Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and good evening. Thank you for joining Sohu's first quarter 2019 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Today's conference call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I'd like to turn the conference over to your host for today's conference call, Mr. Huang Pu, Investor Relations Director of Sohu. Please go ahead, sir.
Thanks, operator. Thank you for joining us today to discuss Sohu's first quarter 2019 results. On the call are Chairman and CEO, Dr. Charles Zhang, CFO, Joanna Lv. Also with us today are Changyou CEO, Dewen Chen, and CFO, Yaobin Wang, and Sogou CTO, Wang Xiaochuan, and CFO, Joe Zhou. Before management begins their prepared remarks, I would like to remind you of the company's safe harbor statement in connection with today's conference call. Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in this conference call are forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current plans, estimates, and projections. Therefore, you should not place undue reliance on them. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. We caution you that a number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement.
For more information about the potential risks and uncertainties, please refer to the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its registration statement and most recent annual report on Form 20-F. With that, I will now turn the call over to Dr. Charles Zhang. Charles, please proceed.
Thanks. Thank you everyone for joining our call. In the first quarter, we delivered better-than-expected revenue, mainly driven by the solid performance of our search and game businesses. Sohu Media continued to make progress upgrading its products and content on our platform, and we explore new ways to diversify revenue sources. Sohu Video consistently offered appealing self-developed dramas, and its financial loss kept narrowing due to strict cost controls. In Sogou, the user base of its mobile search and keyboard products further expanded, while its core search revenue grew faster than industry. In the first quarter, Changyou's revenue and profit exceeded guidance as TLBB PC game performed very well during the Chinese New Year holiday. Before I go into more detail about our key businesses, let me summarize our financial results for the first quarter.
First quarter total revenue is $431 million, down 5% year-over-year and 11% quarter-over-quarter. On a constant currency basis, total revenues would have been $26 million higher than our reported revenues. That's up 1% year-over-year. Net brand advertising revenue is $43 million, down 24% year-over-year and 25% quarter-over-quarter. Search and search-related advertising revenues, $234 million, up 6% year-over-year and down 15% quarter-over-quarter. Online game revenues, $99 million, down 6% year-over-year and up 5% quarter-over-quarter. Excluding certain non-cash impairment charges, the operating loss for Sohu Video was $27 million, compared with a loss of $48 million in the first quarter of 2018. GAAP net loss attributable to Sohu.com Limited was $57 million, compared with a net loss of $93 million in the first quarter of 2018.
Non-GAAP net loss attributable to Sohu.com Limited was $55 million. Excluding the effect of the impairment charge net of tax effects, non-GAAP net loss attributable to Sohu.com Limited was $48 million, which compared with a net loss of $97 million a year ago, the first quarter of 2018. Excluding Sogou and Changyou, the non-GAAP net loss attributable to our core Sohu.com business, basically the media and video business, was $72 million, which compares with a net loss of $93 million in the first quarter of 2018. For the first time, moving to the forecast, we will forecast this non-GAAP net loss attributable to Sohu business and in general how things are looked. Let me go through some of the key businesses. First of all, our Sohu Media Portal business.
In the first quarter, to improve user stickiness, we continued to focus our efforts on improving our products and technology, and upgrading content on our platform. We deepen our partnerships with high-quality content providers, encouraging them to create in-depth articles on hot topics in an effort to increase user engagement. The total number of articles posted by third-party writers, or so-called Sohu Hao, grew by 10% quarter-over-quarter. On the product side, we are developing compelling social features for Sohu News App. These features aggregate coverage of different important events such as breaking news and social topics, and product launches. Not only our users can browse over stories in a one-stop way, they can also conveniently make comments and share thoughts with peers. We believe upgrades such as this will make our News App not just an information distribution platform, but also a more engaging product.
Financially, while the first quarter always tends to be a seasonally soft quarter, the sluggish economic environment continued to impact our ad revenues. However, we worked hard to alleviate the negative pressure. For example, we are creating more customized solutions for our key advertising clients. In early April, we successfully hosted a celebrity off-road marathon event in Chongli, Hebei Province, where the next Winter Olympic Games will be held. The event attracted a good number of sponsors and helped to elevate the Sohu News brand. We've also been cultivating more local partners in lower-tier cities to better monetize our traffic. Overall, we expect a 20%+ revenue rebound in the second quarter compared with the first quarter. Sohu Video. 2019, we continued to implement what we call the two engine strategy for our content offering.
