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DATE

Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026 at 7 a.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

• IR - Sandra Zhang
• Chief Executive Officer - Gaofei Wang
• Chief Financial Officer - Fei Cao

TAKEAWAYS

• Total Revenue -- $453.8 million, an increase of 2% year over year reflecting growth in value-added services.
• Ad Revenue -- $381 million, a decrease of 1% year over year due to consumption market headwinds and budget tightening in certain industries.
• VAS Revenue -- $72.9 million, an increase of 19% year over year driven by one-off ticket proceeds and membership service growth.
• Non-GAAP Operating Income -- $125.4 million, representing a 28% operating margin compared to 36% in the second quarter of last year.
• Net Income Attributable to Weibo -- $102.7 million, representing a 23% net margin for the quarter.
• Non-GAAP Diluted EPS -- $0.38, reflecting the reported net income for the second quarter.
• Monthly Active Users -- 561 million in June 2026, representing a modest sequential decline as the company rationalized its channel budget strategy.
• Daily Active Users -- 254 million in June 2026, declining slightly year over year while remaining stable quarter over quarter.
• Alibaba Ad Revenue -- $39.2 million, an increase of 10% year over year as higher AI-related spending offset softness in local services.
• Cash and Short-Term Investments -- $2.64 billion as of June 30, 2026, compared to $2.41 billion as of Dec. 31, 2025.
• Operating Cash Flow -- $15.5 million for the second quarter, decreasing due to income tax settlements and payment schedules for annual rebates.
• AI Creative Consumption Share -- 50% in June within promoted feed ad offerings and the real-time bidding system.
• Video Time Spent -- double-digit growth year over year, indicating deeper user consumption.
• Super Topic Participation -- double-digit growth in both active users and discussion participants during the second quarter.
• Capital Expenditures -- $3.1 million during the second quarter.
• AI Optimization Feedback -- 30% reduction in negative feedback rates for e-commerce materials compared to original client content.
• Automobile Ad Revenue -- achieved year-over-year growth driven by intensive new energy vehicle launches.
• Internet Service Ad Revenue -- maintained growth trends due to demand for AI and software performance advertising.
• Food and Beverage Ad Revenue -- grew year over year, fueled by World Cup marketing and new product promotions.
• Cost and Expenses -- $328.4 million, an increase of 16% year over year reflecting higher ad production costs and marketing expenses.

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RISKS

• Wang stated, "In Q3, we had not that optimistic view on the handset industry," noting that budget allocations for high-end product launches remain under observation.
• Cao warned that the "cosmetics vertical remained soft as certain international brands reduced marketing spend amid weak sales and intensified competition."
• Management noted that the "food delivery price war in the third quarter of last year created a relatively high revenue base for comparison," which is expected to pressure upcoming year-over-year growth.

SUMMARY

Management reported that Weibo Corporation (WB -0.91%) achieved revenue growth despite a decline in advertising sales, as the company navigated a subdued domestic consumption market. The company stated that divergent trends across advertising verticals influenced performance, with automobile and AI-related internet services showing strength while the handset and cosmetics sectors faced headwinds. Management indicated a strategic shift toward improving the quality of user acquisition and leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance both the user feed experience and advertising efficiency.

• The company is prioritizing the conversion rate of newly acquired channel users into active participants rather than focusing solely on acquisition volume.
• CEO Wang stated, "The use of AI in both product and operations this year has also delivered tangible results in new feature and product development as well as operational strategy optimization."
• Weibo is integrating Intelligent Search more deeply into content consumption, moving toward multi-turn conversations and interactive Q&A formats.
• Management reported that celebrity marketing demand is growing, with the company becoming involved earlier in campaign planning to provide resource matching for brands.
• The video content creator base is expanding, with approximately 10,000 creators and a 70% retention rate for those updating content on the platform.
• CFO Cao indicated that the company will remain disciplined in capital allocation while focusing on advertising opportunities with better budget visibility in the second half of the year.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

