Nine years ago, Mr. Chen Rui promised Bilibili would have no ads, and they've been paying for that statement ever since. Without ads, they directly embed them into creators' videos, which has many drawbacks: 1. It unnecessarily increases creators' time and effort, as they have to think about how to embed ads without being abrupt—though most still are. 2. It makes advertisers' ads non-replicable; the replicable ones are just inserted as recycled content. 3. Creators get criticized for being too blatant when embedding ads for advertisers, leaving them exhausted after working for free. 4. No ads naturally lead to lower revenue.

They don’t even learn from YouTube’s excellent model—it’s baffling. The scariest thing is being foolish without realizing it, because you’ll do even dumber things to cover it up.