Advertising Base
Advertising Base
Weibo's advertising line has been flat for three years at about $1.50 billion, but the flatness is assembled from parts moving in opposite directions. Arm's-length third-party revenue has fallen every year of the record; related-party advertising has more than halved; Alibaba's spend rose 49% in 2025 and covered the gap. Underneath, revenue per daily user has almost stopped falling, and the audience has started to.
What the flat line is made of
Weibo reports advertising revenue split four ways — third parties, Alibaba, SINA, and other related parties. The split is where the flat headline comes apart. Between 2021 and 2025 the third-party book fell from $1,633.2 million to $1,289.3 million, and it fell in every single year [1] [2].
Sources: FY2025 Annual Report (Form 20-F), Results of Operations [3]; FY2023 Annual Report (Form 20-F), Results of Operations [4]. The 2021 Alibaba figure of $181.2 million includes $41.7 million earned through an Alibaba advertising-agency subsidiary that stopped acting as agent after 2022.
The FY2025 movement decomposes the same way. Weibo tells shareholders that advertising revenue excluding Alibaba fell 4%, to $1,327.8 million, "mainly attributable to fierce market competition" [5]. That $54.1 million decline is not one book shrinking. Slightly more than half of it is related-party advertising running off: SINA's own spend fell $10.7 million and other related parties fell $17.6 million, together $28.3 million. The arm's-length third-party book fell $25.8 million — a decline of 2.0%, the slowest of the five-year record.
Source: FY2025 Annual Report (Form 20-F), Results of Operations table [6]; percentage changes derived.
Two readings follow, and they point in different directions. The encouraging one is that the third-party book — the part an outside buyer is actually underwriting — has decelerated its decline in each of the last four years: down 14.7% in 2022, then 3.5%, 2.2% and 2.0%. The unwelcome one is that the two cushions used to hold the headline flat are close to exhausted. Related-party advertising has fallen from $166.3 million in 2021 to $38.5 million, or from 8.4% of the advertising line to 2.6%. And Alibaba, at $173.8 million, is now 11.6% of advertising revenue and supplied more than the whole of FY2025's growth — a line Weibo itself describes as tracking Alibaba's own marketing strategy, "which fluctuates from time to time" [7].
One defence used in earlier years no longer applies. In 2023 and 2024 Weibo attributed the ex-Alibaba decline partly to renminbi depreciation against the dollar [8] [9]. For FY2025 the company reports advertising revenue as flat both in dollars and on a constant-currency basis [10]. Currency was neutral in 2025; the 3.9% fall in the ex-Alibaba book was real.
The buyer base behind that book thinned faster than the revenue: 0.4 million advertisers in 2025 against 0.6 million in 2024 and 0.7 million in 2023, with average spend per advertiser excluding Alibaba up 39%, from $2,438 to $3,385, both of which Weibo attributes to churn among advertisers with relatively lower budgets [11]. The same filing supplies a mechanical alternative: revenue from advertisers contracting with Weibo directly rose 15% in 2025, to $559.3 million, while revenue billed through advertising agencies fell 7%, to $942.3 million [12]. The definitions printed beside that table rule it out; Weibo counts an advertiser as the ultimate beneficiary of the advertisement and a customer as whoever signs the contract, and a single agency may represent and serve multiple advertisers, so moving a beneficiary from an agency contract to a direct one leaves the advertiser count untouched [13]. The accounts are leaving rather than being reclassified, and the revenue that left went from the agency-billed side. What the record cannot settle is what those accounts were worth: no filing publishes a revenue distribution by advertiser size or an advertiser count split by billing channel, so the 39% rise in average spend is consistent both with small accounts churning out and with budgets concentrating among the large ones.
Users and revenue per user
The ex-Alibaba book can be split again, into how many people use Weibo daily and how much advertising revenue each of them carries. Weibo publishes December daily active users each year, so the ratio is computable across the record — with the caveat that a December headcount is being divided into a full year of revenue, which makes the level approximate and the year-on-year direction reliable.
