Thank you all for standing by, and welcome to the iQIYI first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question at that time, you will need to press star one on your telephone. I would now like to hand the conference over to IR Director, Mrs. Chang Yu. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining iQIYI's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. The company's results were released today and are available on the company's investor relations website at ir.iqiyi.com. On the call today are Mr. Yu Gong, our Founder, Director, and CEO, Mr. Jun Wang, our CFO, Mr. Xiaohui Wang, our CCO, Chief Content Officer, Mr. Wenfeng Liu, our CTO, Chief Technology Officer, Ms. Vivian Wang, our CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, Mr. Youqiao Duan, Senior Vice President of our Membership Business, and Mr. Xianghua Yang, Senior Vice President of Movies and Overseas Business. Mr. Gong will give a brief overview of the company's business operations and highlights, followed by Jun, who will go through the financials. After the prepared remarks, Xiaohui, Wenfeng, Vivian, Youqiao, Xianghua will join Mr. Gong and Jun in the Q&A session.
Before we proceed, please note that the discussion today will contain forward-looking statements made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, those outlined in our public filings with the SEC. iQIYI does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement except as required under applicable law. With that, I will now turn the call over to Mr. Gong. Please go ahead.
Hello, everyone. We recorded quarterly non-GAAP operating profit for the very first time. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our new strategy and execution. Last quarter, we announced that our goals for this year are to reach non-GAAP operating breakeven for the Full Year of 2022, and to reach quarterly non-GAAP operating breakeven as early as possible. I'm very pleased to see our performance exceeded our goals. What are the driving forces on our path to profit? I would name four. First, the premium content. The build of new content such as top-notch dramas solidified our market leadership and lead to healthy growth of both subscriber base and AR. The influence of these new dramas was further elevated from our creative content marketing strategy. Meanwhile, the library content also played a crucial role.
We used effective operations to drive traffic to our extensive library content and enhance the user stickiness. Secondly, refine our operations on content discovery and promotion. Thirdly, increasing operation efficiency, which means delivering superior services based on an effective cost and expense control. Lastly, driving our sales performance through various initiatives to boost our monetization on membership and ad sales. With these four aspects, profitability is a natural result. Therefore, we believe the performance in the first quarter is replicable as we continue to execute this operational methodology in the future quarters. On premium content, we are confident about our future pipeline. On efficiency management, we will continue to focus on driving efficiency by leveraging the power of technology while maintaining the current lean corporate structure.
By using the same methodologies, we will continue to achieve desired result in the future. Now, let's go through the performance of our business segments in the first quarter of 2022. Let's start with memberships. For the first quarter, we continued to deliver a solid membership performance. Membership revenue was RMB 4.5 billion, up 4% annually and 9% sequentially. The average daily number of total subscribing members for Q1 was 101.4 million, a net addition of 4.4 million from the previous quarter. A monthly ARPU was RMB 14.69 during the quarter, up 8% annually and 4% sequentially. Q1 was the fifth consecutive quarter that we achieved 8% or above annual growth.
Our premium new content and our extensive library content were the main drivers behind our positive performance. Our values for members translate into higher member acquisition, retention, and ARPU. We expect to see solid membership revenue growth on year-over-year basis for the quarters down the road. Content is king. Among the new releases during the first quarter, A Lifelong Journey, Under the Skin, Life is a Long Quiet River, were the outperformers. A Lifelong Journey become a blockbuster acclaimed by the whole nation, loved by the audience across all age groups and backgrounds. It tells a story of China transformation in the past 50 years from the perspective of ordinary people. We are happy to see A Lifelong Journey was able to achieve word-of-mouth popularity, social value, and a commercial success.
It also shows our deep understanding of the industry and the ability to balance our social obligation and user appetite. Under the Skin is a detective drama focusing on social issues. It became a dark horse in market with very high user stickiness. Life is a Long Quiet River, an original drama that portrayed the daily life and the stories of Shanghai urban families, also performed very well in terms of traffic and revenue. Its popularity index exceeded 9,200 at its peak. In addition, we are also seeing the long tail effect of premium content as they continue to generate solid viewership after serials come out. One of the key strategy with popular IPs is serializing its production.
