Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Bilibili 2019 4th Quarter and Full Year Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Juliet Yang, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Please note the discussion today will contain forward looking statements relating to the company's future performance and are intended to qualify for the Safe Harbor from liability as established by the U. S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Such statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, assumptions and other factors.
Some of these risks are beyond the company's control and could cause actual results to differ materially from those mentioned in today's press release and this discussion. A general discussion of the risk factors that could affect Bilibili's business and financial results is included in certain filings of the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company does not undertake any obligation to update forward looking information except as required by law. During today's call, management will discuss certain non GAAP financial measures for comparison purpose only. For a definition of non GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of GAAP to non GAAP financial results, please see the 2019 4th quarter and full year financial results news release issued earlier today.
As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. In addition, an investor presentation and a webcast replay of this conference call will be available on Bilibili Investor Relations website atir.bilibili.com. Joining us today on the call from Bilibili Center Management are Mr. Ray Chen, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer Ms. Carly Li, Chairwoman of the Board and Chief Operating Officer and Mr.
Sam Fan, Chief Financial Officer. And I will now turn the call over to Mr. Fan, who will read prepared remarks on behalf of Mr. Chen.
Thank you, Julia. Thank you, everyone, for participating in our 4th quarter and full year 2019 earnings conference call. I'm pleased to deliver today's opening remarks on behalf of Mr. Chen. 2019 was a transformative year for Bilibili with remarkable and diverse growth to our content and user base.
Significantly enhanced our entertainment ecosystem and expanded our platform offerings beyond ACGs. While we remain the leader in online entertainment for Generation Z users, our platform is also beginning to be recognized as a mass market product with offering that appeal to people across different generations. Meanwhile, we continue to foster friendly, active and sticky community with high engagement levels and retention rates, making Bilibili an extremely unique and competitive player in China's fast growing entertainment industry. During 2019, we affirmed user growth as our key strategic focus and raise our MAU target for the next 2 years to 210,000,000 by 2021. I'm pleased to say we are on the right track to meet this exciting goal.
We closed the year on a high note with our 4th quarter results forming a solid foundation for our 2 year growth plan. MAUs grew by 40% year over year, reaching a record 130,000,000 users compared with 93,000,000 in the Q4 2018. Mobile MAUs grow at an even faster pace of 46% year over year, reaching 100 and 16,000,000 users by the end of Q4. At the same time, community engagement is at all time high. Our DAUs increased by 41% year over year to 38,000,000 higher than our MAU growth rate.
And users are spending an average of 77 minutes on our platform per day, excluding gameplay time. These statistics once again demonstrate the high quality growth we are always aim to deliver. As part of our growth strategy and brand campaign, we roll out our 1st ever New Year's gala, the most beautiful night of 2019, to mark December 31, the turn of the decade. The 4 hour entertainment showcase celebrate the coming age for China's Gen Z, who are entering their 20s 30s, deeply influencing our society and mainstream ideals. The event was immediately hit and quickly become the most talked about New Year Gala in China.
The playbacks have been revealed over 90 1,000,000 times, generating nearly 3,000,000 bullet charts as well as massive media coverage. The success of Gala not only exemplified our understanding of young people's interest, but also impressed older generation born in the 70s 80s, opening Bilibili to a much wider audience group. With this far reaching brand awareness of our company, 2020 is off to a good start, especially as we work to grow our brand on broader scale. With our platform increasing differences among multiple generations and mass media, we take our social responsibility very seriously, especially during the recent coronavirus outbreak. Following the outbreak, we took immediate action to support and defend against the pandemic, including a donation of RMB10 1,000,000 and the medical supplies to Wuhan province.
We also believe that disseminating timely and accurate information is crucial. As such, we partner with official media outlet, CCTV News to provide 20 fourseven virus related news and information. In addition, we have partnered with over 60 top universities and education groups, including Beijing University, Tsinghua University and TAL Group to launch live and record open courses to support continued education for students who are unable to leave their homes. We are also the designated live broadcasting channel appointed by Shanghai Municipal Education Commission for K-twelve students to continue their schooling. As the event progresses, we will continue to evaluate ways we can support our users during this time.