• MAU: Monthly Active Users, a measure of the total number of unique users who visit the platform within a 30-day period.
• DAU: Daily Active Users, the number of unique users who visit the platform on a given day.
• eCPM: Effective Cost Per Mille, the ad revenue generated per 1,000 impressions.
• RTB: Real-Time Bidding, a sub-type of programmatic advertising that allows for the automated buying and selling of ad inventory.
• VAS: Value-Added Services, non-advertising revenue streams such as membership subscriptions and virtual gifts.
• KOL: Key Opinion Leader, an influencer or expert on social media with a significant following.
• Super Topic: Interest-based community forums on the Weibo platform where users engage in discussions about specific subjects or celebrities.
• FMCG: Fast-Moving Consumer Goods, products that are sold quickly and at a relatively low cost, such as packaged foods and toiletries.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Operator: Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Weibo Reports Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Sandra Zhang, IR. Please go ahead.

Sandra Zhang: Thank you, operator. Welcome to Weibo's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me today are our Chief Executive Officer, Gaofei Wang; and our Chief Financial Officer, Fei Cao. This conference call is also being broadcasted on the Internet and is available through Weibo's IR website. Before the management remarks, I would like to read you the safe harbor statement in connection with today's conference call. During today's conference call, we may make forward-looking statements, statements that are not historical facts, including statements of our beliefs and expectations. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. A number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements.

Weibo assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements in this conference call and elsewhere. Further information regarding this and other risks is included in Weibo's annual report on Form 20-F and other filings with the SEC. All the information provided in this press release is current as of the date hereof. Weibo assumes no obligation to update such information, except as required under applicable law. Additionally, I would like to remind you that our discussion today includes certain non-GAAP measures, which exclude stock-based compensation and certain other expenses. We use non-GAAP financial measures to gain a better understanding of Weibo's comparative operating performance and the future prospects.

Our non-GAAP financials exclude certain expenses, gains or losses and other items that are not expected in future cash payments or are nonrecurring in nature or are not indicative of our core operating results and outlook. Please refer to our press release for more information about our non-GAAP measures. Following management prepared remarks, we will open the lines for a brief Q&A session. With this, I would like to turn the call over to our CEO, Gaofei Wang. Thank you.

Gaofei Wang: [Interpreted] Hello, everyone. Welcome to Weibo's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. On today's call, I will share with you highlights on Weibo's product and monetization in the second quarter 2026. On the user front, in June 2026, Weibo's MAUs reached 561 million and average DAUs reached 254 million. This year, we have proactively rationalized our channel budget allocation strategy. Instead of scaling up user acquisition, we shift our focus towards improving the conversion rate of newly acquired channel users into active users. Concurrently, as the homepage information feed revamp is still in the phase of continuous optimization, some low-frequency users will need time to adapt to the changes.

As a result, our DAU base declined slightly year-over-year in June, but remained largely flat quarter-over-quarter. Now let me walk you through the financials. Our total revenue in the second quarter reached USD 453.8 million, an increase of 2% year-over-year. Our total ad revenue reached USD 381 million, a decrease of 1% year-over-year. VAS revenue reached USD 72.9 million, an increase of 19% year-over-year. Although our advertising business was impacted by the consumption market headwinds and tightened budget from advertisers in certain industries, advertising revenue from automobile Internet service and food and beverage still achieved solid year-over-year growth this quarter. Ad revenues from selective marketing also maintained year-over-year growth trends.

Our non-GAAP operating income in the second quarter reached USD 125.4 million, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 28%. In 2026, we will continue to enhance user experience, improve platform operating efficiency and content quality, continuously stepping up AI investment in product operation and strengthening user retention and long-term engagement. On the product and operation front, we will continue to refine the homepage information feed. By leveraging trending topic examination, social interaction and hot topic discussion, we aim to ensure that users gain timely access to the key trending content, content worth discussing and sharing as well as high-quality posts tailored to those to their interest when they access Weibo.

Furthermore, we will continue to strengthen product capabilities across core consumption scenarios such as video, interest-based community and search, thereby enrich user experience in video content consumption, interest-driven interaction and information discovery and further enhance the platform long-term competitiveness. The use of AI in both product and operations this year has also delivered tangible results in new feature and product development as well as operational strategy optimization.

