Hello, and welcome to the Deutsche Bank Deposit Receipts Virtual Investor Conference, DBVIC. I'm pleased to announce our next presentation will be from LIZHI from China. Before I introduce our speaker, a few points to note. Please submit your questions in the questions box towards the left of the slides. Please, once the Q&A session has ended, don't log out. You'll automatically be transferred to the LIZHI booth, where you can continue to ask questions via chat and access shareholder materials. On a final note, all of today's presentations are recorded and can be accessed by the Deutsche Bank website, adr.db.com. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Effy Kang, Head of Capital Markets, and Sarah Chen, Capital Markets Analyst of LIZHI , which trades on NASDAQ under the symbol LIZI. Welcome, Effy and Sarah.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to join LIZHI 's conference call today. We are an audio-based social and entertainment company. Founded in 2013, LIZHI aims to become the world's biggest audio platform, and use audio to make people feel closer and live more happily. We remain focused on dual-pillar approach of interactive entertainment, plus audio-based social networking business, and continuously enriching our globalized and diversified product matrix. We have set up local offices in target markets to promote the globalization of our products. In the meantime, we have been focused on developing proprietary in-house technologies, including our in-house hybrid cloud computing platform, Voice Cloud, that empowers business development. In the third quarter this year, we maintained steady growth in our overall business development. We are achieving new highs in both revenue and net income. In the third quarter, our total mobile MAUs totaled 49.7 million.
Average monthly paying users amounted to 477,000. The audio-based social networking business is our primary source of revenue, and its MAUs have grown to 9.5 million, with its user penetration rate climbing to 19.1%. Third quarter revenue reached CNY 565 million, up 2% year-over-year and 10% quarter-over-quarter. We also made great strides to optimize our products and operational strategies. We are promoting the development of our core technologies and boosting organizational efficiency across our global business. Thanks to these efforts, we achieved our fourth consecutive quarter of net income on GAAP, which rose 5% quarter-over-quarter to CNY 19.8 million in the third quarter. Next, I will share more about how we started business and extended.
LIZHI was founded in 2013 when podcasting just started to emerge in the US market. At that time, podcasts were recorded with expensive technology, edited with professional software, then distributed through RSS hosting. There was no easy-to-use radio creation tool in the market. Recognizing this gap in the market, our Founder and CEO, Mr. Marco Lai, led the whole team to create the one-stop online audio platform, LIZHI , with the aim of allowing everyone to create, share, and record in one app to satisfy users' creative needs. Beyond scripted podcasting, many users love the sharing about their lives through voice on the platform. With the growth in platform users and the continuous enrichment of our audio content, LIZHI has gradually formed a highly engaged and closely connected UGC audio community, and can be seen as an audio version of TikTok or Instagram.
In 2016, the online audio industry started the commercialization progress, mainly through the paid content and advertising in a traditional way. Marco used to be a radio host, and he keenly noticed that the live program is highly welcomed in a radio show, where listeners can communicate with the host through paid messages. Inspired by Marco's experience, LIZHI decided to explore the commercialization models through interactive audio entertainment business and launched the real-time live social features. In the next few years, we further extended our interactive audio functions and gradually developed an interactive audio entertainment business, with virtual gifting as the main business model, which got highly favored by younger generations in the third or below-tier cities in China. Through diversified and interactive product functions and features, we have effectively improved the user engagement, and our business maintained steady growth momentum.
At the beginning of 2020, LIZHI was successfully listed on NASDAQ Global Market and started exploring the international market and tapped into the Internet of Things industry. We have successfully launched more new products, gradually shifting our global strategy through a multi-product matrix strategy. In this year, we have set up our international headquarters in Singapore, as well as local offices in target markets to build an international team and strengthen our globalized expansion strategy. Next, I will share more details regarding our business segments. The interactive audio entertainment business is the most mature business in the group and the main source of our revenue.