With the extension of the Chinese New Year holiday, 100 of millions of people have stayed at home, spending more time on the Internet. Bilibili has become many people's first choice for online entertainment. At the same time, we are seeing an elevation in content supply as people now have more time to create content. Based on the increased time spent on our platform and user momentum we have seen so far, Q1 is shaping up to be one of the strongest first quarter in our corporate history. We are also improving our ability to monetize our growing user traffic.
In the Q4, the number of paying users doubled year over year, reaching 8,800,000. Our paying ratio also increased to 6.8% compared with 1.6% for the same quarter 2 years ago. Revenue per MAU was RMB15.4 and the non GAAP revenue per MAU was RMB8.7, marking 24% 83% increases from the same period in 2018, respectively. We continue to see considerable potential to convert more traffic to paying users, bringing them into the fraud of our active sticky community. Total revenue for the Q4 was also strong, once again beating the top end of our guidance.
Total net revenue for the Q4 were up 74% year on year, reaching RMB2 1,000,000,000, largely driven by our nongame business. Through our increased monetization and the diversified revenue streams, our gross profit margin have also come a long way from 13.8% in Q1 to 19.8% in Q4. As we move through 2020, we expect to continue expanding our top line and the gross margin. With that overview of our improvement across our primary business metrics, I'd like to review some of our activities and upcoming initiatives designed to further grow our content, community and commercialization capabilities in 2020 beyond. 1st, we will look at our content.
POGV is the root and the foundation of our business. It's also the most if tap way to generate high quality content at a relatively low cost. In the 4th quarter, POGV continued to be our primary source for our growing content library, accounting for 91% of our total video views. Our increasing brand awareness, friendly community environment and improved platform services continue to attract more content creators to Bilibili. In the Q4, about 1,000,000 active content creators uploaded 2,800,000 videos monthly, up 80% and 66% year over year, respectively.
With the development of mobile devices and adoption of 5 gs technology, we believe the video industry will be one of the biggest beneficiaries across all sectors. Bilibili, in particular, is going to be benefit with 5 gs potential to revolutionize the various ways of how people produce and consume content. In 2019, we saw very clear trend of more diversity around content and content creators, helping us to attract more mass audience with varying tastes. While we remain the clear leader in games and anime related content, we continue to grow our lifestyle and entertainment offerings. Along with this, we had witnessed many new star content creators rising in those verticals.
Vlog, Fuji and technology continue to gain popularity in the Q4. We are also proactively expanding into other pan entertainment verticals. Music is one of them. With this universal appeal, music is welcomed by our generations of all different backgrounds To further inspire our content creators and enrich our music content offerings, we have partnered with Tencent Music and then most recently with renowned record labels, Sony Music, to bring new experiences to our growing viewership of music lovers. We are also looking into other universally attractive categories, such as celebrity, fashion, study and information to reach even broader audience.
Our smart content distribution continue to play a vital role in our content ecosystem, bringing discover high quality content and the talented content creators in a speedy fashion. As our algorithm and operational capabilities improve, the number of videos that achieved 10,000,000 views grow nearly 84 in 2019 compared with 2018. The motivations to showcase their work and attract loyal fans make Bilibili the ideal platform for content creators. We continue to support and encourage our content creators on the multiple levels. In January 2020, we hosted Bilibili Top 100 Content Creators, our 7 and 8 in Shanghai, where we celebrate outstanding achievements of leading content creators in various categories.
Our cash incentive program continues to motivate our mid layer content creators. By the end of December 2019, over 220,000 content creators joined our program. While high quality and original content creation have been rewarded with cash bonus based on the positive feedback from our We also provide an increased number of online and offline tutoring sessions as well as access to our traffic to help newer content creators grow and flourish. Turning to our future NA generated video OGVs, our OGV strategy has a dual focus. 1st, to form IP assets and second, to convert villagers to paying users.