Source: derived from December DAU figures in the FY2023, FY2024 and FY2025 Annual Reports [14] [15] [16] and the company's disclosed advertising revenue excluding Alibaba [17] [18].
The character of the decline changed in 2025. Through 2022, 2023 and 2024 the audience grew slightly every year while revenue per daily user fell — by 20.1%, then 6.4%, then 4.0%. That is a monetisation problem. In 2025 the pattern inverted: revenue per daily user was down only 0.9%, from $5.32 to $5.27, while daily users fell 3.1%, from 260 million in December 2024 to 252 million in December 2025 [19]. Practically the whole of last year's ex-Alibaba decline was a smaller audience rather than a cheaper one.
That matters for how the next few years are underwritten. Price stabilising is the harder of the two things to achieve and it appears to have happened; the ex-Alibaba line is now most sensitive to daily users, which fell 3.1% in 2025 against a 0.9% fall in revenue per daily user. Weibo's monthly user base and the feed rebuild behind its recent fall are recorded in the industry backdrop and the company record, and are not re-argued here. What the record does not contain is any disclosure of impression volume, ad load, or price: "impressions" appears in the FY2025 filing only inside the revenue-recognition policy for cost-per-thousand-impression contracts. Inside revenue per user, price and volume cannot be separated from the primary record.
Flat against a growing market
Flat revenue and stable share are not the same thing. Third-party trackers put China's internet advertising market at roughly 6% growth in 2024 and 5% to 6% through the first three quarters of 2025 (QuestMobile data, reported in the trade press; no market-size or share figure appears anywhere in Weibo's own filings, and none of this can be cited to the corpus). Against that, Weibo's arm's-length book fell about 2% and its ex-Alibaba book fell 3.9%, both on a currency-neutral basis.
The nearest listed comparator in the corpus tells the same story from the other side: Bilibili's advertising revenue rose 22.8% in 2025, to RMB10.1 billion, which it attributes to improved ad products and advertising efficiency [20]. The full named-rival record sits in the competitive map; the point here is narrower. Measured in constant currency, so that both sides are effectively renminbi, the gap between Weibo's advertising growth and the market's has run at roughly seven to ten percentage points in each of the last two years. Flat revenue in a market compounding at 5% to 6% is a shrinking position, not a stable one.
Quarter by quarter
The quarterly series shows why "flat" feels unstable when read close up. Stripping Alibaba out, non-Alibaba advertising revenue has swung between minus 12.5% and plus 10.1% year on year over the last nine quarters, on a base that barely moves.
Source: quarterly disaggregation tables in the Q4 2025 [21], Q3 2025 [22], Q1 2025 [23], Q4 2024 [24] and Q1 2026 [25] results announcements, with the 2022 and 2023 quarters and the two second quarters taken from the Q3 2023 [26], Q4 2023 [27], Q1 2024 [28] and Q2 2025 [29] announcements.
Every one of those swings is explained by an event, not by a change in underlying demand. The company's own attributions read like a marketing calendar.
Sources: Q4 2024 [30], Q1 2025 [31], Q2 2025 [32], Q3 2025 [33], Q4 2025 [34] and Q1 2026 [35] results announcements, with the 3Q25 sector detail from the Q3 2025 earnings call [36] [37]; year-on-year percentages derived from the disaggregation tables.
Management states the mechanism plainly. Asked in May 2026 why revenue was growing while its customers were struggling, the CEO answered that Weibo's "ad revenue and ad budgets was primarily related to the frequency of the new product launches of the different verticals as well as the sales, but not necessarily related to the operational result of the customers in different verticals" [38]. The company has been building toward that position deliberately: in the fourth quarter of 2024 it described revenue from new product launch marketing growing by double digits while total advertising fell [39].
