AcFun, 81 Years Away from Becoming a Century-Old Store
Author / Cuttlefish Nyan
This article is reprinted with permission from “Reliable ACG.”
As of 2026, Tongrentang has been around for 357 years, Quanjude for 162, and AcFun for 19.
Putting the three together might seem a bit abrupt. But across the contemporary internet, video platforms that have survived 19 years can be counted on one hand, which really shows the weight AcFun carries.
56.com and Popcorn, once thriving, are long dead. Tudou stopped updating in 2023, YinYueTai lives on only in watermarks—but AcFun is still alive. With DAU barely above 100,000, an operations team of less than twenty, and annual revenue virtually zero, the outside world calls it a “living fossil of ACG internet.”
Fossils are dead, but living fossils are alive. It may not be living well, but staying alive is a skill in itself.
Congratulations to AcFun, this living fossil—only 81 years away from becoming a century-old institution.
In its nineteen years, AcFun has been sold six times. If an object can be passed around six times, it might have become a heirloom. From this perspective, AcFun is a treasure of the internet world, though it’s cost its former owners quite a bit.
In 2010, founder xilin sold AcFun to Bianfeng, and the new owner was Chen Shaojie, then general manager of Bianfeng’s Wuhan branch. Old Chen didn’t just sit idly—he hatched a live-streaming module called “Shengfangsong” inside AcFun. In 2014, it split off and changed its name to Douyu.
Douyu later went public. And since then, far more people know Douyu than know AcFun.
After Chen Shaojie, Cai Dongqing of Alpha Group acquired about 92% of AcFun’s shares in his personal capacity. Then came Youku Tudou, SBCVC, Huace Film & TV, and Chinese All Digital Publishing, one after another, pouring in money.
Six patrons in six years—AcFun became Web 2.0’s most diligent ACG financing expert.
Those who passed through AcFun and held executive positions later had mixed fortunes, but their time at AcFun meant something to their subsequent paths. Looking back at their career histories, AcFun felt like a transit station—people came and went, taking something away with them, and later leaving something behind elsewhere.
AcFun is a master of the tortoise breathing technique—every time everyone thinks it’s dead, it manages to resurrect.
In the summer of 2009, the server crashed and the site closed. The butterfly effect of this shutdown was huge, because a user named ⑨bishi couldn’t stand it and built his own small site called mikufans, later renamed Bilibili.
Every year after that, AcFun would inevitably suffer outages and undergo sit-up-style resurrections.
Until February 2018, AcFun faced its biggest crisis. The website and app were completely inaccessible, and nearly every day media and KOLs were writing obituaries for AcFun. The official account seized the moment to post on Weibo: “I want to live another 500 years!”
The whole internet was shouting to save AcFun, and the topic trended. But among those shouting for help, how many visited AcFun every day? How many never thought to open this old creaky site normally, but just felt it would be a shame if it disappeared?
AcFun knew the answer itself, so it never asked.
Five hundred years is too extravagant, but after surviving ten days and nights, AcFun really did rise from the ashes. Ten days later, AcFun was back on its feet.
At its peak, AcFun had 3 million DAU. By 2026, DAU was just over 100,000.
Videos recommended on the homepage could make the leaderboard with just a few hundred views. Even the top of the daily chart—even for a hot dance in black stockings—could barely break 10,000 views. The anime department went from exclusive licensing (dubbed “the ACG buying genius”) to having only a dozen or so series on the entire site. The operations team shrank to fewer than 20 people, and technical maintenance relies on Kuaishou’s occasional support.
But AcFun’s audience never gets pessimistic. Some think this is a “familiar mode.” In the comments section, the same few IDs keep popping up. A danmaku or comment you post today might get a reply a week later. Other sites are communities; AcFun is a living room. And a living room is so cozy.
Actually, danmaku on AcFun has long stopped being just for others to see—after all, few works can fill an entire video’s danmaku reservoir. If you can, on a lonely night, face the empty video section and jot down a few lines about your mood today, then come back later to revisit them, it has a unique charm.