In 2019, our annual for Chinese anime surpassed Japanese anime for the first time, making Chinese anime the largest OGV verticals on Bilibili. With our growing viewership and our audience group hungry for new content, we are excited to bring new titles and series to our community. In November, we host our annual Made by Bilibili event highlighting our updates and the new launch plan for 40 Chinese anime titles throughout 2020 2021. This includes 13 projects updates such as the World Reno Sci Fi Sewer, the 3 Body Problem, Sanji and the 27 new titles including Having Official's Briefing, Legend of Mortal Ascension, Financial Xuanzhuang and the daily life of Immortal King. In addition, we see considerable synergy between anime and our comic business.
Many of the popular anime titles are also the top selling e books on our comic platform. In the documentary and variety show department, we're delighted to see our self produced and IP owned titles gaining traction. In the Q4, we partnered with Shanghai Media Group and co produced Shanghai Guardians. This documentary about local police in Shanghai quickly gained popularity among young people. The Hidden Kingdom of China, a phenomenal documentary that we co produced with National Geographic, was also released in the Q4 and received positive viewers.
As we welcome more diversified OGV titles in our community, we are accumulating a library of valuable IP assets, while simultaneously bringing us converting our growing traffic to paying users, our premium members, which offer additional exclusive and advanced content to paid users, continue to flourish in the 4th quarter. By the end of December, we had 7,600,000 valid premium members, up 111% year on year. While user growth at the tremendously high rate, our community density has not been diluted. As a matter of fact, it continues to flow with high engagement, high retention and tight bonds. In the Q4, we had 710,000,000 daily video views, up 63% year on year.
In Q4, our users generated 2,400,000,000 monthly interactions with bullet charts, comments, likes and the Bilibili Moments post, up 141% year on year. Each user on average follows 34 content creators compared with 26 for the same period last year. The unparalleled level of engagement and the connection among users are making Bilibili the most unique and competitive video community in China. Our official membership program is also on the rise. At the end of Q4, we have 68,000,000 royal official members who passed our 100 question exam, up 50% year over year.
This group of users' 12 months retention rate remained high as well at above 80%. This continues to be an excellent indicator of the quality of our user growth. Turning to our commercialization progresses, let's first look at our games. In the 4th quarter, revenue from mobile games were up 22% year on year to RMB871 1,000,000, accounting for 40 3% of our total revenues. We continue to expand our reach in games, covering different genres and game plays.
On the exclusively licensed games, FateGrand Order or FGO continued its popularity during its 4th year of operating in China. In November, we also began operating the exclusive licensed title, Girl Cafe Gun 2, making a big splash in China's mobile game market. The newly launched domestic ACG game, The Furious Yama, was also a hit among enemy friends following its release in January this year. As part of Game Based strategy, our jointly operated games also made meaningful progress in 2019. With increasing density of game lovers gathering on our platform, Bilibili have become a top channel to distribute ACG theme or other high quality games.
During this year, we had multiple success with our jointly operated game projects, including Arknights, Gray Raven, Fox Sports, Markmaker and Onmyoji, the card game. Revenue generated by our jointly operated games now account for more than 25% of our total game revenue 25%, sorry. Looking at our game pipeline, we have over 30 exclusive licensed game lines up for releases, 8 of which have already gained regulatory approvals. This includes 2 exciting Japanese role playing games, Princess Connect, Kung Fu Yanji and the animated, Wailing Qiwen, which we plan to roll out in the Q2. On the jointly operating game front, we are continuing to work with leading game developers to bring our user premium games such as Mihayo's Yuan Shen, You Zhu, Shanghai Jinhua.
Additionally, leveraging our expertise and understanding of the APG culture, we plan to expand our game distribution outside of Mainland China, further growing our revenue streams and increasing our global reach. Turning to our live broadcasting and VAS business. We have seen excellent growth from this segment, and we believe that there is a great deal of potential to broaden our offerings and attract new users, Particularly in live broadcasting, where the natural crossover with our video business platform and our user base, revenues from live broadcasting and VAS increased by 183% year over year, reaching RMB571 1,000,000 in the Q1. Our growth was driven by increased contribution from online broadcasting, premium members, mallard and the company's business. We continue to build our games and entertainment content for live broadcasting, where we see considerable room for growth in 2020.