On the user growth and engagement front, we continue to optimize the homepage information feed product in the second quarter, while maintaining a stable social consumption experience in the relationship-based feed, we focus on strengthening the capabilities of interest-based feed to distribute relationship-based content, trending topics and video content and sustained user engagement and consumption. By doing so, we aim to improve content matching efficiency while further highlighting Weibo's differentiated advantages in social interaction, trending topics and opinion discussion, which ultimately increase users' willingness to open Weibo and stay engaged.

Specifically, with the continuous improvement of distribution capability of the interest-based feed, the platform has strengthened its ability to better organize and distribute content, social content that users have a strong demand for, trending discussion and high-quality video content received greater exposure through the interest-based feed. This in turn drove overall increase in the time spent, the number of engaged users and the interaction for the homepage information feed since second quarter.

At the same time, we have observed that for some low-frequency users still take time to adapt to new product format and thus, the recovery of those, their visit frequency and retention continue to lag behind the improvement in the overall consumption metrics, posing challenges in time spent and retention. Going forward, we will continue to optimize product experience, keeping a better balance between improving recommendation efficiency and accommodating different user habits, thereby strengthening the homepage feed ability to drive user visits and long-term engagement. On the video front, in the second quarter, we continued to optimize video distribution and supply with a focus on improving video consumption efficiency and expanding the supply of high-quality video content.

On the distribution side, with enhanced recommendation algorithm of interest-based feed, we were able to more effectively identify and distribute high-quality video content, shifting traffic towards high-quality content. This helped reduce the negative impact of repetitive and low-quality videos on the user experience. In the second quarter, total time spent on video views continue to grow double digit year-over-year and average time spent per user on video views grew even more meaningfully, indicating deeper video consumption. On the supply side, the supply of high-quality video content across the platform continued to grow double-digit quarter-over-quarter in the second quarter.

As the upgraded interest-based feed continue to drive greater distribution and consumption of high-quality video content, we further beefed up our efforts to expand the video content creator base and strengthen content operation. By improving our content creator acquisition mechanism, enhancing traffic support and sustaining operation, we have gradually established a clear framework for creator onboarding, content production and creator retention. As a result, the scale of video production from newly acquired content creators and their corresponding user consumption performance has largely met our expectations and gradually forming a positive cycle between video content supply and consumption.

In the second half of this year, we will further step up our efforts to expand our video creator base, accelerate the onboarding of the high-quality creators with stable production capabilities and strong content influence. We also leverage traffic support to strategically supplement key video content in alignment with our users' consumption needs. At the same time, through our ongoing operation, we will help video content creators better understand the type of content that resonates on Weibo's platform and establish consistent production. As the supply of high-quality video content expands, the recommendation algorithm will also be able to better understand users' video consumption preference, improving the efficiency of matching quality content with targeted users.

By simultaneously improving video creator supply, content distribution and content consumption, the video business will more sustainably drive user time spent, long-term engagement and monetization efficiency, while further enhancing the vitality and competitiveness of the platform's content ecosystem. Moving on to content ecosystem competitiveness. Throughout 2026, we will continue to focus on 3 core areas: trending topics, social network and search, while further enhancing the health and core competitiveness of our content ecosystem. On social attributes, Super Topic is a core interest-based community on Weibo and an important areas for strengthening our competitiveness in the interest-based social engagement.

In the second quarter, we accelerated product and feature integration around the core needs of users across different interest-based communities, aiming to further reinforce Weibo's competitiveness in the interest-based social scenarios. For example, in celebrity Super Topic, we enhanced the check-in experience and introduced a celebrity memory album feature as well as online to offline engagement initiatives. The sports and e-sports Super Topics, we introduced features for event reviews, ratings and discussion and leverage the World Cup to strengthen user awareness, driving a significant increase in the sports Super Topic user base. These new features further encourage users to move from content consumption to interaction and deeper participation.