The original light comedy, Vacation of Love Season 2 , is an example of multi-season approach in which we develop new plot lines for additional seasons of our popular content. The revenue-sharing drama, Shining for One Thing, also become a dark horse and set a new record for revenue-sharing drama on our platform. To better connect with users, we also created distinctive brand for our feature vertical content categories, namely, iQIYI Theater. In the first quarter, we launched our third vertical content theater, Laugh On Theater, focusing on comedy in general. Two titles were launched in Q1, and the third title to be released soon. These comedies are good leisure and entertainment choice, and provide user a new outlet to relieve daily pressures.
Now, with Mist Theater, Sweet On Theater, and Laugh On Theater, our platform successfully covered the three most loved genres by our core users, namely suspense, romance, and comedy. Going forward, we will continue to explore other content genres and iQIYI Theaters that bring targeted and diversified experience to users. In summary, we attract users through premium new releases and retain users through our extensive and diversified library content. We employ various operational initiatives to increase user loyalty and brand awareness. All of this will contribute to our solid base of subscribers and lay a good foundation for future growth. We are pleased to see the value we provide to our users was widely recognized, which translated to great monetization capability. Moving on to content. After explaining how we achieve our first quarter success, next, how do we replicate our success in the future?
We focus on a systematic approach in building our content business from production to operation. Our goal is under the promise of maintaining iQIYI's overall competitiveness and leadership, which means we would acquire the most appropriate content with optimal ROI and maximize monetization with reasonable number of titles. As we continue to enhance our in-house production capabilities, enrich our premium content inventory, and refine our content operations, we will be able to expand our advantage as an integrated platform and improve our overall efficiency across various aspects, including content production, content scouting, and promotion. Meanwhile, we utilize technology to further improve our production capability and increase our efficiency. Investment in content is our biggest organizational focus, which makes it the key in achieving our goal optimizing costs and efficiency.
We have placed stringent control over the full content production process, from script development, pre-production, to shooting and post-production. We also emphasize efficiency in content production, content release, and fund utilization. As for our content reserve, we have dedicated ourselves in building our original content offering and enhancing production capability in the past few years. We have established one of the largest and the most professional team of producers in the industry. We also want to highlight that despite the recent resurgence of the COVID in some regions in China, we are relatively comfortable with our content reserve, especially in the core drama category, as we have a diversified pipeline of dramas for this year, benefited from our solid reserve of original content and the experiences gained from operating under COVID in the past two years.
Therefore, we currently expect to see limited impact from COVID in our future drama pipeline. Looking ahead to the second quarter and the full year of 2022, our key focus is to improve the overall content quality. We will continue to introduce premium content to our users, increase the quality of our offering, and leverage the platform's advantage to build iQIYI content ecosystem. Meanwhile, we would enforce our brand awareness, so making multi-season productions for our long serials and utilize our successful theater model to enforce our advantage in some vertical genres. Benefiting from our rich content reserve, we will be able to launch a series of titles in the second quarter.
For dramas, the key titles we have released in Q2 include A Lifelong Journey, My Fancy Princess, The Wind Blows from Longxi, and The Night Wanderer, all have been well received by user. For the rest of the second quarter, key dramas to be released include the highly anticipated original titles, A Love Never Lost, Ordinary Greatness, The Law of Losers, uncertain , and Love On Theater. We'll also be premiered. For this year's Sweet On Theater, five new serials will be launched.
For variety shows, we will launch the second season for last year's hit show, The Detectives' Adventures, 萌探探案. For animation and children's content, we will continue to launch new titles under our multi-season strategy. Also, we have prepared a rich and diversified slate of premium content for this year's summer season, covering all major genres that target different user cohorts. We continue to produce and release original movie to enrich our content ecosystem. Man on the Edge, 边缘行者, was released in theaters on April 15th, and its cumulative box office has surpassed RMB 130 million. On April first, we upgraded the online film distribution collaboration model. With our partners, the revenue sharing model is now based on the user viewing time instead of views in the past.