China is the world's largest game market, and esports is gaining more and more traction among young generations. Viewers demand for premium esports content is high, and we are poised to deliver. Our 3 year exclusive license for live broadcasting ride for the world renowned League of Legends World Championship placed us in the center of the esports world. With the S10 game being held in our home base, Shanghai, we believe we can maximize the impact of the game even further. On the fan entertainment front, we have secured a contract with 1 of the China's top entertainment host, Feng Ji Mo, who has quickly won over Bilibili's users.
With top level content and our new host additions, we have now completed our new live broadcasting pyramid and are working to grow this part of our business. As for our advertising business, our community present a considerable attractive audience for advertisers. Our brand awareness is on the rise, and we continue to be the go to platform for the Godong JNC consumer cohort. With these significant advantages, we are confident that Bilibili will remain as a top choice as our advertising partners look to allocate their budgets for the year. For the Q4, we saw increased sales in advertising despite the challenging macro environment.
Revenues our advertising increased by 81% year over year to RMB290 1,000,000 driven by our heightened brand awareness and efficient ad offerings. The top 3 industry verticals for brand advertising in the 4th quarter were games, e commerce and food and beverages, and the top 3 verticals for performance based advertising were games, education and e commerce. On the heels of our successful integrated marketing program with Taobao and Tmall for 2011 and 2012 shopping events, we continue to deepen our partnership with Alibaba. In the year end, Taobao Zhihuahuan, profitability's New Year Gala event. The Gala's 1 success far exceeded Taobao's expectations, highlighting our deep understanding of our users and increasing awareness of Bilibili brand, a primary platform for advertisers.
We look forward to further collaborating with Baba and other industry leaders that showcase the strength of our far reaching platform. In summary, we have reached an exciting inflection point. We have moved into the ream of mass market appeal. For 2020, our strategy relies on key expansion initiatives that broaden our content offering, grow our user base and improve our commercialization capabilities. At the same time, we are dedicated to putting our community first by representing and varying our users and content creators.
We will continue on this strategy with goals of creating sustainable growth and long term value for our community and our shareholders. Let's conclude Ms. Chen's remarks, and I will now provide a brief overview of our financial results for the 2019 Q4 and full year. Our total net revenue increased by 74% year over year to RMB2 1,000,000,000, exciting the high exceeding the high end of our guidance. Our nongam revenue made up nearly 57% of our total revenue in the 4th quarter, up from 38% in the same period of 2018.
With more than half of our revenues coming from multiple sources, we are pleased with our commercialization progress and the implications of this diversity. We are also converting more and more online traffic to paying users. The average number of monthly paying users increased by 100% year over year, reaching 8,800,000 in the 4th quarter. Cost of revenue increased by 68% year over year to RMB1.6 billion. Revenue sharing cost, a key component of cost of revenues was RMB705 million, a 63% increase from the same period in 2018.
Gross profit increased by 102% year over year by RMB398 1,000,000. We are also starting to see operating leverage from our diversified revenue streams. With more revenue contribution from our higher margin business, including advertising and co operated games as well as additional income from premium users. Our gross profit margin steadily improved throughout 2019, reaching 19.8% in the 4th quarter. Total operating expenses increased to RMB818 million, up 68% from the same period in 2018.
Selling and marketing expenses were RMB4.30 million, representing 127% increase year over year. The increase was primarily attributable to the increased channel and marketing expenses associated with Bilibili apps and brand, including promotional activities for offline events, the 2020 New Year Eve Gala event, for example, as well as promotional expenses for our mobile games. The increase was also attributed to the increased headcount in sales and marketing personnel and the increase in fulfillment costs associated with our e commerce program. G and A expenses were 1000000, representing a 6% increase year over year. R and D expenses were RMB245 1,000,000, representing a 60% increase year over year.
The increase was primarily due to increased headcount in R and D personnel and increased share based competition costs. Net loss was RMB387 1,000,000 for the Q4 of 2019 compared with RMB191 1,000,000 in the same period of 2018. Adjusted net loss, which are non GAAP measure that excludes share based compensation expenses and amortization expenses related to intangible assets acquired through business acquisitions was RMB337 1,000,000 compared with RMB152 1,000,000 in the same period of 20 18. Basic and diluted net loss per share were RMB1.17. Adjusted basic and diluted net loss per share were RMB1.01.
