Gaofei Wang
Analyst · Citigroup
[Interpreted] Thank you. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Weibo's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. On today's call, I will share with you highlights on Weibo's product and monetization in the third quarter 2025. On the user front, in September 2025, Weibo's MAUs reached 578 million and average DAUs reached 257 million. In the third quarter, Weibo's total revenues reached USD 442.3 million, a decrease of 5% year-over-year. Our total ad revenues reached USD 375.4 million, a decrease of 6% year-over-year. Our non-GAAP operating income reached USD 132.0 million, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 30%. In 2025, our overall corporate strategy continued to focus on enhancing user value sustaining Weibo's leading position in hot topics and the entertainment content ecosystem while reinforcing the competitiveness of our social products. Building on this, we also leverage large language model to enhance our recommendation feeds and search products, aiming to increase our user base and engagement. Next, I'll share with you highlights in Weibo's product operation and monetization in the third quarter. On user growth and engagement, in 2025, our key product revamp is the upgrade of the homepage information feed, which put the recommendation feed as the default core feed. The revamp has largely rolled out in all users by late July. Alongside the information feed revamp, we also optimized our recommendation algorithm, especially for video content recommendation. During the summer vacation, leveraging the active entertainment events and hot topics during the summer vacation, we saw significant improvement in user engagement of the mid- and low frequency-user group. The per capita viewership, time spent and retention of the mid- and low-frequency user group grew double digits quarter-over-quarter, which in turn drove per capita time spent in recommendation feed for the whole user group to increase for Q3 quarter-over-quarter. In the third quarter, we implemented two key strategies. First, we enhanced the algorithm of the recommendation feed to improve user satisfaction with content, which matches their real-time interest. For example, in hot topic distribution, we established user behavior linkage between the recommendation feed and the search function. We use the view and engage with the hot topics in search function. They are showing more precisely targeted content in recommendation feed. This strategy has been proven particularly effective in enhancing engagement and retention among mid- and low frequency users of Weibo. Second, we enhanced our algorithm to better integrate video content into the recommendation feed, driving deeper content consumption. With the homepage information feed shifting from a relationship-based model to a recommendation-based one, video content could be distributed through our recommendation algorithms to reach more precise and broader user group on top of the traditional social distribution mechanisms. As a result, we saw a notable increase in the distribution of original and mid- to long-form video content in the recommendation feed. The enriched mid to long form video content extending user time spent in the recommendation feed and supporting healthy development of the content ecosystems. Meanwhile, we continue to enhance our interest-based content operation, strengthening large-scale content production by content creators around user interest and thereby improving the quality and diversity of content supplied to the recommendation feed. 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. While improving the efficiency of the homepage recommendation feed, we also strengthened social discussion in a relationship feed ensuring its role as the cornerstone of Weibo's differentiated competitiveness. In the third quarter, our efforts focus on two key aspects: driving interaction between content creators and their followers, and stimulating interest-based social engagement among users to fully boost the social engagement across the platform. First, to further drive the interaction between content creators and their followers, we upgraded the core fan mechanism and optimized the content reach and distribution. This significantly improved interaction efficiency in the relationship feed which is measured by the ratio of total interactions versus total viewership, resulting in double-digit growth of this ratio, both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year in Q3 while further driving content creators' motivation to consistently produce high-quality content in text and image. Second, to enhance ordinary user social interaction around interest-based content, we continue to develop the Super Topics community, focusing on key summer events, concert and anime conventions, which young people are interested in. We encourage users to share meaningful and emotional content around their interest, positioning Super Topics as the front-end useful space for interest-based sharing and interaction. In the third quarter, the number of users who posted and engaged in Super Topics grew double digit year-over-year. This effective initiative has strengthened Weibo's differentiated advantages in text and image, complementing the homepage recommendation feed and contributing to the solid development of the platform's ecosystem. Turning to search products. In the third quarter, we continued to reinforce AI application in search function, focusing on technical infrastructure upgrades and integration across ecosystem scenarios. First, in upgrading technical infrastructure, we continue to enhance intelligent search capability to understand user search intent and content matching capability, which effectively improve the relevance and accuracy of search results and making it easier for users to find desired content. At the same time, we upgraded the search model from conventional onetime information search to continuous exploratory dialogue, enabling users to engage in coherent conversations with intelligent search and enjoy a more intelligent and seamless information across experience. Second, the integration across ecosystem scenarios, we focused on extending intelligent search application in information feed, fostering a Search as a Service user mindset. We deeply integrated intelligent search into the content consumption experience with enhanced content verification and the content summary features. The system leveraged AI to assess the authenticity of the original post, extract key information and provide extended insights, helping users quickly access structured and reliable information while consuming contents. 