Promotional resources will be allocated based on the audience participation and the content performance, such as view time, membership conversion rates, and user views. The new model enables high quality of films to stand out and may significantly improve our operational efficiency, providing a win-win solution for both producers and our platform. Now, I'd like to quickly talk about our progress in IP development. Premium content also translates into additional monetization opportunities. As we continue to push our strategy of building our IP franchise and increasing monetization capability. In late December, we launched the first title of the iQIYI Chinese historic city universe franchise, Feng Qi Luo Yang. We have signed with over 20 partners to franchise this popular IP into various formats such as toys, jewelry, apparel, food and beverages. Moving on to advertising.
For Q1, the total advertising revenue declined both annually and sequentially due to the current macro headwinds. The soft ad demand negatively impacted our brand ad business to some extent. Despite the challenging macro environment, premium content contributed to drawing strong attraction from advertisers. For example, A Lifelong Journey and Life is a Long Quiet River both had very good advertising performance. The drama A Lifelong Journey itself attracted 25 advertisers to our platform. For Q1, the sequential growth of our performance ad business was benefited by our growth in ad inventory, but partially offset by the weak macro environment. iQIYI Lite was contributing to the increase in ad inventory. As a monthly average, DAUs reached 5 million in Q1 and surpassed 5 million starting in April.
Given the major monetization methods for iQIYI Lite is performance ads, it effectively supplemented our ad inventory and mitigated the adverse impact of the macro environment. In Q1, we upgraded our ad placement platform, which was widely adopted by advertisers. The new version is more user-friendly and increased monetization efficiency by nearly 20% compared to the previous version. The upgraded ad placement platform helped advertisers to cover more ad slots, get more exposure for their products, and improve ROI by leveraging smart algorithms. Moving on to technology. Technology is fundamental to support our development. We continue to use AI technology to improve content production efficiency and promote the industrialization of online video industry. Technology helps us to optimize cost, promote information security and copyright protection, and improve the entertainment experience of users.
In the first quarter, our proprietary AI dubbing technology, IQ-Dubbing, was widely used in our film offerings. For our movie channel, more than 20 foreign movies used this technology to complete dubbing in Mandarin before launching on our platform, saving costs while increasing revenues for both new and library films. IQ-Dubbing was also used in our overseas business. For example, we launched a new film in Thailand using IQ-Dubbing that received a very strong user feedback and generated strong revenue performance. AI dubbing is effective in optimizing costs and driving revenues for long tail content. The technology also safeguards our system architecture and provides data security and enable anti-piracy protection of our platform.
In the quarter, our proprietary Digital Rights Management DRM solution completed in the Farncombe security audit, which is recognized worldwide as an in-depth measure of a solution's ability to protect premium content. So far, we are the only domestic streaming platform in mainland China that completed such a certification, reflecting our strong ability in digital media security protections. Moving on to new business. We are also exploring growth opportunities from new business initiatives. We are delighted to see a continuous strong momentum for our overseas business and iQIYI Lite. For our overseas business, driven by our continuous efforts in enhancing products and user experience, the membership revenue and advertising revenue for our overseas business both recorded solid annual growth during the first quarter.
iQIYI Lite is a great supplement to our main iQIYI app and continues to achieve strong performance across various operating metrics in the quarter. iQIYI Lite is mainly focused on the performance ad monetization model, which is significantly different from the subscription-centered monetization model of our main app. Overall, the user demographics, monetization model, and content consumption behaviors on iQIYI Lite are largely different from our main app. The user overlap between iQIYI Lite and the main app further declined in the quarter. The DAU overlap was only around 4% in March. Meanwhile, we observed that the consumption of library content on iQIYI Lite was significantly higher than the main app, largely enhanced the realization of long-tail library value. We believe iQIYI Lite has ample potential for growth in both user scale and monetization abilities.
In summary, Q1 was a breakthrough quarter for the company. We delivered what we had promised, reaching non-GAAP operating profit earlier than anticipated. That demonstrated our outstanding execution, professionalism, and strong unity of everyone within iQIYI. The encouraging first quarter results also demonstrated that the long-form video industry can generate sustainable operating profits. We have a clear value proposition for our users. Not only that, we offer the latest premium content available in the market. We also have an extensive and diversified content library that our user can find his or her favorite. This value proposition is unique, and the happiness we offer to users far exceeds the price we demand. Looking forward, the pandemic situation in Shanghai and Beijing too does create additional challenge. The time for full recovery remains unknown as of today, which could impact our Q2 performance.