For the full year of 2019, total revenues increased by 64% to RMB6.8 billion. Revenue from mobile games increased 23% to RMB3.6 billion. Revenue from live broadcasting and VAS increased 180 percent to RMB1.6 billion. Revenues from advertising increased 76% to RMB817 million. Revenue from e commerce and other increased 403% to RMB722 million.
Gross profit increased 39% to RMB1.2 billion. Net loss for 2019 was RMB1.3 billion compared to RMB565 1,000,000 in 2018. Adjusted net loss for 2019 was RMB1.1 billion compared to RMB377 1,000,000 in 20 19 2018. Basic and diluted net loss per share for 2019 was RMB3.99 or 0.57 dollars compared to RMB2.64 in 2018. Adjusted basic and diluted net loss per share were or US0.47 dollars compared to RMB1.84 in 2018.
As of December 31, 2019, we had cash and cash equivalents, time deposits as well as short term investments of RMB8.1 billion compared to RMB5.2 billion as of December 31, 2018. To further grow our business, we plan to improve our monetization by leveraging our considerable and growing traffic. We also see benefit in further expanding our diverse revenue streams and continue to improve revenue contribution per MAU. Longer term, we believe our monetization efforts, high paying user scale and the conversion rates will yield an improved bottom line. With that in mind, we are currently projecting net revenues for the Q1 of 2020 to be between RMB2.15 billion and RMB2.20 billion.
The above outlook is based on the current market conditions and reflects the company's preliminary estimates, which are all subject to change, particularly in light of the uncertainties related to how coronavirus developments. Thank you for your attention. We would like now to open the call to your questions. Operator, please go ahead.
Certainly. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer Your first question today comes from the line of Lei Zhang from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Related to that, can you give us more color on the user trend in Q4, especially after people back to work and extend user slowing down? And how should we look at our full year user target? Thank you.
Okay.
Okay. So taking the virus situation under consideration, we are currently projecting our Q1 total net revenues to be between CNY 2 point $15,000,000,000 to $2,200,000,000 and which has considerable growth quarter over quarter year over year. And given that we have multiple business lines from different business lines, e commerce, because due to the logistic delays, there will be some impact related to the how much we can book the e commerce revenue in the Q1. However, compared to other business that's more related to our traffic growth, such as live broadcasting and games, we do see some positive impacts of the extended traffic. Overall, in general, we don't see much of an impact to our overall business.
So given that the extended holiday people are staying at home for over a month and the billy has become many people's first choice for online entertainment consumption. And we've seen so far, either it's user traffic, user engagement as well as time spent has been beyond our expectation. So overall, this trend is quite positive. So regarding your question about whether we see a decline in users after people are now going back to work, the answer is that user growth is our primary business focus for 2020, and we don't rely on incidents or occasions like the coronavirus outbreak. We do have a designated thorough plans throughout the years to help us to achieve a steady user growth.
So after people going back to work, for sure that the growth rate will be as high as when people are staying at home, but it won't be a drastic ups and downs. Okay. Thank you very much. Congrats on the results again. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Wendy Chen from Goldman Sachs. Please go
ahead. So thanks management for taking my question. And my question is about the user growth outlook. As we have achieved the 130,000,000 MAU target this year, I'm wondering what's management's updated view on our user growth target for the full year 2020. And as we are targeting with some vast market appeal this year, what is our outlook for our user growth addressable market for the longer term?
Thanks very much.
So as we communicated with the market before that, we have set up our user growth goal for 2020 to be $180,000,000 $220,000,000 for 2021. And we have done a lot of we have conducted a lot of efforts and to help us to achieve this goal. And so far, it all looks like the progress is well on track. So while we are quite optimistic about our user growth plans, at the same time, we also really values the quality of that growth. And the past historical data also suggests, even though that we are on a very fast track of user growth, we have maintained high quality of user growth as well as a very tight community environment.