As a result, both daily active users and the number of users participating in discussion on Super Topics double-digit year-over-year growth in the second quarter. On search, building on the scaled rollout of Weibo Intelligent Search last year, our focus this year has shifted further towards deepening the use of multi-turn conversations and integrating AI search more naturally into content consumption experience. In the second quarter, we continued to enhance intelligent search ability to understand context and user intent in multi-term conversations with a particular focus on enhancing the search experience in areas where Weibo has differentiated content strength such as trending topics, public speakers and IPs.

At the same time, we are embedding search entry points more deeply into users' journey for browsing posts, videos and trending topics, allowing us to promptly address the needs as they arise during content consumption and continue to improve the efficiency and user experience of information discovery. Monetization in the first half of the year, our advertising product and sales team focused on 2 key strategies. First, we sought to bring Weibo unique content marketing value to more industries and advertisers. Second, we systematically enhanced advertising performance and conversion through AI integration. In the second quarter, the recovery in the domestic consumption market remained relatively subdued with divergent trends across industries and advertisers.

Some advertisers continue to face challenges such as limited recovery in consumption demand, intensifying industry competition and rising cost and margin pressures. As a result, they become more cautious with their marketing budget, placing greater emphasis on the measurable returns and ROI certainty. Although Weibo continue to be well positioned to capture advertising budget in areas such as new product launch, celebrity marketing and sports event marketing, the aforementioned factors weigh on our advertising business to a certain extent. Consequently, Weibo's ad revenue experienced temporary pressure in the second quarter and decreased 1% year-over-year. By industry, advertising revenue from the automobile sector grew year-over-year, driven by intensive launch of new energy vehicles.

The Internet service sector continued to book solid growth, primarily benefiting from the increased demand among AI and software service advertisers for performance-driven advertising and content distribution. The food and beverage sector also delivered growth, mainly fueled by the World Cup, celebrity marketing and the promotion of key new products. On the flip side, some industry continue to face headwinds. Following intense competition last year, the e-commerce sector has gradually returned to a more normal market condition. Despite overall stable ad spend during the June 18 shopping festival, the relatively high revenue base from certain business lines last year posted noticeable pressure on revenue growth this year.

In the handset sector, overall ad budget contracted under the cost and margin pressure, but Weibo's wallet share within the sector remained largely stable. In light of advertisers' budget trends, in the second half of the year, we will focus on further strengthening our content marketing products and services. By offering more standardized product solution and more convenient advertising tools, we aim to lower the barrier for advertisers across content planning, resource allocation and information feed placement. Thereby further enhancing Weibo's ability to capture ad budgets. Among its marketing scenarios, celebrity marketing was one of our key focus area in the second quarter. We are pleased with the growing demand from advertisers for celebrity marketing.

In the first half of the year, we not only supported advertisers with celebrity marketing campaigns on Weibo, but also became involved earlier in campaign planning and resource matching, providing more comprehensive service aligned with their brand objectives and communication goals. Leveraging measured resource investment and enhanced service capabilities, we successfully expanded their ad spend on celebrity marketing products. Taking Mono's partnership with Erling Haaland as an example, we help match the brand with the right celebrity resource and work with both the brand and celebrity to co-create content and drive engagement around key event-related topics. During the World Cup, topics related to Erling Haaland attracted broader attention on Weibo, generating over 5 billion topic views and 1.4 million discussion.

Mono also further enhanced its brand exposure and user engagement thanks to the celebrity content and World Cup-related discussion. During the campaign, Weibo effectively integrated celebrity resources, event-related trending topics and social discussion to provide the advertiser with one-stop service spanning resources matching, content co-creation and campaign execution. This empowers the brand to extend a single celebrity collaboration into sustained content buzz and brand exposure. On advertising products, we will continue to apply AI across key stages of advertising process, focusing on creative supply, intelligent ad placement and creative quality management to improve advertisers' campaign efficiency and user experience.

