Weibo (WB) Q1 2026 Earnings Transcript

Image source: The Motley Fool.

DATE

Thursday, May 28, 2026 at 7 a.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

• Chief Executive Officer — Gaofei Wang
• Chief Financial Officer — Fei Cao

TAKEAWAYS

• Monthly Active Users (MAUs) -- 562 million as of March, with a modest sequential and year-over-year decline attributed to a shift in channel investment strategy and user experience enhancement focus.
• Daily Active Users (DAUs) -- 254 million in March; DAUs increased slightly quarter over quarter, driven by higher core user engagement and improved retention.
• Total Net Revenues -- $421.3 million, representing a 6% increase; constant currency growth was 1%.
• Advertising Revenues -- $369.8 million, up 9%, or 3% constant currency; main contributors were Internet Services, Automobiles, and Local Services.
• Non-GAAP Operating Income -- $119.8 million, with a 28% non-GAAP operating margin versus last year's 33%, reflecting increased investments in product and marketing.
• Net Income Attributable to Weibo (NASDAQ:WB) -- $91.9 million, with a net margin of 22%.
• Diluted EPS -- $0.34 reported for the quarter.
• Value-Added Services Revenue -- $51.6 million, a decrease of 11%, mainly due to lower game-related income.
• Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) Advertising Revenue -- $43.3 million, rising 2%, but down 4% constant currency because last year included one-off promotional campaigns.
• Operating Expenses -- $301.5 million, up 13%, driven by higher ad production and marketing costs, partly offset by lower general and administrative expenses.
• Cash, Cash Equivalents, and Short-Term Investments -- $2.59 billion, increased from $2.41 billion at prior year-end.
• Operating Cash Flow -- $164 million for the quarter.
• AI Integration -- Enhanced ad targeting, bidding, and creative generation, with approximately 40% of ad materials consumed now AI-generated, and double-digit eCPM growth in promoted information feeds.
• Dividend -- $0.61 per ADS distributed, totaling approximately $150 million for fiscal year 2025.
• Video Consumption -- Double-digit year-over-year growth in time spent on video playback pages; per-capita growth was even higher, supported by increased original video posts from top-tier verified accounts.
• AI Content Creation Tools -- Nearly 3,000 creators produced approximately 8,000 pieces of AI-generated content as of April using new in-platform tools.
• Super Topics Community -- DAUs and engaged users showed year-over-year growth.
• MSCI ESG Rating Upgrade -- Rating improved from BB to AA, recognizing progress in sustainability and innovation initiatives.

Need a quote from a Motley Fool analyst? Email pr@fool.com

RISKS

• Operating Margin Decline -- Operating margin fell to 28% from last year’s 33% due to investment in advertising product capabilities, content marketing ecosystem, and client service offerings.
• Value-Added Services Revenue Decrease -- Segment revenue fell 11%, primarily from weaker gaming-related results.
• Headwinds in FMCG and Online Games -- "FMCG continued to face a year-over-year gap," and "The online game sector was still on a descending trend due to lack of blockbuster release" this quarter.
• Customer Budget Pressure in Handsets -- "rising chip and memory costs continue to put pressure on handset manufacturers' profitability, which may weigh on their ad budgets going forward."

SUMMARY

Management emphasized effective monetization through 9% growth in advertising revenue and highlighted ongoing benefits from AI, which contributed to improved ad conversion and content creation efficiency. The video segment delivered robust year-over-year expansion in user time spent, supported by a substantial rise in original video output from premium account holders. AI-driven services extended to user-facing products, resulting in increased adoption of interactive searches and heightened content production by creators leveraging proprietary tools. Investments in product, marketing, and AI capabilities resulted in higher operating expenses and a reduced margin, while cash generation and shareholder returns remained healthy, as evidenced by a significant dividend payout and strengthened ESG ratings.