Regardless, we still strive to deliver another quarter of non-GAAP operating breakeven after the first quarter success. We would like to wrap up by thanking all our stakeholders, including our shareholders, business partners, and employees, who share our belief in the positive prospect of long-form video. We understand that many of our stakeholders follow our business developments closely and pay close attention on areas such as whether blockbuster content can be delivered every quarter, or if our business would be impacted by some short-term market headwinds. Honestly, we would not worry about what will change. We focus on what will not change in the next five years or 10 years, and we will invest heavily into these areas to meet user demands. That is, producing a collection of highly differentiated premium content and a highly effective platform that delivers sustainable value to our users.
Meanwhile, we will continue to seek new opportunities from innovation and expand our values in the ever-changing market. With that, I'll hand over to Jun Wang to go through our financials.
Thanks, Mr. Gong, and hello everyone. Now let me walk you through our key financials for the first quarter 2022. Starting with the revenues. In first quarter, our total revenues reached CNY 7.3 billion. We booked healthy growth on our membership services with CNY 4.5 billion, which was our largest revenue contributor. Our membership services revenue increased by 4% annually and 9% sequentially, primarily driven by ARPU or average revenue per membership, which achieved a positive annual growth for nine quarters in a row. Our subscriber base also grew by 4.4 million as our premium show attracted more paying members. The solid performance of membership services was partially offset by the relatively weaker advertising services revenue due to macro headwinds. Now move to the cost and expenses.
The first quarter cost of revenue was CNY 6 billion, representing a cost saving of CNY 1.1 billion compared with the same period last year. This leads to consistent gross margin expansion in the past three quarters from 7% in third quarter 2021 to 12% in fourth quarter 2021 and to 18% in the first quarter 2022 on GAAP basis. In the meantime, our total operating expenses decreased 35% annually and 34% sequentially after we completed our organizational realignment second half last year. Our Q1 was also the third quarter in a row that we saw the decrease in total OpEx. The expanded gross margin and decreased expenses combined contributed to our first profitable quarter. Yet behind this profit is not magic, but science, as it takes us three quarters to get where we are.
Our non-GAAP operating loss was RMB 1 billion two quarters ago, which shrink to RMB 516 million last quarter, then turned to a profit of RMB 27 million in the first quarter 2022. The trend is clear. What is driving this trend is our consistent efforts in improving our operational efficiency and scalability. We have become nimbler and more focused, which help us in better adapting to the changing environment and best positioned to capture the long-term growth opportunities in the future. In March 2022, the company completed a private round of $285 million. At the end of first quarter, the company has cash equivalent, restricted cash and short-term investments of RMB 5.2 billion. We believe we have sufficient funding to satisfy our operational needs in the foreseeable future.
For detailed financial data, please refer to our press release on our IR website. With that, I will now open the floor for Q&A.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press the hash key. For the benefit of all participants on today's call, please limit yourself to one question. If you have more questions, you may rejoin the queue. We also ask that you state your question in Chinese first and then in English. Your first question comes from the line of Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Please ask your question.
Thanks management for taking my questions. My question is about our overall strategy. How do we execute and reflect in our financials? In particular, we are making profitability on a quarterly basis in Q1. On the other hand, how should we think about the future outlook in the next couple of quarters? Thank you.
精细化的运营。第四点是提高销售能力，包括广告的销售能力，以及这个会员的销售能力。会员的销售能力包括直接度——这个直接面对消费者的和面对这个中间商的。第五点是关掉或者减少投资在这个就是没有未来发展空间的一些业务。这五点。来，要不然你先翻译。
OK. I will translate what was just said. First, there are coming from five aspects. First, we have many years of accumulation of head premium content. For example, on the key TV drama series and also variety shows, movies, our children's content and animation. Second, we refined our operations, including content scheduling and promotions, and then to increase the overall operational efficiency. Third, we also improve the content operations in many different areas, have stringent control over the full content production process. Fourth, we're also driving the sales capability and efficiency, including boosting our monetization, our membership, and also ad sales. Fifth, increase the overall ROI by terminating the business that has poor ROI and low future potential.