In the second quarter, driven by the advancement of video generation models, we automatically generated viable ad creatives for e-commerce advertisers facing a shortage of video materials, resulting in solid improvement in the coverage and usability of AI produced videos for target products with continued gains in efficiency and quality of AI creative production. On the ad placement front, the consumption share of AI-generated ad creatives in the promoted feed ad offerings and the real-time bidding system continued to increase, reaching 50% in June. Meanwhile, we use AI to identify ad creatives with low quality and those generating high levels of negative feedback and apply targeted optimization accordingly.

In the e-commerce sector, AI optimized materials saw a drop of over 30% in negative feedback rate compared with client original materials, effectively enhancing the user experience in ad content consumption. Going forward, leveraging an increasingly mature creative quality evaluation system and implementing differentiated generation strategies for various distribution scenarios, we aim to continuously improve the adaptability of AI creatives to their respective scenarios. With these initiatives, we hope to further improve advertising performance and campaign efficiency. Looking ahead to the second half of the year, we believe the recovery in consumer demand will take some time, while pressure on advertisers from cost, profitability industry competition is likely to persist. Competition for advertising budget is also expected to remain intense.

It's worth mentioning that the food delivery price war in the third quarter of last year created a relatively high revenue base for comparison. And moreover, due to factors such as prime match broadcaster times and the advertiser dynamics during this year's World Cup, the incremental boost to the related ad budget was lower than that of the previous tournament. These factors are expected to put some pressure on year-over-year advertising revenue growth in the third quarter.

Faced with this market environment, we will continue to invest in building Weibo's differentiated commercial service capabilities, keep pace with shift in clients' marketing needs and budget structures, reinforce our content marketing value proposition and add conversion effectiveness and enhance our capability to capture clients' budgets with more certainty to stabilize our overall ad revenue base. With that, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for a financial review.

Cao Fei: Thank you, Gaofei, and hello, everyone. Welcome to Weibo's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Let's start with user metrics. In June 2026, Weibo's MAUs and average DAUs reached 561 million and 254 million, respectively. During this quarter, our user strategy continued to focus on improving user quality, driving retention and deepening engagement, while MAUs saw a modest sequential decline, DAUs remained resilient and broadly stable quarter-over-quarter. We continued to see solid engagement among our core users, along with improving consumption and engagement in the recommendation feed. Video consumption also continued to improve, supported by better content distribution within our revamped feed.

AI continued to serve as an important enabler across our product, content and monetization systems, helping us better understand user interest, improve ad targeting and delivery and enhance operating efficiency. Turning to financials. As a reminder, my prepared remarks will focus on non-GAAP results. All monetary amounts are in U.S. dollars and all comparisons are on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise noted. Now let me walk you through our financial highlights for the second quarter 2026. Weibo's second quarter 2026 net revenues were USD 453.8 million, an increase of 2% or a decrease of 4% on a constant currency basis. Operating income was USD 125.4 million representing operating margin of 28%.

Net income attributable to Weibo reached USD 102.7 million and diluted EPS was USD 0.38. Let me give you more color on the second quarter 2026 revenue performance. Weibo's advertising and marketing revenues for the second quarter 2026 were USD 381 million, a decrease of 1% or 6% on a constant currency basis. The decrease was mainly reflecting softer demand in certain key advertising verticals and was partially offset by the favorable foreign exchange impact on reported numbers on a year-over-year basis by industries. Our top 3 verticals were FMCG, e-commerce and automobile.

In terms of growth, Internet services and automobile were primary contributors despite softness in overall automobile sales, ad revenues from the auto sector delivered solid year-over-year growth, supported by Weibo's strong content ecosystem and frequent new energy vehicle launches during the quarter. Advertising revenues from Internet companies also increased, driven by stronger marketing demand for AI-related products and services as leading Internet platforms increased marketing activities around their AI offerings. As for industries facing headwinds, the handset sector remained under pressure in the second quarter. Softer ad demand continued to weigh on smartphone shipments while rising component costs put additional pressure on handset manufacturers profitability and marketing budgets. As a result, advertising revenues from the sector declined year-over-year.