Our users' time spent retention rate as well as the interaction levels have all been quite positive, all faster than our MAU growth, indicating the high quality of our user growth. So this is the standard we are hoping to continue to maintain throughout the year. So at the same time, we are also focusing on improving our commercialization capabilities. So there are several metrics that we've seen very positive trends from the paying user conversion rate as well as our traffic related business such as our advertisement revenue growth, they are all quite very, very positive. Our paying user growth more than doubled our advertisement revenue growth, 81% year on year.
So all this matrix are suggesting we're also making a very good progress on improving our commercialization capabilities. So in summary, that we are quite confident that while maintaining a fast user growth trend, we'll continue to maintain a high quality of that growth, maintain a very friendly and tight community environment, while simultaneously improve our commercialization capability.
Your next question comes from the line of Alex Zhu from China Renaissance. Please go ahead.
My question is on advertising business. We note that 4th quarter advertising growth is very robust and also the Q1 guidance is also very solid. Could the management share some color on our advertising business performance in Q1? And also for full year 2020, could you share some updates on the advertising business new initiative? Thanks.
So historically, Bilibili has been very strong in terms of converting customer converting to be related business. And we've seen a very strong conversion in terms of many consumptions, including our games, live broadcasting and advertisement business. So we do achieve very solid growth across all business lines in 2029, and we feel quite confident that this business has great potential. And during the Q4, even under this challenging very challenging macro environment, we were still able to deliver 81% year on year advertisement So as our brand awareness continues to grow, we have made quite big of impression among our advertisers from vertical content platform to a must invest, must have channels to reach young audiences. For example, this year, we've seen some very clear trends that Bilibili has become the first choice for a lot of new product launches, online press conferences.
And all of that is we've seen that the advertisement advertisers' budget is shifting with the movement of our users. So starting from Q1, we will adjust and continue to improve our advertisement overall strategy as well as pricing and efficiencies to achieve sustainable growth. So 3rd and quite importantly is on the technology front, we'll continue to invest to improve and revolutionize our algorithms' efficiencies to improve our performance based advertisement effectiveness and improve our click through ratio. So your question regarding our collaboration with Alibaba. So in 2019, we have established quite a lot of new projects and collaborations during Double 11, Double 12 shopping festivals.
And Taobao's Zhihuacan also exclusively sponsored Bilibili's New Year's Gala, which the overall effect has exceeded Zhihuahua's expectation. So, so far, we think that the partnership between Alibaba has meet or even exceeded our previous expectations. And we really look forward to deepen our relationship with Alibaba's overall e commerce ecosystem in 2020. So we actually have developed a whole strategy of how we can better collaborate Bilibili's ecosystem with Alibaba's ecosystem in terms of integrated marketing campaign that includes the brand campaign that increase the brand awareness and to influence users' purchasing decision through native ads and complete the transaction through performance based ads. And this strategy, we can copy and paste and replicate that with many new advertisers in 2020.
And we believe we have a lot of potentials to further replicate the success stories between Alibaba and Bilibili to many others many other new advertisers. As Fei Zhu mentioned earlier that 2020's primary focus of our business is to grow our users. And while we do so, they will the increased traffic will also serve fuels for our advertisement business. So we are quite confident that in Q1 2020, our overall advertisement business will have a very good growth trajectory.
Your next question comes from the line of Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Thanks management for taking my questions. I have two questions. My first question is about the GP margin trend. Given the solid GP margin over the past 3 quarters, can management comment about how we should think about the GP margin outlook in 2020? And my second question is about the Gather event that we host very successful earlier this year.
Can management comments about the positive impact to our platform after the success? Thank you.
Okay, Thomas. I will take your first question and Rui Song will comment on your second question. Yes, you're right. Our gross profit margin has record steady improvement throughout 2019 from like 13.8% in Q1 to like 19.8% in Q4. In the future, we still see some room to further leverage between our high paying ratio to increase the revenue per MAU to further improve the gross profit margin.
That leverage will come from the cost component like bandwidth cost as well as the revenue sharing cost. So we will work on that, and you will see that in the coming quarters.
So the success of the gala, while the gala itself is a part of our user growth plan as well as part of our brand campaign. And we don't think this is isolated events that Bilibili, the Bilibili New Year's Gala is a success. It actually is a testimony of how Bilibili understands young people's interest. And as we accumulated our understanding for the past 10 years, this has made a material impact in the mainstream
ideals.