We have been committed to building a highly active and engaged social audio community through our diversified entertainment product matrix. Through a series of creative interactive activities and functions, such as like audio live streaming and multi-user on-air dialogue, LIZHI provide users with an immersive audio interaction and audio social networking experience. In the third quarter, the average MAUs of our interactive audio entertainment business grew to 9.5 million, with its user penetration rate climbing to 19.1%. Most of our users are younger generation who live in the third or below-tier cities, who also have great demands for expressing themselves, sharing what they have created, and communicating with each other. Users on our platform are not only the listeners. They could also be converted to content creators with our easy-to-use audio-making tool and generate income.
In the third quarter this year, we launched a short audio content module, enabling users to enjoy immersive listening and producing short audio content. We encouraged users to explore the innovative and interactive format of combining short audio content with audio-based social networking. In addition, to further strengthen our users' stickiness and engagement, we optimized our user management mechanism to achieve dynamic, upgrading user services, and improving their experience. We find these efforts effectively improved our average spending per paying user, contributing to our audio entertainment business revenue growth. In addition, we have continued to incubate and launch new products, as well as focus on the development of mid and long-tail content creators. We upgraded our creator support policies and built a unified content creator operation and management platform to encourage the creation of high-quality content and inspire audio content producers' creativity.
Since the beginning of this year, we have further optimized our audio interactive entertainment operational strategy. We have also been focused in terms of resource allocation, as well as the marketing strategy, which effectively improving our operational efficiency and profitability. As we approach our next step of growth, we aim to further enrich our product metrics to meet the needs of more core users and improve the competitiveness of our products. We believe there's great still potential for us to further expand the user base, elevate the paying conversion rate, and ultimately propel the top-line growth. We have been actively exploring overseas development opportunities in light of our stable business development in mainland China. At the end of 2020, we launched a global audio-based social networking platform, the TIYA app, in the US market.
TIYA is targeting the younger generation in English-speaking countries, focusing on users' diverse range of interests and lifestyles, and helping to make online socializing livelier and more interesting through real-time interaction and innovative messaging features. TIYA has now integrated real-time interactions and online entertainment to build an interactive online space and a well-rounded product system. TIYA enables users to enter their personal online space with one click and call on their friends or interact in real time in their public audio space. We have also launched innovative features like a truth or dare mini-game, audio jams, and a voice changer. Users can watch videos with friends through a YouTube interface within TIYA or play games together by screen sharing with real-time audio interaction. We have seen growth in the engagement and activity levels of TIYA users, with per capita user maintaining an upward trend.
In the third quarter this year, our users per capita daily usage time increased 34% year-over-year, and the average monthly group penetration rate increased 94% year-over-year. By the end of September, our users friends pairing increased 56% year-over-year. As TIYA mainly focuses on the US market currently, we will continue to optimize its product features and interactive experience so that we can provide a better online social networking approach to achieve stable growth of our user groups and enhance the networking effect of the platform. In terms of the global team building and capability improvement, we continue to expand our global talent pool in core business regions, cooperating with international colleagues and attracting local talents.
At the same time, we will keep exploring new markets, hoping to create more multidimensional innovations based on our experience from successful products and our in-house technologies. Through innovation, we will further enrich our product metrics and explore more monetization models and commercialization potential. Using our proprietary technologies, LIZHI is also working towards the in-car audio business. We hope that by connecting the in-car audio and mobile audio markets, users can enjoy an even more immersive audio experience that extends across vehicles and mobile devices. Our strategy for the in-car audio market is mainly aimed at long-term market opportunities. LIZHI will continue to work with more automotive companies and Internet of Vehicles platforms to integrate our in-car audio products into vehicles' information system, which ultimately would also help us to reach more user groups.
We have already successfully worked with many leading smart car companies and connected car platforms such as Xpeng Motors, Li Auto, BYD, Tencent, WeScenario in-car platform, Huawei's HMS for Car, and more. This year, we launched our audio products on AITO and reporter vehicles through Huawei's HarmonyOS, smart car cockpit operating system, and the Xiaomi Quick App platform respectively. With the rapid development of Internet of Vehicles and Internet of Technology, as well as smart car and connected car platforms, we believe that the audio has enormous space to grow and great future potential. In addition to promoting our existing product portfolio, we also continuously upgrade the infrastructure and technologies that our products are built on.