The FMCG sector saw divergent performance during the quarter. Food and beverage delivered solid growth, benefiting from the early release of World Cup-related marketing budgets during the quarter. The cosmetics vertical remained soft as certain international brands reduced marketing spend amid weak sales and intensified competition. In addition, game developers remained cautious on advertising spend amid continued softness in the online game market. The ad product, promoted feed ads remained our largest format followed by social display ads and search and topic ads. ECPM continued to improve both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter, supported by deeper AI integration in creative generation, marketing and bidding. These improvements helped enhance ad delivery efficiency and advertiser ROI.

Our IP and content marketing solutions also continued to see solid demand. Ad revenues from Alibaba for the second quarter was USD 39.2 million, an increase of 10% or 3% on a constant currency basis. During the quarter, higher spending on AI-related activities more than offset softer spending in local services as we have noted previously. Alibaba's advertising spend on Weibo is closely tied to its own marketing priorities and pace of product launches, which may therefore vary from quarter-to-quarter. Value-added service revenues were USD 72.9 million in the second quarter, an increase of 19% or 12% on a constant currency basis.

The increase was primarily driven by one-off ticket proceeds from offline activities held by Weibo, solid growth from membership services as well as favorable foreign exchange impact on reported numbers on a year-over-year basis. Turning to costs and expenses. Total cost and expenses for the second quarter were USD 328.4 million, an increase of 16%, mainly due to higher ad production costs and marketing expenses. Operating income in the second quarter was USD 125.4 million, representing operating margin of 28% compared to 36% in the same period last year. Turning to income tax and GAAP. Income tax expenses for the second quarter were USD 23 million compared to USD 31.7 million last year, mainly due to lower income before taxes.

Net income attributable to Weibo in the second quarter was USD 102.7 million, representing a net margin of 23%. Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow items. As of June 30, 2026, Weibo's cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments totaled USD 2.64 billion compared to USD 2.41 billion as of December 31, 2025. In the second quarter, cash provided by operating activities was USD 15.5 million. The decrease in operating cash flow for the quarter was primarily resulted from settlement of corporate income taxes, collection schedule of receivables as well as payment schedule of annual rebate compared with prior quarter. Capital expenditures totaled USD 3.1 million and depreciation and amortization expenses amounted to USD 15.7 million.

We remain disciplined in capital allocation with measured capital spending and continued support shareholder returns. We closed the first half of 2026 with continued progress across our product, content and monetization initiatives. While soft consumer demand and intensified industry competition continued to weigh on advertising demand, we are encouraged by measurable improvements from our product revamp and AI initiatives, particularly in user engagement and advertising efficiency. Entering the second half, we will focus on advertising opportunities with better budget visibility while carefully managing the pace of investment and maintaining our focus on operating efficiency. Our priority remains to balance near-term sustainable profitability and financial flexibility while strengthening the foundation for Weibo's long-term development.

With that, let me now turn the call over to the operator for the Q&A session.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first questions come from the line of Timothy Zhao from Goldman Sachs.

Timothy Zhao: Great. I think my question is regarding the outlook of the advertising revenue into the second half of this year. Just wondering, can management share more detail on your expectations on the ad revenue growth? And what is the trend for different subsectors? And what is the latest update on your advertising strategy? And more specifically on AI, just wondering if you can share more color on how AI has increased the overall eCPM of the advertising business and what are other operating metrics that you may share?

Sandra Zhang: [Interpreted] Yes. Thank you very much for the question. First of all, I'd like to talk about my expectations over the second half of this year. First of all, as I have already stated just now for the performance in Q2, except for some of the verticals that were increasing the performance, for instance, automotive and food and beverages, for the rest of the other verticals, we did see some of the stressful situations. It was because of the overall macro economy, especially on consumption, we have seen some of the pressure the customers were decreasing their budget on advertisement. Okay. And let's talk about some of the performance in the second half of the year.

First of all, there are still a lot of uncertainties first in terms of the automotive industry. We did see the less sales and also poorer performance in terms of the sales and production of the first half of the year. But still, in the first half of the year, we did see a lot of launches and new energy [indiscernible] launched and available to the market. So Weibo is actually a very strong platform in doing the advertisement for the new product launches and new product availability. So you can see that on this front, we did see actually an increase in ad revenue for that.

