Transcripts
Weibo Corporation's management answers for the business every quarter. These are the exchanges that explain it best — verbatim, from the call transcripts preserved in Sources. Each link opens the full transcript at that page in a new tab.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call — Q1 2026
The most recent call: why users are still shrinking on purpose, what is actually driving the 9% ad rebound, and why margin fell to 28%. · Open the full transcript →
The 2026 plan in one paragraph: retention over reach, with the feed still mid-repair and video carrying time spent.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): Next, I will highlight Weibo's key development in the first quarter across user growth and engagement, content ecosystem competitiveness and monetization. On user growth and engagement, in 2026, we will focus on improving user retention and building a high-quality, highly engaged and sustainable user growth framework. Information feed still remains in optimization stage post the product update last year and related strategies began to deliver positive results starting in March, with content consumption and interactive measures among our core users beginning to improve. And meanwhile, the sustained growth in time spent on our video playback pages has served as a more solid foundation for the growth of our overall user time spent and retention.
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The two-part monetization formula — sell content marketing into more verticals, let AI do the conversion work.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): We have continued to execute on 2 key strategies that have underpinned our ad products and sales teams since 2025. First, driving broader adoption of Weibo's unique content marketing value across more industries and clients. And second, systematically improving ad conversion effectiveness by leveraging AI capabilities. In the first quarter, Weibo's ad revenues increased 9% year-over-year. Overall, we will continue to leverage differentiated strength in hot trends plus social plus content marketing across proven marketing scenarios such as new product launches, Chinese New Year campaign, sports events and celebrity marketing, leading to growth across multiple key industries. By industry, the main growth contributors in the first quarter were verticals such as Internet services, Local services and Automobiles.
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MAU falls while DAU holds: management ties the gap to its own channel-spend cuts, not to disengagement.
Cao Fei (Chief Financial Officer): In March 2026, Weibo's MAUs and average DAUs reached 562 million and 254 million, respectively. During the first quarter, we continued to focus on user quality, retention and engagement. MAUs saw more of this sequential decline, mainly reflecting our ongoing rationalization of channel investment and the transition forming our information feed revamp. At the same time, DAUs remained resilient and improved slightly quarter-over-quarter, supported by better retention of core users, continued optimization of the homepage feed experience and improving video consumption.
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Where the five points of margin went: ad production and marketing spend on monetization initiatives, taken deliberately.
Cao Fei (Chief Financial Officer): Total cost and expenses for the first quarter were USD 301.5 million, an increase of 13%, mainly due to higher ad production cost and marketing expense, partially offset by the decrease of general and administrative expense. During the quarter, we continued to make major investments in selected monetization-related initiatives primarily around advertising product capabilities, content marketing ecosystem and client service offerings. We will continue to manage the pace of these investments with ROI discipline and within a controllable budget framework. Operating income in the first quarter was USD 119.8 million, representing operating margin of 28% compared to 33% in the same period last year. […] While operating margin declined year-over-year due to these investments, we remain focused on balancing near-term execution needs with sustainable profitability and healthy cash flow generation.
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The distinction that matters: ad revenue grew while the customers buying it are under margin pressure.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted), answering the first analyst question on the ad outlook: And next, I would like to say that in Q1, overall speaking, we had a better than expectation growth of our ad revenue in terms of the consumption area. But if you're talking about the key accounts that we have, especially from different verticals, we've been seeing a stressful situation. For instance, in terms of automotive sales, they've been experiencing double-digit decrease. And for the handset, they had also a decrease in terms of their overall revenue because of the additional cost of the memory, and most of the handset makers have to adjust their overall price. And also for e-commerce, we've been experiencing also a stressful profitability situation.
So even if our ad revenue was growing, we have still a stressful operation for our customers.
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Why AI-generated ad creative is not being pushed to scale — public acceptance is the gating test, not capability.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): So AI is pretty much useful in generating those ad materials for those KOLs to be very much facilitative. But of course, in Q1 and Q2, we've been seeing some of the headwinds in terms of the adoption rate as well as the acceptance by the public in terms of those ad generated by AI or those contents generated by AI. So at the current stage, we're not doing a massive commercialization as for the front. But still, we are going to wait still. We are doing some internal testing among the KOLs and the public acceptance is the criteria for us to evaluate the before we go massive commercialization.
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The purpose of the feed revamp stated bluntly: break the dependence on the relationship-based feed, accept the transition pain.