• The integration of video and trending topic content with social discussion reinforced Weibo’s market position in public discourse, particularly around new product launches in the automotive and technology sectors.
• In Q2, management plans a targeted focus on optimizing user experience for recommendation-feed-dependent segments and continued strategic investment in AI to drive further engagement and monetization opportunities.
• Management observed that industry pressure, especially in handsets and e-commerce, could constrain client ad spending even as new product launch activity may offset some of this weakness.
• The reported sequential decline in MAUs was directly linked to reduced channel spending and strategic resource reallocation rather than broader user disengagement.
• Ongoing diversification of ad revenues was noted, with relevant gains from both performance-based and brand/celebrity marketing campaigns supported by AI tools.
• Weibo’s newly upgraded ESG rating and fifth ESG report signal corporate emphasis on sustainability and responsible innovation, which may factor into investor sentiment.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

• DAU/MAU: Daily Active User and Monthly Active User, respectively; key engagement and reach metrics in social media platforms.
• KOL: "Key Opinion Leader" — high-influence content creator or personality used in content marketing campaigns.
• eCPM: "Effective Cost Per Mille" — advertising revenue generated per 1,000 impressions, an important metric for ad monetization efficiency.
• ADS: American Depositary Share — a U.S.-traded equity share representing a specified number of foreign company shares.
• Super Topics: A Weibo product feature creating focused community discussion threads around specific topics, events, or interests.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Gaofei Wang: [Interpreted] Thank you. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Weibo's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. On today's call, I'll share with you highlights of Weibo's product and monetization in the first quarter 2026. On the user front, in March 2026, Weibo's MAU was 562 million and average daily users reached 254 million. Our MAU is still in a modest decline on both a year-on-year and a quarter-over-quarter basis. This is primarily driven by our strategic focus on enhancing the user experience and driving user retention. We have proactively rationalized our channel budget allocation, shifting our focus towards improving the conversion rate of newly acquired users into active users.

Concurrently, driven by our recent efforts to optimize information feed product experience for our core business, which includes engaged users and click-oriented users, coupled with the sustained growth in video content consumption on the platform, the scale and engagement frequency of our core users have maintained a solid trend. As a result, our DAUs achieved modest growth quarter-over-quarter. Our total net revenues for the first quarter reached USD 421.3 million, an increase of 6% year-over-year. Our total ad revenues reached USD 369.8 million, an increase of 9% year-over-year. Our non-GAAP operating income for the quarter reached USD 119.8 million, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 28%.

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. Moving on to information feed product.

In 2026, the strategy focuses on the product optimization after the information feed upgrade, which aligns with our long-term direction. Building on Weibo's strength in social network and hot trend discussion, we will further enhance the distribution capabilities of Weibo's distinctive native content, establish a more stable and consistent content consumption experience and continue to strengthen users' trust in the information feed. Specifically, in the first quarter, we focused on a series of optimization initiatives aimed at balancing the distribution of social content, trending topics and vertical interest-based content. For Weibo's engaged core users, while ensuring their consumption of social content, we also prioritize improving recommendation efficiency for trending and interest-based content.

Meanwhile, we further strengthened the distribution of content from authentic accounts, high-quality original content and reposted content, while stepping up our governance over low quality and overly promotional content to enhance the consumption experience within our information feeds. These strategies were gradually rolled out throughout the first quarter and began to make positive impacts in March. Looking at the preliminary results, the scale, time spent and engagement model of the social engaged users within our information feed have all shown month-over-month improvement demonstrating that our strategy is more effective in retaining and serving this specific user cohort. These preliminary results have boosted our confidence to further advance the optimization of information feed products.

In the second quarter, building upon the experience improvement for our socially engaged users, we will place greater focus on user groups that rely more heavily on the recommendation feed and have higher expectations for content matching efficiency through the continued optimization of product strategies and content matching algorithms, we aim to improve the seamless content consumption for these users within the recommendation feed and further strengthen Weibo's competitiveness in recommendation driven content consumption scenarios. Moving on to video. Our video business is set to serve as a crucial driver for increasing user time spent and retention throughout 2026.