No one has counted how many electronic monologues are stored in AcFun’s danmaku pool, but using danmaku to hijack someone else’s video and write a cyber diary sounds pretty cool.
Gradually, AcFun degraded from a content platform to a content museum—the exhibits are still-glowing old videos from years ago, and the visitors are old-timers who can’t bear to leave.
Although AcFun is in its twilight, what it has incubated might well become century-old institutions.
Douyu was spun off from AcFun’s Shengfangsong. During the years Chen Shaojie handled AcFun, he planted the seed of live streaming in Wuhan. It later grew into a listed company, the second stock in the game-live-streaming sector. Sun Min served as AcFun’s CEO in 2015 and later found his comfort zone in Youku Anime, continuously contributing to Chinese animation. Alpha Group, Chinese All Digital Publishing, Kuaishou—these benefactors may not have entirely wasted the money they poured into AcFun; at least they bought a piece of exclusive memory from old-school ACG fans.
AcFun nurtured gods, and also nurtured plenty of eccentric talents. Though AcFun itself lives in pieces, the people who walked out of it have propped up various realms of China’s internet, live streaming, and anime.
Kichiku culture sprouted on AcFun: “Golden Fertilizer,” “Golden Manager,” “Lan Lan Lu”—these internet dreamcore memes all originated there. The ACG New Year’s Gala was pioneered by AcFun in 2010. Later, various forms of “New Year’s Festival” became annual highlights for the entire ACG circle.
AcFun itself doesn’t reclaim these things, and doesn’t intend to. It just stands still, watching the eggs it incubated grow into free birds that fly higher and farther than itself.
In June 2018, Kuaishou acquired AcFun outright for a valuation of 1.04 billion yuan. As mentioned earlier, that year AcFun had just endured a life-or-death ten days—capital chain broken, unable to pay salaries or even server fees. Brother Kuaishou extended a helping hand, promising to maintain AcFun’s independent brand, independent operation, and retain the original team.
In 2019, Kuaishou invested 570 million yuan in AcFun for a super-uploader support plan, helping rebuild the technology and upgrade content. In 2020, AcFun’s DAU briefly hit 3 million—that was the most glorious year after the acquisition and up to now.
Later, Kuaishou itself, as a listed company, had to fight the already-invincible “Note” platform, faced profitability pressure, and had tough battles like the Kling AI. The priority of a money-losing, revenue-lagging business like AcFun naturally slipped. In 2021, the policy of pre-censoring anime was implemented, and the anime AcFun had purchased got stuck in censorship, unable to be released, causing the last batch of content users to start leaving.
Kuaishou never let AcFun down. From 2018 to 2026—eight years—which benefactor would support a platform with 100,000 DAU and nearly zero revenue for eight years?
ACers will never forget the brother’s loyalty.
AcFun has a group of old users—so old that they don’t even visit AcFun except to show off their UID. But they’re a bit “selfish”: on one hand, they can’t even remember AcFun’s current domain; on the other, they don’t want it to disappear. If it disappeared, they would have to shed a few sincere tears, post a comment on Bilibili, attach an old picture of AC Niang, and write a caption like “AC is here, love is always here.”
Does AcFun need this kind of user? Who knows. But AcFun is even more reluctant to part with these “fake-hearted” old users. There is a very delicate relationship between them and AcFun—they treat each other like stray cats they’ve been feeding for years. They don’t pet them normally, but if the cat truly disappeared one day, they would still look around for a couple of times, worried enough to lose sleep.
Coming back: AcFun is still 81 years away from becoming a century-old institution.
Eighty-one years is enough for an infant to become a nonagenarian, for a mega-corporation to rise and fall through multiple sit-ups, for the internet to hype up Web 30.0. For AcFun to survive those 81 years, it will probably need to play dead dozens more times, sell itself a few more times, and be rescued a few more times.
Probably no one expects AcFun to live to any particular form in the future, because no one can even imagine what it would be like if it—or we—live to see its centennial.
But when I think of AC Niang at 100 years old singing “I really want to live another 500 years,” anyone who can keep a straight face must be—