In the first half of this year, based on our business development needs, we launched our own hybrid cloud computing platform, the Voice Cloud, by integrating three cloud computing models, the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, to build a full-stack metric system that delivers superior connectivity, system stability, and secure cloud solutions for LIZHI Group business. Since unveiling the platform in August, we have continued to integrate core technologies and services, as well as promoted Voice Cloud application to various business segments to boost our business backend and middle platform support. The PaaS of Voice Cloud is made up of REMI, our real-time communication and audio streaming solution, as well as WaterX, our instant messaging technology. Voice Cloud also integrates with other business-related systems to achieve an overall improvement in business efficiency.
We believe that capabilities of our proprietary technologies form the foundation of our business, and we will further integrate them into future products and features as we globalize and evolve our business strategy. Thank you, all. Next, our Head of Capital Markets, Ms. Effy Kang, will share more about our financial and markets insights. Please go ahead, Effy.
Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. I will now introduce you more about our financial performance and future strategies. We are very glad to see a strong performance for the third quarter this year, while achieving record highs on revenue and net income. Our third quarter revenue grew by 12% year-over-year and 10% quarter-over-quarter to CNY 565 million. Currently, our revenue was mainly generated from our interactive audio entertainment segment, which is a relatively more mature business segment for the company. A relatively smaller portion of the revenue was generated from podcasts and other business models such as advertising. Our current main focus would actually be the commercialization of audio entertainment, which has a higher commercialization efficiency.
Given the current user base of 9.5 million MAUs for the audio entertainment business, we think there will be more growth potential for us to further grow the user base and increase the paying user conversion rate, as well as the average spending per paying user, and ultimately driving the future top-line growth. In the long term, as we continuously enrich our product matrix, we will continue to explore more business models, which may help us achieve a diversified revenue structure and help us achieve a solid scalable growth. We can see from the slide that in the third quarter, our gross margin reached the 33%, increased by 300 basis points year-over-year.
In compare with the last quarter, the gross margin was essentially flat, and the 1% difference was mainly due to our dynamic adjustments in revenue sharing policies because of new products launching and during the different seasons. Cost of revenues mainly consist of revenue sharing fees for content creators and staff salaries, bandwidth costs, and payment handling fees, et cetera. Revenue sharing fees accounts for the most of the total revenues, which is over 60% in the third quarter this year. More than one year ago, the ratio was more than 65% to 70%. In the recent periods, we have further optimized our cost structure by lowering the relevant cost ratio, such as the revenue sharing ratio. We have actually implemented a more focused operational strategy.
Instead of implementing the cash-based incentive program for content creators, we actually provided traffic support and better creation tools for our content creators, which have increased the creators' activities and lowered the revenue sharing ratio, while we also maintain the competitive in the creator front. We have built a unified creator management platform and community to cultivate the mid- to long-tail content creators. Thus, we have optimized our cost structure overall and improved our gross margin. In the future, with more diversified monetization models, we may further improve the overall gross margin. In terms of the operating expenses, we have also optimized our overall expense ratio and improved the operational and organizational efficiency. In the third quarter this year, the operating expenses accounted for 31% in total of the revenue, which is down 700 basis points compared with the same quarter last year.
This was mainly due to our optimized operational strategy and include implementing a more precise marketing strategy. We focus on acquiring target user groups with higher spending power, so we are able to lower the marketing expense ratio compared with the same period of last year. The difference from last quarter was mainly due to our dynamic adjustments to marketing strategies based on different stages of our product. Basically, we will evaluate and adjust our marketing strategy and budget based on the business performance, operational needs, and market conditions. In the meantime, we have built a high-quality and efficient support platform by integrating the business-related technical services and our in-house technology platform, as Sarah mentioned before.
This in turn has created a highly efficient middle and back-end support, which helped us achieve efficiency improvements in many aspects, such as the product development and marketing, as well as the operational management. Thanks to our improved cost structure and overall operational efficiency, we have achieved a net income of CNY 19.8 million in the third quarter, up 5% sequentially, and a non-GAAP net income of CNY 27.5 million, excluding the share-based compensation expenses. This is also the fourth consecutive quarter for us to achieve a profit on a GAAP basis. At the end of September this year, our cash and cash equivalents was more than CNY 517 million, which is more than the $72 million, and it's much higher than our current market cap.