That is a coherent franchise, and it is also what makes the base hard to call: revenue built on launch moments gets a Paris Olympics and then laps one, gets a wave of blockbuster game releases and then laps that too.
The first quarter of 2026 is the most recent evidence, and it reads both ways. Reported advertising revenue rose 9%, but 3% in constant currency, with the company naming currency first among the causes [40] [41]. Applying the same currency effect to the non-Alibaba line takes its reported 10.1% to roughly 4% in constant currency, its strongest quarter on that basis since at least the start of 2024. The composition is what qualifies it. The three named contributors were internet services, driven by large-language-model developers ramping marketing around Chinese New Year; local services, "supported by ongoing competition in the food delivery" business; and automobiles, on new vehicle launches [42] [43]. All three are budget waves rather than run-rates, and management said as much on the same call: the food-delivery promotional budget was "not as intense as before" going into the second quarter, and e-commerce faced "a very high base number in entering into Q2" [44].
The customers behind those budgets are under visible strain. On the same call the CEO described automotive key accounts seeing double-digit sales declines, handset makers cutting prices as memory costs rise, and e-commerce clients in a "stressful profitability situation" [45].
What would make it a floor
Two supports in the record argue for stabilisation, and both are specific to what Weibo sells rather than to the cycle.
The first is a change in how Chinese advertisers are taxed and priced. On the third-quarter 2025 call management reported that after years of budget migration into performance advertising, bidding for commercial traffic had become intense enough to push client costs up, and that the government had issued a tax policy limiting the deductibility of feed advertising spend. Together these were driving clients to reassess allocation and place "renewed emphasis on the value of the brand advertising", with celebrity endorsement named as the favoured route [46]. Brand and celebrity marketing is the part of the market Weibo is structurally best placed in.
The second is that the tooling is improving on measurable terms. By the end of October 2025 AI-generated creative accounted for nearly 30% of ad creative consumption on the platform [47]. That is a cost and throughput gain for advertisers rather than a new revenue line, but it is the kind of change that shows up first in retention of existing budgets.
Against those, three facts cut the other way. The customer mix has not refreshed: Weibo's three largest verticals were fast-moving consumer goods, 3C products and e-commerce in the third quarter of 2021, the same three across full-year 2024, and the same three again in the third quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 [48] [49] [50] [51]. Two of those three are the ones management repeatedly names as the drag. Second, the other 15% of revenue has turned down: value-added services fell 11% in the first quarter of 2026, and 15% in constant currency, on lower game-related revenue [52] [53]. Third, related-party advertising is down to 2.6% of the line, so the part of any future decline that can be attributed to related parties running off, rather than to lost arm's-length demand, is now close to nil.
Consensus sits close to the flat case: $1,802.7 million of revenue for FY2026 and $1,841.4 million for FY2027, about 2.6% and 2.1% growth [54].
On the balance of that evidence, the arm's-length advertising book is decelerating toward a floor rather than sitting on one, and the flat headline of the last three years was held up by an Alibaba line that grew 49% in a single year and by related-party revenue that has almost run out. Weibo prices launch moments well, and the shift of Chinese budgets back toward brand work suits it; what it has not yet shown is an ability to hold revenue steady in a market growing 5% to 6%.
The strongest fact against that read is the deceleration itself: a third-party book falling 14.7%, 3.5%, 2.2% and 2.0% in successive years is converging on something, and revenue per daily user was down less than one percent in 2025. What would change the read in either direction is narrow and observable. Two consecutive quarters of positive constant-currency growth in the non-Alibaba book without an event base to lean on, together with daily users holding at or above 252 million, would establish the floor; daily users were 254 million in March 2026 [55] and management described "initial signs of stabilization in core user engagement and advertising demand" [56]. A second year of Alibaba spend growing while everything else falls would establish the opposite — that the reported line is being held up by a single related party whose budget Weibo does not control.
The free cash flow examined in Business and the obligations examined in Claims on the Cash are both sized off this $1.5 billion advertising base.