So the Bilibili this Gala is a landmark event as Bilibili move into the realms of mass market appeal. And the success of the gala actually attract the content of the gala actually attract many users from different background and different generations and make them get to know Bilibili from their perspective, from what they have the perspective or content verticals that they are familiar with. And this is a quite we would think this is a quite eventful campaign that made the Bilibili brand accessible, much accessible to wider generations and audiences. So far, the playback of the event has been viewed over 90,000,000 times. And we have accumulated 5,000,000,000 media exposures.
And now we think we have 4 major points that will impact our business. So, first of all, it's definitely laid a very solid foundation for our 2020 overall user growth plans. And second of all is further increased our brand awareness among users and make them to perceive a little bit more clear about what Bilibili is and what Bilibili has to offer. And thirdly, we mentioned earlier, on the advertisement front, it definitely also has a very positive impact. Like we said, Zhihuasen's sponsorship, the overall effect has exceeded their expectations and also made a very good example of how the Liabilities events and campaigns can influence and reach much wide audiences, groups.
And last but not least is, once again, is a strong testimony of how Bilibili has the determination and ability to produce high quality content and will continue and will commit it to continue to produce more high quality content.
The next question comes from the line of Jialong Shi from Nomura. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning, Chen Zhang, Sam and Julien. Thanks for taking my question. My question for management is about the competition landscape. We saw some of Bilibili's peers, Chinese Internet peers are talking about ramping up investments this year in either anime or pure TV content. We understand these peers this move by peers may show the huge potential in this market, but the entry of this new commerce may also fuel the competition in this segment.
So my questions are 2. First of all, I just wonder how management think of the potential impacts it may have on the company's efforts to retain talented content creators and the audience. Will Bilibili at certain point be forced to pay more to some of the top content creators in order to retain them? And secondly, what are the company's strategies to maintain fast user growth in a more competitive environment? Is there any risk that Bilibili may have to spend more in marketing dollars to hit the user growth target?
So as regards the overall video industry, actually is a fast growing and a very big market. According to third party research data, that the current video user has already reached 750,000,000 in China. And we think as the adoption of 5 gs technology and the revolution of hardware and infrastructures, I'm projecting the overall video users can grow to 800,000,000 or 900,000,000 in the next few years. So as a matter of fact, video as an industry vertical on the Internet space is actually one of the largest verticals. And for the past few years, you must have witnessed many new player many players in the video industry to grow quite significantly.
And that has also very direct relation to the expansion of the market. And we don't believe 1 or 2 new additional players entering this market will make a material impact or difference from this growth trajectory. Okay. So a lot of people have asked that for the past few years how those will impact the overall industry. But as a matter of fact, we are able to maintain a fast growth while doughing gain their market share.
Many people would probably will argue that it's the different there's a difference of length in terms of short video and long form video. But we believe we are actually the player who gives definition of PUGVs and we have the most experience in terms of PUGVs. So we are we have been putting PUGC as our primary business model for at least 5 years. And for the past 5 years, we have gained a lot of experience. And actually, we kind of feel alone in this track.
And now we have more players starting to pay more attention on this business model. We believe this is another test on different perspective on another side of the story, which means this track has great potential to grow. And this business model requires unique expertise in terms of operation as well as running a platform. So for the newcomers, I think there's going to be a learning at least a learning curve for them and won't yield results in short terms. So as for your question about the competitive cost related to more player joining in this verticals, we believe for this industry, we have long passed the phase that people have to burn cash to fight for content or KOLs.
This is we have already entered a phase that we compete with each other in terms of the overall industry layout, the business operation capabilities as well as whether content creator are able to achieve their career goals on your platform, to able to grow their traffic on your platform. So it won't have a significant impact in terms of single cost, whether it's content or sales and marketing.
And that concludes the question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any additional or closing remarks.
Well, thank you once again for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please contact myself, Julie Yang, Bilibili's Senior IR Director or TPG Investor Relations. Our contact information for IR in both China and U. S. Can be found in today's press release.
Have a great day.