In the first quarter, we continued with the proven path established in the second half of 2025 and saw continued improvement on video consumption. During the first quarter, total time spent on the video playback pages achieved double-digit year-over-year growth, while also maintaining an upward trend quarter-over-quarter. Notably, the growth in per capita time spent on video playback pages was even more pronounced. Specifically, during the first quarter, our video business initiatives centered around 2 key aspects: distribution and supply. On the distribution side, we continue to optimize the recommendation conversion efficiency for videos across core scenarios such as information feeds and trending feeds.

At the same time, we reduced the distribution rate of repetitive low quality and excessively commercialized the content. This ensures that the growth in video watch time is increasingly driven by high-quality content and the rising users' meaningful viewing behaviors. On the supply side, we further strengthen the supply of high-quality video content by investing more resources to attract high-quality video content creators and incentivize their content production. This includes celebrity and top KOL live vlogs, trending topic analysis, and derivative creation of popular content, all of which are distinctive to our platform and strategically steer our traffic distribution toward these high-quality offerings.

In the first quarter, both the number of top-tier accounts, for example, the golden and orange verified accounts, publishing original videos and the number of original videos posted recorded double-digit year-over-year growth. Meanwhile, we are also exploring and validating the introduction of more diverse video content formats such as short plays and video podcasts. In the first quarter, leveraging the continued integration of our video AI large model, we further built on the platform strength in vertical IP by opening up AI creation tools to the creators, enabling them to produce derivative video content and expand IP-related content.

As of April, we had made copyright materials available from over 20 top-tier TV drama and variety show IPs on the platform and have actively collaborated with partners to launch AI-driven content recreation initiatives, which have attracted nearly 3,000 creators and generated nearly 8,000 pieces of AI content. Meanwhile, we further enhanced Weibo's AI creation platform by providing creators with resources such as graphic text generation tools, trending topics creation tools, video generation capabilities, copyright material and campaign templates. This empowers creators with richer materials and inspiration, allowing them to translate their content expertise and creative ideas into publishable videos and text-based post at a significantly lower cost.

This, in turn, has helped improve content production efficiency for creators on Weibo. Moving on to content ecosystem competitiveness. Throughout 2026, we will continue to focus on our 3 core businesses: trending topics, social network and search, while further enhancing the health and core competitiveness of our content ecosystem. In the first quarter, our focus within the company ecosystem was on enhancing the quality of trending topic consumption, deepening community interactions and advancing our AI search capabilities. Through these efforts, we aim to significantly improve users' content consumption efficiency and their overall engagement experience on the platform. With respect to hot trends. In the first quarter, we focused on strengthening the influence and the credibility of our trending list.

We optimize the ranking mechanism, improve the quality of content presented on the list and enrich the content supply and discussion atmosphere on the landing pages. These efforts drove higher content consumption and more vibrant discussion under the hot trend scenarios. Compared with the fourth quarter last year, both average time spent and average discussion volume per user under the hot trend scenarios increased in the first quarter. The strength and stickiness of user engagement around hot trends further reinforced Weibo's competitive position as a go-to platform for hot trend discovery and a public discussion.

On social attributes, in 2026, we aim to deepen user engagement and increase revisit intention within interest-based communities, leveraging richer community engagement features and stronger interaction mechanisms. In the first quarter, the Super Topics community continued to enhance its product capabilities and standardized event-based operations across categories such as celebrities, IPs and sports events, which sustainably drove user engagement. As a result, both DAUs and engaged users of Super Topics recorded year-over-year growth. With AI further integrated into product development efficiency and content understanding, we will continue to center on core needs of users of community products, accelerating its iteration of interactive community products and features and thereby further improving research, social fulfillment and sense of belonging on Weibo.