On one hand, we primarily focused on developing and producing original content with long-clip, long video, long-clip original content. We are also enhancing the short-form, short-clips, the UGC, user-generated content, and its distribution. These are two-engine strategy. We believe this combination should enable us to provide users with interesting content at a much lower cost, and this will likely help our video business achieve profitability eventually. For the self-developed shows, we have built an impressive track record in two categories in particular. One is the idol romance category. The other one is the criminal theme, the dramas. In the first quarter, our idol romance drama, called Well-Intended Love, [Foreign language] became a web sensation upon its debut. It hit a hot search list on Weibo 30 times during the broadcast period, while its total video views reached 1 billion.
Look ahead, we will mainly use our in-house artists and focus on producing high-quality content with low to mid-range budgets. Besides Sohu Originals, we are also exploring opportunities in short video categories, especially UGC. Leveraging our cross-platform advantages, UGC videos can be more efficiently distributed across a number of Sohu family platforms, such as News, live broadcast, and Games and Search. In the first quarter, benefiting from the strict cost controls, we were able to further narrow the financial loss at Sohu Video. Operating loss was $27 million, which was 10% less than the previous quarter and 43% less than the same period last year. Now, turning to Sogou. In the first quarter, Sogou's two key products, Search and Mobile Keyboard, both demonstrated healthy growth, leveraging our innovative AI technologies. As the number 2 search engine, Sogou's core search revenue continued to outpace industry growth.
By the end of March, Sogou Mobile Keyboard's DAU reached 443 million, up 23% from a year ago, becoming the third largest mobile app in terms of DAU in China, according to iResearch. Lastly, Changyou. In the first quarter, Changyou revenues and profits came in ahead of our expectations. In particular, its PC game revenues rose significantly on a sequential basis. Changyou launched a new expansion pack for the Spring Festival, as well as a variety of online and offline events for the holidays, and received warm response from gamers. Looking out at 2019, we will continue to execute our strategy of top games and improve our capabilities and efficiency in game development. MMORPG mobile games will continue to be our strategic focus, while we are also developing a number of casual games and strategy games.
With the support of strong cash flow, we believe Changyou is well-positioned to roll out new hit games in the future. Now let me turn to Joanna, our CFO, who will talk you through our financial results. Joanna.
Thank you, Charles. I will walk you through the key dimensions of our four major segments for the first quarter of 2019. All of the numbers that I will mention are all on a non-GAAP basis. For Sohu Media Portal, quarterly revenues were $23 million, down 26% year-over-year. The quarterly loss was $35 million, which compares with a net loss of $29 million in the first quarter of 2018. For Sohu Video, quarterly revenues were $26 million, down 16% from a year ago. Of this, advertising revenues were $10 million. Excluding impairment charges, the operating loss for Sohu Video was $27 million, which compares with a net loss of $48 million in the same quarter last year. For Sogou, quarterly revenues were $253 million, up 2% year-over-year and down 15% quarter-over-quarter. Net loss was $3 million, compared with net income of $20 million in the same quarter last year.
For Changyou, quarterly revenues, including 17173.com, were $123 million, down 10% year-over-year, and up 5% quarter-over-quarter. Changyou posted net income of $37 million, compared with net loss of $16 million in the same quarter last year. For the second quarter of 2019, we expect total revenues to be between $469 million and $494 million. Brand advertising revenues to be between $47 million and $52 million. This implies annual decrease of 15%-24%, and a sequential increase of 9%-21%. Sogou's revenues to be between $303 million and $313 million. This implies annual increase of 1%-4%, and a sequential increase of 20%-24%. Online game revenues to be between $90 million and $100 million. This implies annual decrease of 5% to annual increase of 6%, and a sequential decrease of 9% to a sequential increase of 1%.