以上的五点措施，不是为了一个季度的，显然这五点措施可以持续进行，这是第一个可以保证未来中长期保持公司的盈利状态。那第二点呢，我们在适度投入创新型的业务，其中包括海外业务，爱奇艺极速版业务，以期待这些业务在中长期持续不断地为公司的业务增长贡献，做出贡献。
The earlier mentioned five aspects are the continuous efforts that we will be focusing on and that will drive the profitability in the mid- to long-term. We're also focusing on new business initiatives. For example, overseas business, iQIYI Lite, that will help the overall development and growth of our mid- to long-term as well.
好，谢谢。
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Xueqing Zhang from CICC. Please ask your question.
嗨，管理层晚上好，谢谢接受我的提问。恭喜第一个季度盈利。我的问题呢，其实是和我们的账本增效相关的，就是对PNL带来的benefits的同时，我们有没有看到，公司整体账本增效的策略会不会对用户观看时长的运营指标和我们未来的收入有一些可能不利的影响。还有，第二个是想请公司给我们update一下，未来的内容的整体的规划，然后我自己翻译一下。Thanks management for taking my question, and congrats on our breakeven. We have seen a meaningful cost saving and breakeven in fourth quarter. So wondering, do you see any impact of our cost control barrier to our operating metrics like user time spent and the revenue?
Secondly, can you give us some updates on your content strategy going forward? Thank you.
好，谢谢。我来回答这个问题吧。我们正在控制成本和费用，主要的目标是提高效率，那提高效率是排在第一位的，而不是单一的，只是为了降低成本而降低成本。那么在这种提高效率的原则上，内容是我们最大的成本了。从内容角度来讲，我们头部内容的投入没有减少，维持着往年的常规水平。我们减少的是那些回报比较低、ROI比较差的这些内容。那通过我们自己多年的数据研究，以及参照海外的一些企业披露的一些信息，我们认为这个收入的上限主要是头部内容决定的，那么这种低效率的内容是决定了企业支出，或者叫对于爱奇艺来讲叫亏损，这是关键因素。所以我们头部内容不减少，减少的是低效率的那些内容，ROI差的那些内容。
For overall speaking our control of cost and also expenses are for the purpose of increase the overall inefficiency. For our business, content is our biggest cost item and also investment. For very important premium head content, we will not lower our investment in this area at all. We will probably decrease our investment in the low ROI content genres and content categories. Based on our very many years of internal studies, user data and also a reference to the overseas streaming business, we can tell that the top one, the revenue upside depends on the head premium content. For overall the low-performing content, that's really dragging our whole performance down and also creating loss. These are the areas where we'll continue to put efforts on going forward.
针对这种策略，这个结果是什么样子？我们看到第三方的统计数据，虽然我们不把市场份额当成我们第一追求的目标，但是因为采取的这个我们认为是正确的策略。根据云合数据显示，这个一季度爱奇艺的电视剧、电影、儿童类的内容有效的播放VV数还是排在行业第一。
Even though that reaching the market number one is not our primary goal, but according to our third-party data, Enlightent data, it shows that iQIYI was still number one in terms of the market effective video views for top TV drama category. At the same time, our original content also had excellent performance. For viewing time for dramas, movies and children's content consistently grew on annual basis.
未来的内容策略主要有两个要点。第一个要点，今年特别强调效率，也就是挑头部内容，然后回报高的内容，然后ROI高的内容来播出。第二点呢，是我们还是为了明年、后年、日后在头部内容方面增加投入做准备。
Okay. For going forward, this year, our very important key focus is to drive efficiency, and then that will make us to focus on the investment in the head premium content, as well as increase the overall ROI and focusing on the content that generates high ROI. Going forward to the next two years, we will continue to focus on the premium head content that will bring profit and also to bring good returns to our business.
Thank you.
Thank you. I think our CFO also have some point to add.