On search products, as we continue to enhance our AI capabilities, in the first quarter, we have upgraded our Weibo intelligent search function from a single-turn Q&A summary into an AI-powered multi-turn of follow-up queries and can understand multimodal content, including videos and images with text. Meanwhile, we integrated AI agent capabilities into key scenarios such as public figure search and hot trends search and conducted product experiments on search landing pages and comment sections. Leveraging AI agent capabilities will enhance the user search experience and efficiency and further reinforce Weibo's differentiated value proposition in the search market. Moving on to monetization.

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.

The Internet services sector delivered robust year-over-year growth, primarily driven by incremental budget we captured from the Internet service companies. For example, during the Chinese New Year period, various AI large language model players ramp up their marketing investment, leveraging Weibo's strong KOL ecosystem and professional discussion environment in the digital and technology verticals. We effectively fulfilled AI company's market needs in areas such as new product launches, technology, education and word-of-mouth building, which resulted in a notable increase in related marketing revenues. We believe that as AI technologies and applications continue to evolve, AI-related content will become a major incremental driver of Weibo's content ecosystem.

In May, the number of AI-focused professional content creators, the average daily number of AI-related hot trends and the discussion volume of AI content on Weibo all increased more than 30% compared with January this year. This technological transformation in AI have been continuously stimulating content-creation and user discussion on our platform and will further build us flywheel between content ecosystem engagement and monetization growth. The Local services sector was also among the fast-growing sector in the first quarter, supported by ongoing competition in the food delivery as well as a seasonal boost from the Chinese New Year holiday.

The automobile sector delivered double-digit year-over-year growth, primarily driven by favorable policies and new vehicle launches, relatively stable ad spend around new product launches, users reputation building and brand awareness. The handset sector recorded modest year-over-year growth in the first quarter. But looking ahead, market competition in the sector continues to intensify despite ongoing support from trade-in subsidies, rising chip and memory costs continue to put pressure on handset manufacturers' profitability, which may weigh on their ad budgets going forward. We will closely track new product launch cycles and client budget dynamics and optimize our sales strategy accordingly to ensure solid coverage of key clients.

Among other verticals, the apparel and footwear sector achieved double-digit year-over-year growth in the first quarter, primarily fueled by the Winter Olympics, concentrated marketing campaigns by sports and outdoor-based brands and celebrity endorsement activities through which advertisers effectively leverage events and celebrity moments to improve the brand awareness. As mentioned last quarter, we have seen a recovery trend in demand for celebrities and IP-based content marketing from certain brand advertisers. In the first quarter, this trend continue to play out in a number of key industries and campaigns with related revenues maintaining solid year-over-year growth and providing a meaningful supplement to our overall content marketing business. Celebrity marketing has always been a distinctive component of Weibo's content marketing capabilities.

Over the past quarter, we focused more on enhancing service depth and ad placement efficiency for clients in this area. Based on clients' brand objectives, budget levels and target audience, we integrated Weibo resources in hot trends, IP, celebrities and KOL ecosystems to provide more tailored resource matching, content planning and campaign execution services. This initiative enables clients to effectively achieve brand exposure and user engagement. While our products and service capabilities are still being further refined, we have already seen encouraging execution results and the client feedback in some of the pilot projects.

Looking forward, we will continue to advance our celebrity and IP content marketing services, positioning them as a key component to deepen collaboration with brand advertisers and enhance our content marketing competitiveness while driving greater synergy with our overall ad product portfolio. With that, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for the financial review.

Cao Fei: Thank you, Gaofei, and hello, everybody. Welcome to Weibo's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Let's start with user metrics. 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. AI continued to serve as an important enabler across our product, content and monetization systems.

On the monetization side, AI-powered targeting, bidding and ad creative generation continued to support promoted feeds and real-time bidding ad products. Internally, we are also expanding the use of AI tools to improve execution efficiency across products, operations and sales teams. Turning to financials. As a reminder, my prepared remarks would focus on non-GAAP results. Monetary amounts are in U.S. dollar terms and all comparisons are on a year-on-year basis, unless otherwise noted. Now let me walk you through our financial highlights for the first quarter 2026. Weibo's first quarter 2026 net revenues were USD 421.3 million, an increase of 6% or 1% on a constant currency basis. Operating income was USD 119.8 million, representing operating margin of 28%.