Non-GAAP net loss attributable to Sohu.com Limited to be between $38 million and $48 million. Non-GAAP loss per fully diluted ADS to be between $0.95 and $1.20. GAAP net loss attributable to Sohu.com Limited to be between $40 million and $50 million. GAAP loss per fully diluted ADS to be between $1.00 and $1.25. Excluding profits generated by Sohu and Changyou, non-GAAP net loss attributable to Sohu.com Limited to be between $65 million and $70 million. GAAP net loss attributable to Sohu.com Limited to be between $67 million and $72 million. For the second quarter of 2019 guidance, we used a presumed exchange rate of RMB 6.8 to $1, which compares with the actual exchange rate of around RMB 6.38 to $1 for the second quarter of 2018, and RMB 6.74 to $1 for the first quarter of 2019. With that, this concludes our prepared remarks.
Operator, we would now like to open the call for questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question now, 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 pound or hash key. The first question comes from the line of Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Please ask your question.
Hi. Good evening, Charles, Joanna, and other management. Thanks for taking my question. I have a couple questions. Number 1 is, what are the plans for the use of cash from the special dividend that we see from Changyou? Second question is, what is the impact to Sohu Video on the recent regulatory restrictions on broadcasting the costume drama? Any other content restriction that you foresee could be introduced later this year? Just lastly, quickly, it's related to Changyou. On the Changyou call earlier, I think management mentioned about the NetEase game, Ancient Martin, that Changyou is licensing from NetEase to publish in Korea. Just wonder why NetEase would license that game rather than not publishing themselves. Thank you.
The use of cash, right? From the dividend. Yeah. On a corporate level, we are still at a loss, Burning cash, right? Continue to spend money on the new apps, the channels, and also product and technological development. Also the video. There are many places we could use the cash, but we'll just use it really diligently and make sure that we'll continue to narrow the loss so that we'll have plenty of rooms or ground to move forward. The regulation on costume drama, it's actually not much restriction, right, on the costume drama. That's one, there's no such regulation. They still talk about it, but never actually carried out.
For Sohu's self-produced dramas, we tend to have dramas, not the ancient stories, but the modern times, that we have a lot of opportunities to have the embedded advertising like cars, automobiles, or mobile phones, and all these kinds of commercial items that are embedded in the story. For the ancient costume dramas, you don't have a lot of opportunities to do that. The advertising. The question about Changyou, right?
The way we work on games are relatively close, the style. We feel easy to cooperate with each other. They're running business overseas, but we are especially doing good in Korean market. From our side, actually, we have been keep very good relationships with both Tencent and NetEase for some IP or logo or brand we registered. We also authorize them to use those. It's good for us.
Yeah.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you once again, ladies and gentlemen. If you wish to ask a question now, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced.
Any question at all?
The next follow-up question comes from the line of Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Please go ahead.
Hi. Yeah. Sorry. Thanks. I have one follow-up question, if I may.
Okay.
Actually, wanted to know, I know this April period, the whole industry are kind of closing, signing out of most of the framework contract. I just wonder if management see what is Sohu's demands, right, from the ad object side, also any change in terms of the different industry vertical that if you can share the color. Thank you.
Any change in what? Well, in the auto industry, it's a mixed signals. Some of those imported cars, vehicles, automobiles, especially U.S. or European brands, seems to be suffering, but the Japanese brand and also German brand is doing better. Yeah, the Japanese brand. In the auto industry, there's generally a kind of weak demand. Advertising spending weakened, but it's mixed, some spending is coming strong. Any comment? Yeah, exactly. There is a surge in the liquor business, right?
Yeah.
The Chinese liquor business is coming up. Also those kind of the Fast-moving consumer goods, cosmetics, those medical, paramedical, something.
Micro merchant.
Micro merchant through WeChat and other. Those are coming strong. Every time you always have economic downturn, you always see some of those traditional industry sectors kind of weak showing, you always have, because China has so many people. There's always sectors that suddenly show up, right? Growing.
Okay. All right. That's helpful. Thank you, Charles.
All right.
Thank you once again, ladies and gentlemen. To ask a question today, please press star one. All right, thank you. There are no further questions at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.