A graph $G=(V,E)$ is called 1-planar if it admits a drawing in the plane such that each edge is crossed at most once. In this paper, we study bipartite $1$-planar graphs with prescribed numbers of vertices in partite sets. Bipartite 1-planar graphs are known to have at most $3n-8$ edges, where $n$ denotes the order of a graph. We show that maximal-size bipartite $1$-planar graphs which are almost balanced have not significantly fewer edges than indicated by this upper bound, while the same is not true for unbalanced ones. We prove that maximal possible sizes of bipartite $1$-planar graphs whose one partite set is much smaller than the other one tends towards $2n$ rather than $3n$. In particular, we prove that if the size of the smaller partite set is sublinear in $n$, then $|E|=(2+o(1))n$, while the same is not true otherwise.