We believe this has provided a solid fundamentals for our future expansion strategy. In terms of the long-term prospects, we believe there is a great market potential, but before addressing the specific development strategy, I want to share more insights of the industry potential. In terms of the audio entertainment market, according to a third-party industry report, the market size of China's online audio industry is expected to maintain continuous growth momentum and increase to CNY more than 100 billion by 2025, with a CAGR rate of 51%. The market size of the audio interactive entertainment and audio live streaming segment is expected to grow to more than CNY 21 billion by 2025, and the CAGR rate is 40%.
The rapid development of the online audio industry is thanks to the unique characteristics of audio products, such as easy participation and multi-scenario uses. In addition, the audio offers a more natural form of the companionship as it emphasizes the emotional expression, which can bring people closer to each other. The real-time audio communication has become one of the most popular ways to communicate. The penetration rate of mobile online audio MAUs in China was about 16% in 2020, which was a large gap compared to 46% in the US market. We believe in the future, the penetration rate of the online audio users in China will further increase with the advancement of the 5G technology and the IoT industry.
Based on the uses of existing mobile audio platforms, audio in other usage scenarios, such as a car, home, and outdoor, will over time become even more embedded into different aspects of users' daily life. An interactive audio entertainment can also facilitate the social interactions through gaming, singing, and other entertainment scenarios that further satisfy users' social needs. This actually is very true for users who are digital natives and rely on the internet and the social media for companionship and online communication. This has offered a higher future penetration rate for online audio industry. In terms of the international social markets, according to the third-party reports, the global online social users in overseas markets are expected to reach more than 5 billion by 2024, of which the audio-based social media users are expected to reach more than 2 billion.
According to the data.ai report, the global users' annual spending on social apps has exceeded $4.9 billion and is expected to exceed $17 billion by 2025. We believe that a combination of audio and social media has a natural advantage compared with the higher barrier of the video. Audio can better convey emotions and meet users' needs for an instant live interaction, which in turn offering LIZHI the company more opportunities for overseas business expansion. Therefore, we will continue to steadily promote our global development strategy around three key focal points in the future. First of all, we will further unleash the commercialization potential of our business, especially the audio entertainment business.
We aim to further optimize our products and operation strategies, enhance user activities through more innovative interactive features, and increase the interactive audio entertainment user base and user spending levels. At the same time, we will also incubate new products, reach more users, and launch various monetization models to finally diversify our revenue streams. As one of LIZHI 's key strategies, we will also continue to explore overseas market opportunities, build an even more international team, advance our globalization capabilities, and promote the global business development. Over the last years or so, we have set up the local offices in our target markets and built the local teams to enhance our localized operations. We also explore the overseas markets and focusing on upgrading product features and functions, and enhancing the network effects of our products pivoting to user experiences.
Moving forward, we will continue to strengthen the global team building and foster product matrix ecosystem, hoping to make further breakthroughs in our international business through our successful product experiences and technological innovations that cater to a local audience group. In addition, we will also continue to develop our core technologies to empower the business growth. This includes further integration of these technologies and services into our products to enhance our core technological capabilities, again, differentiating the competitiveness. At the same time, we will continue to expand the application of the Voice Cloud to a wider range of scenarios and to enable the innovation and global strategic development, reduce relevant costs and expenses, and improve the operational efficiency. Overall, we are very confident about our long-term prospects, which are well grounded by our past experiences and the steady improvement in our financial performance.
Despite the current softer macro environment, our business performance has demonstrated our market competitiveness. We will firmly implement the globalization strategy and leverage our advantages, actively explore the international market opportunities, and achieve a long-term sustainable business growth. Well, this concludes our introduction. I see we are run out of time. If you do have any other questions or want to get in touch with the management team, please feel free to email us or reach out to the D.B. team, and we can arrange a meeting in the future to introduce you more about the LIZHI Group. Thank you.