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. Looking ahead, we will continue to deepen the innovative application of AI in search products. On the technology front, we aim to make search more user aware. As for user experience, we strive to deliver a more seamless and intelligent usage journey. And in terms of the ecosystem, service will become more contextually relevant. These efforts will continuously provide users with a smarter, more convenient search experience and further unlock the value of Weibo's content ecosystem. Moving on to monetization. In 2025, the ad product and sales team focused on two main priorities: first, to expand and solidify customers' mindset of choosing Weibo as a go-to platform for content marketing across more industries and clients. Second, to continuously enhance the performance and conversion capabilities of our ad products. In the third quarter, due to the high base effect from the Olympic last year, Weibo's ad revenue decreased 6% year-over-year. From the overall market perspective, thanks to the stimulus policy aimed at driving domestic demand and consumption, e-commerce platform and related industry maintain a relatively high level of advertising spend, which supported our third quarter ad revenues. 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. In particular, marketing approaches such as celebrity endorsement have generally become a key option for clients to consider. In light of this trend, leveraging Weibo's strength in celebrity resources, we aim to better facilitate clients' needs across the full celebrity endorsement and marketing life cycle. We hope to create richer celebrity marketing playbook together with clients, helping them enhance their marketing effectiveness. Let me share more color from an industry perspective. Competitive dynamics within the e-commerce sector has persisted since the second quarter, benefiting from deep partnerships with leading e-commerce platforms. Ad revenues from e-commerce sector achieved notable year-over-year growth in the third quarter. Meanwhile, we have been gradually cultivating partnerships with other business lines within this e-commerce group promoting a more balanced revenue mix and thus laying a solid foundation for the future revenue stability. Ad revenues from the automobile sector sustained year-over-year growth trend in third quarter. Weibo has continued to solidify its strength in the new energy vehicle content ecosystem. Revenue from traditional fuel vehicles also remained stable this year, contributing to improved revenue stability for the automobile industry. In the online game and smartphone sectors, revenue declined due to overall budget contraction. As for the food and beverage, dairy products and footwear and apparel sectors, revenue fell year-over-year primarily due to the tough comparable base from last year's Olympics. However, with the recovery and strengthening of celebrity marketing in clients' mindset, ad revenues from celebrity endorsements continue to grow year-over-year. On the ad product front, we have continually strengthened the application of AI technology across the entire advertising life cycle this year to enhance ad efficiency. By the third quarter, we have deployed AI capabilities throughout the process from the ad creative production and bidding model optimization to campaign performance improvement. Notably, Weibo's AI ad creative platform, Lingchuang, launched in the second quarter has been widely adopted, enabling even scalable and personalized ad production in both text and image formats. Furthermore, in the third quarter, we have extended AI-generated ad creatives to video contents. This upgrade enables intelligent extraction of key highlights for the pre-roll segments and the generation of eye-catching cover images. This not only improved the efficiency and diversity of video ad creative production, but also enhanced targeting precision and user viewing experience. As of the end of October, AI-generated ad creatives accounted for nearly 30% of the consumption. Besides this, to address the common needs of the brand clients, we launched new products via live stream the press conference. We leveraged AI to click live streams in real time, extract the most engaging highlights and transform them into high-quality material suitable for KOL distribution. These highlights are further distributed through our feed ad product, amplifying the overall content reach and influence. This model not only addresses clients' difficulties in efficiently converting live stream content into shareable materials but also enable clients to achieve secondary distribution of valuable live stream content through a combination of high-quality materials and precise targeting. For example, in live stream product launched by a smartphone brand, AI-generated material make up 10% of all materials. It contributed towards much as 30% of total interactions. We plan to roll out this model to more brand clients hosting product launch, thereby further unlocking the potential of AI in brand marketing. In terms of ad performance, the upgraded AI-powered ad performance model has demonstrated impressive results in key scenarios. Experimental data shows that the conversion efficiency of both app download ads and form submission campaigns have improved. AI-powered performance ad models have enabled us to better deliver on client campaign objectives. Entering into the fourth quarter, we will focus on capturing marketing opportunities from sector with high budget visibility such as the e-commerce sector. We will beef up our efforts to further expand the penetration of our brand plus content marketing approach across key industries, sustain the growth momentum in the automobile sector and strive for recovery in the consumer goods. At the same time, we will continue to drive the application of AI in ad creative generation and AI placement optimization with the hope of offering smarter and more efficient advertising solutions to clients of all sizes and thus further strengthening Weibo's differentiated competitiveness in the advertising market. Next, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for our financial review.