On June 1, China’s leading social media platform Weibo released its annual financial statements for the first quarter of 2022. The company’s advertising revenue reached USD 427 million, up 10% year on year.
As a microblogging application, Weibo (微博) was launched by Sina Corporation (新浪) in 2009 as a social media platform for people to create, share, and discover content online. In Q1 2022, Weibo's total revenue grew 6% year on year to USD 485 million. 94% of its advertising income was generated from mobile end users. The company's main domestic competitors include Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU 百度) and Zhihu (NYSE: ZH 知乎), along with international competitors, such as Twitter and Facebook.
The company further disclosed that the advertising revenue in the game industry maintained over 50% year-on-year growth from sales and product operation. The platform also equips with a natural advantage of advertising new games to a wide scale of audience. According to the earnings statement, Weibo reached 582 million monthly active users, a net increase of 51 million year-over-year.
"We delivered a solid start to 2022," said Gaofei Wang, CEO of Weibo. "In the first quarter, our user base and traffic continued to grow nicely with disciplined marketing spending, which demonstrated our core value in public conversation and enriched content ecosystem. On monetization, Weibo has delivered a relatively resilient performance of advertising business in the first quarter, despite disruptions from COVID-19 resurgence in China."
Benefiting from the Spring Festival holiday and the Winter Olympic Games, Weibo achieved significant growth in user size and traffic in the first quarter of 2022. In March, the company''s community scale continued to expand and the active video account jumped to 30 million.