好的，没有问题。刚才龚总呢，已经就我们的最头部的内容策略做了这个分享。然后这一点呢，也是针对我们的这个new release方面的。我想补充一点呢，就是在我们每一个这个新的头部内容的，它的这个上映以后，然后等到热映期结束，它其实呢会flow到我们的library里面，而我们的library本身是我们用户最大的traffic的一个部分。所以从这个角度来讲的话，一方面我们做这个最头部的内容的投资提高ROI，另外一方面呢，我们已经selection的内容，其实它不是那个……
它还会在它的整个生命周期里面，在library里面带来额外的这个user traffic。所以在这一点上面也能够维持我们长期的、成功的、稳定的这个商业模型。I will quickly translate myself. Supplementing to what Mr. Gong has shared, I would say that, people care about the new releases each quarter. On the other hand, we also need to notice that our new releases is also in the form of the investment.
After the debut, it will flow into our library, which will generate lifelong traffic over time. As a result, I think our business model in general, with a combination of the new releases and library is very much defensible and manageable.
Your next question comes from the line of Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Please ask your question.
Hi thank you.嗯，管理层晚上好，谢谢接受我的提问。我的问题是跟这个会员订阅有关的，是想管理层可以跟我们分享一下，就是如何看待这个长期会员订阅的这个渗透率的增长趋势，然后这个往后的这个增长，觉得主要是这个付费用户的渗透率的提高呢，还是说这个ARPU的增长，为我们带来这个收入的提高。然后也想请教一下，就是说我们还有多少这个空间可以提高我们的这个会员付费率。然后近期因为关于上海跟其他城市的这些疫情封控，我不知道说管理层跟我们能不能跟我们分享一下，就是说近期这个会员订阅服务其实有没有一些明显的一个需求的增加，还是说这个订阅服务更多是这个内容驱动的。谢谢。我自己翻译一下哈。My question is related to the membership subscription business.
How does management see the future more longer-term growth trend for the membership revenue? Will that mainly driven by the increased penetration rate for paying user, or is that increased from the ARPU? How much room we can further increase our paying ratio? In terms of near-term, can management share how has the demand for the membership service trending, given the prolonged lockdown in Shanghai and other cities? Have you seen any uptake on the subscription from the lockdown or the membership more is driven by the content? Thank you.
好的，谢谢。我先回答第二个问题，就关于疫情和会员增长之间的关系。疫情通过这个过去大概20年一次，今年一次，两次比较大的影响，我们基本看出规律，这个规律就是短期内对会员的增长是一个积极作用，但是这种积极作用在比较短的时间内会消失。那当然从长期的角度来讲，这种线下娱乐方式的欠缺，因为疫情严重的时候，电影院和其他的一些线下娱乐方式会减少，从长期来讲肯定会促进线上娱乐方式的这个普及，但是这是长期的，短期的积极的影响是短期的。那么其他的一些因素综合起来可能更是决定会员增长的这个要素，比如说优质内容，和这个就是各类终端付费用户的渗透率的提高，这些因素还是核心因素。
Based on our experiences with COVID in the past two years, the first wave came from 2020, and then the second wave came from this year. We cannot find the pattern in terms of dealing with COVID, the pandemic. In the short term, there are some uplift in terms of, you know, for the consumption of digital entertainment and digital content online. Over the long term, because there might be some impact in terms of the entertainment opportunities or entertainment choices from offline. There might be some impact in terms of the, for example, the movies to be launched, etc. And that might push the popularity and also the penetration of online media entertainment. But I think very importantly, we think the success of our membership business really depends on the premium content.
That's really driving our membership growth in terms of the revenue as well as ARPU, as well as the subscriber growth. That coming from the more penetration or higher penetration for the paying services or paying habits in China will also contribute positively to our business.
关于会员未来的前途问题，我们还抱着非常积极的、有信心的这种态度来对待的。那么未来的增长，无论是ARPU值还是ARM值，还是会员数，都是驱动收入增长的两个重要因素。
In the long term, we are still very confident and very optimistic of the long term growth of our membership business. I think our premium content that's really driving the positive membership growth in terms of the subscribers and also for the revenues and also for ARPU.
那我们的第一目标是总收入，就是会员总收入的提高，并不把单一的一个指标，比如说会员数的增长当成第一目标，而是把总收入当成第一目标。
Our main goal is really trying to keep growing our membership services revenue. We don't set the goal in terms of really growing the absolute number of subscribers or the ARPU.
