What Bilibili Documentary Data Reveals: A Deep Dive into Trends, Genres, and Viewer Engagement

Data Collection and Basic Processing

We first obtain the Bilibili documentary query API and the detailed season API, then use Python requests to fetch data, parse JSON, and store basic fields (title, year, season_id, media_id) into a pandas DataFrame.

'https://bangumi.bilibili.com/media/web_api/search/result?style_id={0}&producer_id={1}&year={2}&order=2&st=3&sort=0&page={3}&season_type=3&pagesize=20'.format(style_id,producer_id,year,page)

Similarly the season detail API is:

'https://bangumi.bilibili.com/view/web_api/season?season_id={0}'.format(season_id)

After retrieving all pages we create a DataFrame with columns name, years, season_id, media_id and save it to CSV.

data_all.to_csv('documentary_data_allinfo.csv', index=0)

Data Visualization

Regional Distribution

Using pandas groupby we count documentaries per region and plot a pie chart.

The top regions are Mainland China, the United Kingdom and the United States, accounting for about 75% of the total.

Genre Comparison

We extract genre information, count single and paired genres, and build a DataFrame for Mainland China, UK and US. A stacked bar chart shows the distribution of genres such as History, Society, Culture, Technology, Nature, etc.

Trend Over Years

A pivot table of documentary counts by year and region is plotted, showing that Chinese documentaries surged after 2015 while US and UK numbers grew steadily.

Episode Length Distribution

Histograms compare per‑episode duration for the three regions.

Season Total Length and Episode Count

Violin plots show the distribution of total season length and number of episodes across regions.

Popularity Analysis

We compute a weighted popularity score (coins × 10 + favorites × 5 + danmakus) / views and plot a bubble chart where bubble size reflects view count and color reflects the score.

Comment Timing

Using the comment API we extract the first comment timestamp for each episode and draw time‑series plots for selected series such as “国家宝藏” and “人生一串”.

These analyses reveal differences in release schedules, episode counts and viewer engagement between Chinese and Western documentaries.