Net income attributable to Weibo reached USD 91.9 million, and diluted EPS was USD 0.34. Let me give you more color on the first quarter 2026 revenue performance. We started the year with our advertising business returning to year-over-year growth supported by improving demand from selected verticals and continued execution in content marketing and performance-based ad products. Weibo's advertising and marketing revenues for the first quarter 2026 was USD 369.8 million, an increase of 9% percent or 3% on a constant currency basis. By industry, our largest verticals were FMCG, e-commerce and 3C products in terms of growth. Internet services, Automobile and Local services were the major contributors.

Advertising revenues from Internet companies increased primarily due to incremental advertising spend from leading players in the sector. The automobile sector also saw sustained growth, supported by auto-related content ecosystem and ad spend from electric vehicles. For handset sector, advertising revenues recorded a modest growth, but we remain mindful that their marketing budgets may face pressure amid intensified competition with the handset market as well as rising component costs. As for areas facing headwinds, FMCG continued to face a year-over-year gap, although we saw sequential recovery as certain advertisers resume spending in celebrity and KOL marketing campaigns. The online game sector was still on a descending trend due to lack of blockbuster release this quarter.

By ad product, promotive feeds ad was the largest, followed by social display and search and topic. Promoted feed delivered solid growth, benefiting from better ad matching in revamped information feed, continued demand for Weibo's differentiated IP and content marketing solutions and a deeper AI integration in targeting, bidding and creative generation. These product improvements helped advertisers combine brand exposure with more measurable conversion objectives. Ad revenues from Alibaba for the first quarter were USD 43.3 million, an increase of 2% year-over-year or a decrease of 4% on a constant currency basis.

The modest decline of revenues from Alibaba was primarily due to higher sales last year, which included one-off revenues from promotional ad budget for Alibaba's sponsorship of Spring Festival in 2025 and AI-related budget in the first quarter last year. Ad spend from Alibaba highly correlated to its own marketing strategies, which may fluctuate with Alibaba's campaign priorities and product launch schedule, et cetera. Value-added services revenues were USD 51.6 million in the first quarter, a decrease of 11% or 15% on a constant currency basis. The decrease was primarily attributable to declined in game-related revenue. Turning to costs and expenses.

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. Turning to income tax. Under GAAP, income tax expenses for the first quarter were USD 15.7 million compared to USD 24.3 million last year, mainly due to a decrease in deferred tax liability related to equity pickup adjustment. Net income attributable to Weibo in the first quarter was USD 91.9 million, representing a net margin of 22%. Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow items. As of March 31, 2026, Weibo's cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments totaled USD 2.59 billion compared to USD 2.41 billion as of December 31, 2025.

In the first quarter, cash provided by operating activities was $164 million. Capital expenditures totaled USD 11.9 million, and the depreciation and amortization expenses amounted to USD 15.5 million. Let me share some color on our shareholder returns. We have completed the distribution of the annual cash dividend of $0.34 (sic) [$0.61] per ordinary share or ADS for fiscal year 2025 with aggregate amount of approximately USD 150 million in 2026. We will continue to take our disciplined approach to capital allocation, balancing shareholder returns with the financial flexibility needed to fund our long-term product, AI and the content ecosystem initiatives.

Overall, first quarter was a quarter of continued transition and steady execution, while macro consumption sentiment and industry competition remain uncertain with the initial signs of stabilization in core user engagement and advertising demand. We will continue to balance investment needs with operating efficiency and healthy cash flow generation as we build a more sustainable foundation for long-term development. Before turning to the Q&A session, let me provide you a brief update on ESG front. In April, we published our fifth ESG report, highlighting our efforts across social value, tech empowerment, information security, employee development, content ecosystem and green operations. MSCI also recently upgraded our ESG rating from BB to AA, recognizing our progress in sustainability, innovation and social responsibility.