And that particular increase and that particular momentum could be kept until the second half of the year. And next, I would like to talk about the Internet industry, especially the vertical of the software and application services. So we believe that the second half of the year will be quite similar to that of year still because the customers are having high requirements over the ROI as well as the allocated budget on developments. As a result, we do not expect too much of the growth in the second half of the year.

So I believe that this particular industry, the software and application services are going to be having a flat performance or a little bit increase in the second half of the year. And next vertical is the headset industry. So in the first half of the year, we did see the down performance and mainly due to the decrease for most of the customers. So except for Apple, the rest of the other handset makers were having double-digit decrease in terms of the total performance. So in the second half of the year, of course, we might be expecting some of the new products launched in the market.

So -- but still, we are observing that in September for the Apple new product launch event, whether or not this is going to trigger more allocation of the budget from the other handset makers to launch or to allocate to the new product availability of the medium to high end of the products. So in Q3, we had not that optimistic view on the handset industry, but still keeping observing observation into the Q4 performance of this year, and next, in the second half of the year, we had some of the really bad fluctuations over the industries of e-commerce and the food delivery as well.

So you know that last year, primarily the food delivery price war was happening in about Q3 and Q4. So that actually did have a lot of impact on the ad revenues to this. So this year, still, we have been seeing some situations. And in the second half of the year, I believe that the anti-involution policies from the Chinese government will continue on this one. So this is going to be weakening this competition among different food delivery brands. So as a result, this was impacting our overall ad budget of this year as well. So it is still uncertain for the industries like the local service or local lifestyle and also food delivery and e-commerce, et cetera.

So we had actually [indiscernible]. And on this particular ad-related strategies, first of all, in terms of the performance-based, of course, we do see an eCPM increase but quarter-by-quarter, but that does not represent that the ad revenue was going to also increase because last year, we had a lot of restructuring of the ad products. So that did impact some of the core users. So in the first half of this year and also second half of last year, we have been doing some of the optimizations of this part. For instance, in terms of this bad user experience of the ad and some of the negative experience products had some elimination process conducted.

So reduce the exposure of those low-frequency users or low-frequency users exposure. So that caused a stressful situation to our ad load. So in the second half of the year, while we are seeing a tendency of increased time user spend and also the kind of other relevant situations, we are expecting to have a little bit of improvement, but still -- and also a little bit release of the ad to the eCPM a little bit increase does not represent an overall growth momentum of this site.

And in terms of the brand-based ad, we can see that except for having an optimized pricing schemes, we believe that the most important parameter here is the sales rate of our core resources. So you can see that this particular parameter has been shown a decline tendency if we're comparing that with the ad revenue trend. So because of the decreased demand from our ad users on ad customer side. So of course, at this current stage, that's the very reason why we are now trying to actually focus more on the celebrity-based or KOL-based marketing or the content-based marketing.

So especially for those ad customers that may actually have the budget of between 5 million and 20 million, I believe that the KOL-based marketing will be the best option for these customers and they're going to be putting most of their available budget or ad budget with Weibo so that, for instance, especially the example of P&G of having most of the budget left on the Weibo platform to actually use the KOL marketing because this is going to help them to actually really help to catch the attention of those medium-level users and the consumer. So this is actually going to help us to increase also the budget attraction as well as the ad revenue on this front.

So the very important core part is to improve the parameter of the sales rate of the core resources.

Operator: We are now going to proceed with our next question and the questions come from the line of Yicheng Yuan from UBS.

Yicheng Yuan: [Interpreted] So let me translate myself. So could you please provide an update on user growth and engagement trends, including content consumption, time spent and usage frequency, et cetera. In addition, in terms of our digitalization strategy and AI initiatives, could you please share the latest progress and the main areas of focus for the second half of the year?