Jennifer Huang (UBS); Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): So we had a lower number of pre-installs and also on the user side as well. And in Q1, you can see that we've been seeing a very good user acquisition. We can see a user acquisition cost increase because it was actually the hot season in terms of the AI application adoption and also the usage. But at the same time, still, we are keeping a very good number in terms of the social-based users and also the click-based users. And after Q2, we are going to see a very good improvement both in terms of the time spent, total time spent as well as the interactive volume. […] So in the long run, our overall objective of doing the update and changes of this existing product is that we would like to, first of all, get rid of those user experience that was primarily based on the relationship-based feed. And of course, at the current stage, there are still some of the challenges from the user side in terms of the acceptance and getting used to this new version. But still, in the long run, we have 2 objectives by doing this kind of change. First is that we hope that we are going to fully release the value of Weibo to those consumers.
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Q3 2025 Earnings Call — Q3 2025
The clearest account of the feed rebuild and of why advertiser budgets are rotating back from performance to brand. · Open the full transcript →
Management sizes the feed rebuild against the shift to algorithmic sorting — and concedes near-term user pain.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): The restructuring of the information feed was strategic significance for Weibo, which is comparable to our transition from the chronological to algorithm-based sorting several years ago. In the short term, user experience for certain user group may face some challenges. However, from a long-term perspective, the increased weight of recommendation content and video content will strengthen Weibo’s core competitiveness as a social media platform while laying a solid foundation for the sustainable and healthy development of our content ecosystem.
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The only hard numbers on AI search scale: 70m MAU, DAU and queries up more than 50% sequentially.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): In the third quarter, the MAUs of Weibo intelligent search product exceeded 70 million with its DAU and search queries increasing more than 50% quarter-over-quarter. This momentum not only reflects users’ recognition of Weibo’s intelligent search product, but also further contribute to the expansion of Weibo search ecosystem. As a result, the total search queries on Weibo increased 20% quarter-over-quarter in the third quarter.
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Why brand budgets are coming back: performance bidding costs rose and a tax rule capped deductible feed-ad spend.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): According to client feedback, after several years of substantial and continuous budget allocation towards performance ad, the bidding for the commercial traffic has become increasingly intense, which pushed their cost upward. In addition, the government recently issued tax policy that limit the cap of the feed ad spend for tax deduction purpose. This dynamic has driven clients to reevaluate their ad budget allocation, placing renewed emphasis on the value of the brand advertising.
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The customer-concentration fact of the year: e-commerce up over 50% and Alibaba spend up 112% to $45.5m.
Cao Fei (Chief Financial Officer): Notably, the e-commerce sector recorded over 50% yearover-year growth, driven by similar policy amid a boosting domestic demand and consumption. […] Ad revenues from Alibaba reported robust growth of 112%, reaching USD 45.5 million in the third quarter.
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Guidance philosophy: no 2026 number, only the event calendar and the subsidy risks that bracket it.
Alicia Yap (Citigroup); Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): So you know that in 2025, we did not have any hot topics or hot trends or events happening. But in 2026, we are expecting several important events like the Winter Olympics and also the World Cup as well. […] So as a result, it is very difficult for me to give you a very precise prediction of our performance in 2026.
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Q2 2025 Earnings Call — Q2 2025
The teaching call: fifteen years of feed architecture explained, plus the first real unit economics on AI advertising. · Open the full transcript →
How the feed evolved — reverse-chronological, then unread-post ranking in 2016, a split feed in 2018, now interest-first.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): To be specific, the information feed were originally distribute — distributed in reverse chronological order based on the posting time. As content creation became more convenient for users, the explosive amount of content produced largely exceeded the amount of content consumed. And therefore, to improve content consumption efficiency, we upgraded the algorithm of information feeds from purely time line-based to focusing on distributing unread post from individual accounts being followed by users in 2016. Later in 2018, we introduced a new feed product structure composing of a relationship-based feed and an interest-based feed, aiming to broaden users’ content discovery and increase their content consumption scale. In recent years, users’ content consumption behaviors have been altered by the recommended content.
To adapt to this trend, we initiated a strategic revamp of our homepage information feed in the first half of this year, which makes the interest-based feed as a primary interface when user access Weibo.