Please visit our IR website for more information. With that, let me now turn the call over to the operator for the Q&A session.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And now we're going to take our first question, and it comes from the line of Thomas Chong from Jefferies.

Thomas Chong: [Foreign Language] Based on the trend so far we see in Q1 and recent months, can management comment about Weibo's advertising outlook in Q2? In addition, can management also comment about our advertising strategies, any updates for the full year? And separately today on AI. Can management share about how it benefits advertising and monetization?

Gaofei Wang: [Interpreted] Thank you for the question. So first of all, let's talk about the overall recap of Q1 performance as well as the expectation of the second half of the year. First of all, we had a year-on-year growth of about 9% of the advertising revenue in Q1. If we're talking about the definition of RMB, it was about 3% of the growth. And in Q1, primarily the advertising revenue growth was driven by the Internet-based software deployment and AI-related investments as well as the other local lifestyle and automotive industry related. Okay.

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. Okay. And next, in terms of Q2 and also the future outlook, I think that although we've been seeing a stressful operational situation for consumption industry, we did have the different responses from different customers. First of all, in terms of automotive industry, at the current stage, they've been experiencing some of the decrease of their sales volume. However, they were not just stopping in terms of the promotional activities for their new products and new product launch as well. So this year, we've seen more new product launches than that of last year.

In Q1 and Q2 as of the near future, I think that this is going to be accelerated. As you can see that we always have more and more frequent launches of new EVs. And also, Weibo is a very good and natural ecosystem to generate and stimulate the discussions around the topics of technology-related and new energy related. At the same time, for the handset industry, as you can see that, it is difficult for us to have a very correct prediction of the performance in the second half of the year. But the industry did experience a drop of the sales volume in the first half of this year.

Of course, this year, however, still we are seeing more launches of new products and new smartphones and especially increasing the frequency of the smartphone launches for the medium to high-end segment. In summer holiday, we might have been experiencing some of the adjustments of the strategy from the handset industry. And of course, this year, we've been seeing Apple proactively adjusted their price, causing some of the stressful situations to some of the Chinese handset makers.

So as a result, our 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. And also lastly, let's talk about some of the other industries like the e-commerce and local lifestyle as well as the FMCG industry. First of all, for the e-commerce, we've already had a very high base number in entering into Q2. And of course, also for the industry, some of the promotional activities and especially budget allocated to the fast food delivery was not as intense as before.

So this is going to be not that stressful. And also, I would like to comment on FMCG. Entering to the second half of the year, we are going to have the World Cup as activities. So I believe that we are trying our best to catch the opportunity to gain that ad revenue or ad budget from that customer. And also, you can see that talking about the AI topic, as we have already previously stated, that the AI was primarily very effective on the effects-based or performance-based ads. So you can see that AI was quite useful in terms of the ad material generation, eCPM and also the recommendations as well.

So in terms of those generated materials for the advertisements, the primary consumption rate was already reaching to about like 40%. And in Q1, in the information-based feeds, we had a double-digit growth, especially talking about eCPM and the other relevant areas. Also, of course, you know that Weibo is very good at doing the business in the advertisement industry for the brand-based advertisement and key customers' advertisements. So we are very good at doing the business of the celebrity based or the content-based marketing. And at the current stage, we've been having a very good progress in terms of adoption of the AI among those KOLs and also the celebrities as well.

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.

Operator: Now we're going to take our next question, just give us a moment. And the question comes from the line of Jenny Huang from UBS.

Jennifer Huang: [Foreign Language] Could you please share some updates on the impact of the state of events on the user growth? Now last quarter, you highlighted video strategy as a key focus for this year. Could you please provide an update on the progress so far as well as the key priorities and targets for the next phase? And lastly, could you please also share the developments on the AI front in terms of user facing products?

