Mao Mao
Analyst · JPMorgan
Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter 2020 earnings call. Joining us today are Mr. Shaojie Chen, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Mingming Su, Chief Strategy Officer; and Mr. Hao Cao, Vice President of Finance. You can refer to our third quarter of 2020 financial results on our IR site at ir.DouYu.com. You can also check a replay of this call when it becomes available in a few hours on our IR website.
Before we start, please note that this call may contain forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions for the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and observations that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors not under the company's control, which may cause actual results, performance or achievements of the company to be materially different from the results, performance or expectations implied by these forward-looking statements.
All forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statement, risk factors and details of the company's filings with the SEC. The company undertakes no duty to revise or update any forward-looking statements for selected events or circumstances after the date of this conference call.
Now I will speak on behalf of our Chairman and CEO, Mr. Shaojie Chen. Overall, our financial and operational results maintained their stable growth rates in the third quarter of 2020, with our total net revenues increasing by 37.0% year-over-year to RMB 2.65 billion.
We also achieved the seventh consecutive quarter of positive non-GAAP net income. At the same time, our average mobile MAU count maintained its robust growth trajectory, increasing by 14.4% year-over-year to 59.6 million while our quarterly paying users also grew by 12.7% year-over-year to 7.9 million during the quarter.
Despite the lingering effects of COVID-19 and broader macro uncertainties throughout the country, users continue to flock our eSports-centric game live streaming platform for its vibrancy and enjoyment. Our total average MAUs reached 194 million during the third quarter of 2020, which was attributable to 5 factors. First, by strengthening our collaboration with Tencent Penguin, we added more users, especially those users on the PC platform. Also our broadcast of large-scale import tournaments such as the LPL 2020 Summer Tournament helped expand our user base while engaging those previously inactive users at the same time.
In addition, new game launches attracted a wave of brand new users to our platform during the third quarter. Besides, the summer holiday boosted students' viewership and contributed to the positive seasonality impact. Above all, our continuous refinement of platform operations has enabled us to seize opportunities emerging from eSports events and tournaments and helped us to achieve steady growth in all of our operating metrics.
For our content ecosystem, we continued to enhance our game-centric eSports platform, increase the content rep and depth in every segment of our platform, develop a variety of innovative content format and expand our coverage up and down the eSports industry value chain.
During the quarter, we achieved superior results in investing high-quality eSport teams. For example, our sponsored League of Legend teams, such as CES, LGD and JDG all advanced to the LPL 2020 summer playout series. Notably, CES won the LPL 2020 summer championship.
Moreover, our newly signed PUBG COC emerged as the dark horse team of 2020 and won the runner-up place in its inaugural participation in this year's PCL summer tournament. Meanwhile, we further deepened our collaboration with Tencent and other game developers and publishers and successfully broadcasted more than 50 large-scale official eSports tournaments during the quarter.
For example, we obtained the exclusive broadcasting rights for Omega League, which was one of the largest professional championship for DOTA 2 in the world, thus further augmenting our platform's brand influence. In addition, we self produced more than 50 high-quality eSports tournaments during the period.
Most notably, we organized the tenth consecutive production of our proprietary eSports event, Golden Grand Tournament, which has grown into one of the largest PUBG tournaments in China. As we continued to innovate our business model, we improved our user experience significantly by launching the beta version 2.0 of cloud game, which has a brand-new UI design as well as optimize further functionality and compatibility.
Going forward, we plan to explore further into cloud game. Also, as we almost completed the design and development of the mobile application for prerecorded game videos, we were able to rotate prerecorded game broadcast with livestream game content, provide a more diverse supply of content to our platform, expand our coverage of various user scenarios and stimulate our user engagement.
On the streamers front, we continue to improve our efficiency in managing and monetizing the mid-tier and long-tail streamers during the period. We are glad to see that it has become a norm for our partner talent agencies to proactively uncover and grow new streamers.
Also, revenue contribution from our mid-tier and long-tail streamers has been increasing continuously. In addition, by recruiting the new nongame streamers to our platform, we have been able to cover a broader array of user demographics.
Looking ahead, we shall continue to execute our game content-centric growth strategy, engage more game users through diverse content, capture user addition opportunities borne out of new game title launches, satisfy a wider range of new user viewing demand through segmentation of nongame content, proactively explore new business models and invest in those areas aligned with our long-term strategy.
In terms of monetization, as we continue to refine and optimize our interactive product functionality, we were able to grow our quarterly paying users by 12.7% year-over-year to 7.9 million and our paying ratio to 4.1% during the quarter.
Meanwhile, our ARPU also increased by 25.2% year-over-year to RMB 297. In addition to solidifying our existing users' paying habit, we rolled out additional innovative initiatives to add more paying users and lay a solid foundation for our sustainable growth in both paying users and overall revenue.
Looking ahead, we will continue to explore new product functionalities and revenue models, enhance our platform's overall operational efficiency and advance the monetization capabilities for every platform segment or even every live streaming room. At the same time, we will bolster our management in the design and production of large-scale events to promote monetization consistency.
On the research and development front, we continued to invest in our technology development capability during the quarter with our support for the display functions of the more efficient video compression technology. As you can see, our users can enjoy videos of the same video quality with only half of the previously required bandwidth, thus, leading to a smoother viewing experience, especially for our mobile users.
As we continue to implement the display functionality of Edge 255 across our platform, we foresee more room to optimize our bandwidth path. In addition, we rolled out the real-time playback function at a large scale on our platform by leveraging AI technologies to accurately tap key game moments such as [ kills and team blasts ]. We enabled our users to replay precisely the moment of their choice, thus significantly improving their viewing experience.
On the globalization front, we continue to increase in our investment and exploration in the Japanese market as we made further improvements to the product functionalities and content varieties of our Japanese live streaming platform, Mildom. It was able to maintain its steady growth trajectory.
In summary, during the quarter, we sustained our continued growth and exploration in our user base expansion and content ecosystem development. Looking ahead, we plan to further build out our game content-centric platform, deploy resources both up and downstream the eSports industry value chain, bolster our operational performance, ramp up our R&D efforts and optimize our user experience.
Furthermore, we remain committed to upgrading our platform's monetization capabilities, improving our operating efficiencies and enhancing our financial performance over the long run.
On October 12, 2020, we entered into a merger agreement with Huya. We look forward to working together with Huya by providing our users with high-quality content and services and creating long-term value for our shareholders in the future.
With that, I will now turn the call to our Vice President of Finance, Mr. Hao Cao, to go through the details of our financial performance in the third quarter.