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The supply side of the new feed: cross-vertical KOLs make half the content, and traffic share shifts toward mid-tier creators.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): Currently, over 50% of the interest-based content from key verticals are generated from cross vertical KOLs, which benefit from our years of deep cultivation in vertical areas and advantages of our vertical content operation. In the second quarter, vertical content consumption accounted for 60% of the interest-based feed consumption. And meanwhile, the new interest-based feed optimized content quality by allocating more traffic to high-quality authentic content. This has increased the traffic share for KOLs and selected accounts, while also providing more growth opportunities for mid-tier and long-tail KOLs.
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The demand-side thesis: FMCG advertisers hitting diminishing returns on performance and seeding are moving money back to brand.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): In the FMCG category, including food and beverage, footwear and apparel and personal care and beauty sectors, we’re seeing shifts in clients’ marketing strategies. After years of heavy investment in the e-commerce performance and KOC seeding, more and more advertisers now face diminishing return, which prompt a reconsideration of building. For instance, certain advertisers who had previously shifted most of their budget to performance-based marketing or influencer seeding are now reallocating budget towards selected endorsement, content IP creation, and sponsorship. While this transition is gradual and measured, we believe this trend is likely to continue.
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AI in ads, quantified: over 10% of creative assets AI-made, eCPM up single digits, bigger lifts on leads than on app installs.
Felix Liu (UBS); Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): In terms of ads, I think most of the platforms are alike. That means they are mostly concentrating on the performance-based ads. And for us, on one side, it’s about the auto placement of the AI assets. So in Q2, we launched our AI ad creative platform called [ Linchong ]. And right now, for the assets that is consumed, actually more than 10% is already from AI. And from the results, just now we already talked about it, for Q2 in the information feed ads, the eCPM grew by single digit, less than 10%. And then when it comes to CTR, I think for different clients, for different client types, things would be different. For the leads type, the CPR would be higher, maybe around 20%. But for the apps, maybe more than 10%. But comprehensively, the eCPM maybe grew by less than 10%.
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The bottleneck on AI ads is not the model — brand clients must approve every asset, so adoption is capped near 10% this year.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): So the overall result was pretty good. But for the brand clients, the biggest challenge is still in the restraints of the process of ad placement. So basically, for our brand customers, when they place the information feed ads, they require all the assets to be approved on their side. So that kind of work process for AI ads, which is quite customized for different people, it’s not really adaptive. So that really limits our customers, especially the brand customers when they want to use our AI ads at scale. So generally speaking, for the brand ads, I think if we can use AI ads on a large scale, the performance and the results would be even more obvious in terms of this improvement. But it may take some time for our customers to gradually accept it.
So we expect that at the end of the year, maybe more than 10% of our brand customers can start to use the AI ad system.
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On search monetization: no business model exists yet in the industry, so grow the user base first.
Timothy Zhao (Goldman Sachs); Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): And for the search ads, I just introduced that, of course, there are certain customers. They have some expectation on the monetization or commercialization. But for us or even in the industry, there’s no clear business model for this type of ads. So right now, we still focus more on building a bigger customer base and introducing more traffic. […] In terms of the revenue and commercialization, we’re in no hurry.
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Q4 and Full Year 2024 Earnings Call — Q4 2024
The strategy-setting call: the 2025 agenda that produced the feed revamp and AI search, and the adoption of a formal dividend policy. · Open the full transcript →
The link management draws between cost discipline and optionality: stable profit is what funds the AI spending.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer): Recapping on 2024, although revenue from a few industries fell short of expectations, which negatively impact on the overall revenue growth, our effective cost management enabled us to sustain a stable operating income. The solid profitability gives us financial flexibility to support our investment in product, technology, and AI area in 2025, which are cornerstones of the Company’s longterm development.
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The feed revamp announced a year before it was finished — and the intent behind it stated as a traffic-mix goal.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer): Second, we will upgrade our information feed product by optimizing the homepage interface. Coupled with the strength of the large language model powered interest-based feed, we hope to nurture users’ habit of consuming recommended content on the homepage, thereby raising the proportion of recommended content among traffic distribution. By doing so, we endeavor to offer fresh user experience while reinforcing the long-term development of the vertical content ecosystem.
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The ambition behind AI search: move Weibo from real-time/trending search into general and vertical search.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer): Based on the current user group tested, the updated version will improve user search experience on Weibo and drive usage frequency of Weibo’s search function. This will transform the positioning of Weibo search from hot trend and real-time search to general search, which will facilitate us to enter into the vertical search market. This potential transformation will also set a high standard for our product experience.
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The dividend moves from an ad hoc payout to a standing annual policy, framed as sustainable and predictable.