Gaofei Wang: [Interpreted] Okay, thank you for this question. So first of all, as for the update of the information-based feed, we've been seeing that this was actually completed in about the mid of Q3 of 2025. And before which it was primarily based on the recommendation-based feed. But when we actually had that update and the adjustments, we've been seeing a very good improvement of the user experience in the front. And in Q1, we had a little bit decrease of MAU and DAU of the site primarily due to the strategic or strategy changes of channel placement and also some of the low shipments of the handset.

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.

At the same time, using our algorithm to better enhance the user experience and also the depth of the user interaction on the social media. And second point is that we hope that our total video consumption in terms of the time spent and also the total video-based consumption could be further improved because of this kind of a strategy. Also, we would like to attract more bloggers to be on the Weibo to open an account and generate more video content. And also this would be helping them to do more deployment and the placements as well as the generation and production of the video-related content.

So this will be really helpful for us to increase the time spent on video-related content on Weibo. And also in terms of the overall results of the video strategy for the video front. First of all, of course, we've been seeing actually a very good growth of the number of users consuming the video-related content on Weibo, and you can see that this was pretty much forming a new mindset of the consumers on the video-related content. And we had a very good double-digit growth year-on-year in terms of the time spent on the video related content on Weibo.

And on the supply side of the video content, because of this recommendation based fees, we hope that we are able to attract more creators and bloggers from outside of Weibo to actually by providing them with more resources and also more budgets. And based on this, the new algorithm and new incentive plans and encouragement plans, we hope that we are able to attract more and more of those external bloggers and also content creators to be landing on Weibo and helping us to enrich the supply of video content. In terms of the AI, we had a lot of R&D investments and try to encourage people to actually use AI to facilitate what they do.

And when we launched the Zhisou in 2025, we had actually a very good boost in terms of the total volume of search. But still in Q1, we had some of the challenges because at the current stage, we've been seeing a lot of AI tools that were emerging. And on the consumption side or on consumer side, they're actually now -- more and more consumers are now trying to use the interactive and dialogue-based search instead of just a pure search function. So in Q4, we made that interactive dialogue-based search available and experiencing 100% of the growth in terms of users and adoption in Q1.

But still at the current stage, the base number of the user for these particular features only at a level of 1 million. So we hope that in the future, we are able to further boost that and further strengthen our AI-related strategy on this front. So in Q1, yes, in Q1, especially targeting those content creators, we are now establishing an AI content creating center, facilitating those content creators to generate the text and images as well as video content as well.

So at the current stage, you can see that we had a lot of important key account or the key content creators that had a very good video generated through -- in the center and those text and images as well. Also, we've been seeing a very good collaboration with ByteDance and Qwen to actually have the capability to help the content creators to generate video with a length of 1 minute long, which primarily it's about like several seconds or 10-or-so seconds, but we are able to help to generate the videos of 1 minute long.

So this, of course, is the feature that is not accessible by all users, but at the current stage, we're only providing this to some of the new certified users. But in the future, we hope that we are able to have a rollout. But before that, we are going to have further consolidation internally.

Operator: Dear participants, due to time constraints of today's call, we will not be addressing any further questions. Thank you very much for taking participation. You may now all disconnect. Have a nice day. [Portions of this transcript that are marked [Interpreted] were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]

This article is a transcript of this conference call produced for The Motley Fool. While we strive for our Foolish Best, there may be errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in this transcript. Parts of this article were created using Large Language Models (LLMs) based on The Motley Fool's insights and investing approach. It has been reviewed by our AI quality control systems. Since LLMs cannot (currently) own stocks, it has no positions in any of the stocks mentioned. As with all our articles, The Motley Fool does not assume any responsibility for your use of this content, and we strongly encourage you to do your own research, including listening to the call yourself and reading the company's SEC filings. Please see our Terms and Conditions for additional details, including our Obligatory Capitalized Disclaimers of Liability.

The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.