Gaofei Wang: [Interpreted] So for this question, first of all, for the previous 2 quarters of this year, we did see, as I have already elucidated just now, we have some of the adjustments of our product structure. So in the last year's second half, this did have some of the low-frequency users as well, especially because of the changes of the using habits. So this year, of course, in terms of the core users, we did see a very good trend of increasing the time spent on Weibo as well as the interactivity with Weibo. But still, this is quite stressful for the low-frequency users still because of 2 reasons.

First reason is that previously, we were pretty much focused on the pre-installed app of -- in those handsets. But this year, we had lower shipments of those handsets with the pre-install app. So that did help us to impact the overall parameter of attraction of new users using those pre-installed app. So this had around 10% of impact to our overall business. And second reason is that now at the current stage, we are primarily focusing on the recommendation-based feed. And because of that, if we are competing with our peers, we do not see that much of a difference if we're talking about the low-frequency user attraction. So that did give us actually a quite stressful situation.

But I believe that in the second half of this year, we are going to focus on this particular issue and hope to have some better achievements in the second half of the year. And the next part is about the video-related consumption, as you -- as we have already stated in the prepared remarks that time spent on the Weibo video and production as well as the consumption of Weibo video, we did see actually a double-digit growth on these parameters.

And especially after Q2, we did see some of the particular resources and investments invested by us in order to attract those video users or video accounts to be created entered Weibo or we are attracting the video content creators from other platforms to enter the Weibo platform. But of course, in the past, it was quite difficult to actually create new accounts if it was purely based on the relationship-based feed. But at the current stage, we're now converting to the recommendation-based feed. And that really give us an advantage of giving more traffic to those video content creators so that they are more willing to open accounts on our Weibo platform.

And I believe that at the current stage, the overall trend is pretty good in terms of video content created and also the consumption as well. So we are going to keep investing on this front. And in terms of the number of those video content creators at the [ current account ] at current stage, it is amounting to around 10,000 of them. So in terms of the retention rate, it is about 70% also. So meaning that those accounts keep updating the video-related content now. So this -- and the second part is about incentives that we are providing to those content creators or the video content creators. And the ROI then was about 70% to 100%.

And this did help to contribute a lot to the ads of the current year. And also, of course, that we believe in terms of the impact of this part to the gross margin of Weibo a little bit negative. So if you're talking about -- and also in terms of the long term, I do believe that there is going to be a lot of benefits added to our overall business because this did help us to increase the ad at the same time, having better attraction to the users and improve. I think that now I would like to talk a little bit about the Intelligent Search, Weibo Intelligent Search.

So we've been launching this in the past years and especially the agentic AI and AI Intelligent Search. And so in terms of the year-on-year performance, we did see actually an increase. But here, if you're talking about the quarter-by-quarter performance, this did have some of the negative trend. But still, in Q1, we had a massive update of the capabilities of LLM, and at this stage, we are focusing on the upgrading of the technology as well as improving the user experience, especially changing the user behaviors from those fixed box based and typing kind of a search to an interactive search and Q&A-based search or the introduction based or guidance -- or guided search in this front.

So hopefully, that we are going to see a very positive overall trend of this particular user behavior and some of the other relevant areas. Okay. And next part is about the AI application and its overall impact to enhance the R&D efficiency and maintenance as well. So at the current stage, we do see some of the positive impacts of AI use to facilitate the R&D of the products. But first of all, in terms of the core product R&D, there is not much to be shared because this is actually quite standardized. But especially on the product of the Super Topics, I think that this is really important in my opinion.

And for the Super Topics, because of the efficiency of generating the Super Topics [indiscernible] by . We did see more kind of sub apps to be created by those content accounts like from the game industry or sport industry, et cetera. So you can see that this particular super topic interaction and the activity rate at the current stage is already reaching the historical high status just because of this facilitation by the AI technology to this particular area. And we're seeing a very good trend of Super Topics.

Operator: We appear to have no further questions at this time. So I will now hand back to Sandra Zhang for closing remarks.

Sandra Zhang: This wraps up our conference call today. Thank you all for joining us. We'll see you next quarter.

Operator: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.