Fei Cao (Chief Financial Officer): In light of Weibo’s robust balance sheet and healthy cash flow position, we are pleased to announce that our Board of Directors has adopted an annual cash dividend policy. […] Over the past 2 years, we have successfully distributed 2 rounds of bank or cash dividends, each totaling approximately USD 200 million.
Looking ahead, our top priority is to seize the transformative AI opportunities while maintaining robust financial health. Our efficient capital allocation supports our strategic priorities and ensure long-term financial stability, enable us to deliver sustainable, predictable dividends to our shareholders.
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The subsidy-policy split: 3C, e-commerce and autos get a policy tailwind; discretionary categories get nothing.
Felix Liu (UBS); Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer): So in terms of the national subsidy policy, this has been impacting immediately positively on the 3C products and e-commerce industries. So we’ve been seeing a very good growth of the ad revenue from these areas in Q4. However, in the other areas that are not enjoying this kind of policy, for instance, the beauty and personal care products and luxuries and also the other discretionary industries, we’ve been seeing a lot of pressures and also stress of growth.
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Capital allocation stated as two principles, with buybacks explicitly left on the table.
Daisy Chen (Haitong International); Fei Cao (Chief Financial Officer): Weibo is focused on a balanced capital allocation strategy that supports long-term growth while delivering value to our shareholders. As we mentioned, over the past 3 years, our non-GAAP operating margin has remained stable and our operating cash flow reached around USD 600 million, giving us the flexibility to invest in AI, in product innovation, and shareholder returns. […] So going forward, we will continue to refine our capital allocation strategy, leverage AI to strengthen our product capabilities, and create long-term value for our shareholders.
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Q1 2024 Earnings Call — Q1 2024
Where the user strategy behind today’s shrinking MAU was first spelled out, including what a high-value user costs to acquire. · Open the full transcript →
The ad playbook the company keeps returning to: hot-topic and new-product marketing rather than broad budget capture.
Felix Liu (UBS); Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): And of course, another very important thing is that we have to refocus on the hot topic marketing and also some of the relevant areas like the hot topics of the festivals and also some of the IPs as well as the ecommerce focus, for instance, the 618 or Double 11 shopping festival.
And also, we have to pretty much focus on the new product marketing and also the new brand market as well.
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A rare pricing observation: brand marketing prices better than performance, which is why the revenue mix matters.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): And also, now you can see that if we’re comparing the brand-based marketing versus the effect-based advertisement still, we’ve been seeing the latter part, experiencing some of the pressures. And also, you can see that the pricing trend for the kind of brand-based marketing and advertisement is always better than the effectiveness based advertisement.
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The user-acquisition economics: high-ARPU users cost 2–3x more, and cheap users were deliberately given up.
Daisy Chen (Haitong International); Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): So that is to say that if we need to spend the budget in acquiring those users, we are going to focus on those users with a higher ARPU and also the users that are able to generate more content and also are more interactive. So normally, of course, the overall spending is around 2x to 3x more expensive than those users with a lower performance, but still, we’ve been seeing a very good positive trend. So still, we have tested that notion last year, and we’re going to keep doing so. So for instance, in Q1 of this year, we purposely gave up on some of the cheap to get or low-cost to get users in terms of their interactivity and also the ARPU generation. So we expect to have a very good DAU increase because of this focus. And also second, we do expect some of the frequency of the use and by switching on the Weibo app, for instance, really will focus on those high-frequency users.
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Q1 2022 Earnings Call — Q1 2022
The shock call: Shanghai lockdown, an ad hit management called worse than 2020, and the cost rules they ran the business by. · Open the full transcript →
The starkest guidance Weibo has given: the Q2 ad impact would be worse than the 2020 COVID shock.
Fei Cao (Chief Financial Officer): The restriction and lockdown in major areas in China, especially Shanghai, has also negatively impacted consumption sectors such as FMCG and e-commerce, which suspended ad campaigns originally scheduled for the quarter and cut ad budget accordingly. Additionally, we also faced the major sales and ad campaign execution challenges due to lockdown in Shanghai. As COVID-19 resurgence rapidly invoked national wide and the restriction and lockdown disrupt economy activities, including production, consumption, logistics and offline activities. Based on our current observation and our best estimate, we expect the potential impact on advertising business in the second quarter is material and even more severe than the COVID-19 impact on our business in 2020.
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Why brand revenue recovers more slowly than performance — the approval and planning cycle, not demand.
