming platform gradually cut incentives, and the overall advertising market began to shrink, according to industry insiders.

Bilibili had a net loss of CNY7.5 billion (USD1.1 billion) in 2022, according to the firm’s latest annual report. Its operating costs reached CNY18 billion (USD2.6 billion), CNY9.1 billion of which went to vloggers, an increase of 18 percent from the prior year.

Cost-cutting and boosting operational efficiency have been two of the most important tasks for Bilibili in the past two years. The company will focus more on improving gross profit margin, reducing losses, and pursuing healthy user growth this year, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Chen Rui said during Bilibili’s 2022 earnings call.

Bilibili had 3.7 million monthly active vloggers last year, up 45 percent from 2021, the earnings report showed. According to one with nearly 700,000 followers, the average income of top-tier vloggers declined between 20 percent and 30 percent last year.

Shares of Bilibili [HKG: 9626] ended 4.3 percent lower at HKD153.30 (USD19.53) apiece in Hong Kong today. Its New York-traded stock [NASDAQ: BILI] fell 2.5 percent to close at USD19.88 yesterday.

Editors: Shi Yi, Futura Costaglione