关于两个因素，一个是ARM，一个是会员数，我分别说一下看法，就是我们自己的一些看法。先说ARM影响的因素，第一是行业，同业之间的定价。那么我们很高兴看到了我们的这个片，然后他们也不断地在提高会员的价格，对于整个行业，对爱奇艺来讲，这是一个积极的信号。
I would like to first talk about ARPU that's driving our business. We're very happy to see that in among our industry peers, there are some price adjustments on that front as well. That's sending really positive signals and also guiding the whole industry moving towards a positive direction.
当然更重要的第二个因素，第二个因素更重要，也就是我们提供头部内容、优质内容的能力越来越强，质量越来越好，长期来讲数量越来越多，这个是核心的因素。
Second point is very important that I would like to raise for everyone, because we think premium content is really driving the whole membership growth, and also we're driving the quality of the premium content and also very stable supply and a reserve, building a good reserve of premium content. That's really supporting our future business growth for the membership services.
第三是用户对知识产权价值的认可，这个程度越来越高，然后全社会包括政府也好，司法也好，对盗版的打击力度越来越大，对我们来讲也是一个非常积极的因素。
We think the recognition from users for IP is very important for the future growth as well. We're happy to see the whole industry as well as users, as well as government, are sending positive signals of recognizing the power of IP, and that we're focusing on IP protection and really driving the anti-piracy issues of the company.
以上三个主要的因素是构成ARPU值提高的主要动力。下面说一下会员数的增加，未来两个比较大的空间。第一个大的空间是，用户消费升级是一个必然趋势。现在很多用户看免费内容，这些内容包括长视频、中视频、短视频。长视频是相对而言需要更多的思考，需要更多的经济上的支出，就是付费。按照各行各业普遍的规律来讲，消费升级是一个必然趋势，所以我们相信，而且目前的趋势也看到，越来越多的用户愿意掏钱去买内容，买会员。
The very first I mentioned the three points related to our user growth that I talked about earlier. Now I would like to talk about growing the users. First, we think users are upgrading the consumption behaviors. If you look at the content offerings, whether it's for the long form video or the short form videos, for long form videos, I think overall speaking, the content are driven by the paid content as well as long tail content that's really brings the echo of the users. I think we're very good or very happy to see that there are more users are getting the habit of buying subscriber memberships, so that's sending a very positive sign to our business.
然后影响这个会员数增长的另外一个重要因素，就是现在我们同业之间内容的重合度还是太高，也是各家拥有的独家播出的头部内容太少，这是一个重要原因，所以会导致一个付费用户拥有的，同时间拥有的付费账号，在各个国家比较起来，大陆地区算是很低的，按我们的统计大概在1.2左右。
Also another point to the subscriber numbers is because right now, we think the overall overlap of content is pretty high among our peers, which means there are less number of really exclusive content for each platform. That's kind of putting back some of the paying willingness for the subscribers. I think if you look at the Mainland China area, one user that's subscribing to multi platforms, the ratio of that is 1.2, which is lower than many of the overseas streaming services.
造成平台之间重复内容比较多的原因是多种的，经济性的原因是一个，因为非独播的内容相对来讲成本更低一些。第二个原因还是我们行业的头部原创内容的制作能力还需要提高。如果这种能力，原创能力，头部的原创内容能力提高了，那么这个相对而言，各家平台头部的内容重合度会降低，用户会更愿意付费买更多不同平台的会员。
A couple of reasons that's contributing to the high overlap of content among our competitive peers. One is from the economic aspect, because selecting content that's not really exclusive will bring lower content costs. That's the first point. The second point is the original content production capability is relatively low at this point among all the industry peers. I think going forward, we could increase the production capabilities going forward, especially the head original content that will drive down the overlap between our content among the industry peers.
That's all. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. In the interest of time, I would now like to hand the conference back to management for any closing remarks.
Thank you everyone for participating in our call today. Feel free to reach out to the IR team if you have further questions. Thank you and see you next quarter.
Thank you.
Thank you. Bye bye.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.