Alicia Yap (Citigroup); Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): And also talking about the effectiveness or the performance ad, the impact to that particular category will be the minimized. And also, however, talking about the brand customers because they have the whole process, which is going to be followed, if they want to resume the kind of a budget and also resume the advertisements in terms of the budget allocation and in the marketing plans as well as the execution, etc. So, we expect that the brand customers are going to recover slower than the performance.
p. 12 · Read in context →
Concentration made explicit: half the business sits in three verticals, and all three snapped back within a month.
Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): And also because 50% of our businesses are focusing on FMCG, luxury products as well as the automotive industry. So, you can see that these three verticals, they’ve been impacted heavily in April because of COVID. However, when there was a little bit recovery of the control and also containment of the COVID in May, we’ve seen a very quick and also robust rebound of these three verticals.
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The channel-spend rule in plain terms: no payback in three to six months and the channel is cut.
Thomas Chong (Jefferies); Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): Okay. So first of all, talking about the cost control, so first of all, we are having a stricter control and also a stricter policy in terms of the ROI and also keeping a quite preservative in terms of the placements among different channels and also the purchasing of the feeds, for example. And also talking about Q1, however, still we had stricter rules on the appraisal of ROI.
And also, if the channel, for example, cannot provide with us the returns as required within three months or six months, we are going to cancel collaboration with that channel.
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Margin philosophy under stress: accept the decline, attack the cost structure, protect the financial metrics.
Fei Cao (Chief Financial Officer): But the management has reached a consensus that the highest priority in this year is to optimize our cost structure with more disciplined channel investment and other spending strategy. Weibo — as you know, Weibo, has always maintained a conservative status [Phonetic]. Our goal is improving operating efficiency with stricter ROI assessment to control our overall spending and striving for higher operating leverage to mitigate the margin decline as small as possible and ultimately keep our healthy financial metrics.
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The answer on the user ceiling: video is what raises it, and engagement matters more than the MAU headline.
Tian Hou (T.H. Capital); Gaofei Wang (Chief Executive Officer, interpreted): So in terms of the video, the impact is actually going to be bigger than the social media. And also the business driving quarters are going to be more as well than the social media only. So, that’s why that even if we’ve had a lot of headwinds, as well as the market competition in the video content area, we’re still trying to invest as many as possible. And so we believe that when we have a very key positioning and also important positioning in the video area and then we are going to further uplift the upper limit of the number of users and also the others. And now in terms of the total traffic and data, the video part accounted for about one-third of the total traffic now we have. […] And also, lastly, I would like to say that, talking about the business value of a company, this does not only related to the DAU and also MAU number, but I think it’s more relevant to the activity of the users.
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More calls
Q4 and Full Year 2025 Earnings Call — Q4 2025 · 16 pages · The full-year 2025 scorecard and the framing of the July feed upgrade one quarter before the 2026 plan; the archived capture holds only the opening prepared remarks, with no Q&A. · Open →
Q1 2025 Earnings Call — Q1 2025 · 21 pages · The DeepSeek switch quarter: why intelligent search will not be spun out as a separate app, and a candid read that AI lifted click-through roughly 10% but did little for ad revenue. · Open →
Q3 2024 Earnings Call — Q3 2024 · 21 pages · The best explanation of the value-added services line — membership growth traced to the high-quality-user strategy — plus how the Paris Olympics were monetized versus Tokyo. · Open →
Q2 2024 Earnings Call — Q2 2024 · 21 pages · Management sorts advertisers into three buckets and names the one where Weibo is structurally weakest: discount-driven, performance-only categories such as cosmetics and luxury. · Open →
Q3 2023 Earnings Call — Q3 2023 · 24 pages · Defines the "IP ecosystem" — hot topics, entertainment, sports, gaming — and sizes it at roughly 40–60% of platform traffic; the post-COVID vertical strategy in its original form. · Open →
Q2 2023 Earnings Call — Q2 2023 · 24 pages · Reopening-year pacing month by month, and the first framing of AIGC as a tool for mid- and long-tail creators rather than for the top accounts. · Open →
Q3 2022 Earnings Call — Q3 2022 · 15 pages · The trough of the ad recession: the mechanics of the cost-optimization programme, the 1–2x ROI hurdle applied to offline events, and the case for diversifying beyond advertising. · Open →
Q3 2021 Earnings Call — Q3 2021 · 27 pages · Regulatory exposure quantified vertical by vertical — education under 2% of revenue, insurance abandoned, fan-culture rectification — alongside the IDFA and splash-ad rule changes. · Open →