Bilibili - Q1 2024
May 23, 2024
Transcript
Operator (participant)
Good day, and welcome to Bilibili First Quarter 2024 Financial Results and Business Update Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Juliet Yang, Executive Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
Thank you, operator. During this call, we'll discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements. These comments are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Actual events or results could differ materially from those mentioned in today's news release and in this discussion due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in our most recent filing with the SEC and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
The non-GAAP financial measures we'll provide are for comparison purposes only. The definition of these measures and our reconciliation table are available in the news release we 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 the Bilibili IR website at ir.bilibili.com. Joining us today from Bilibili senior management are Mr. Rui Chen, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer; Ms.
Carly Li, Vice Chairwoman of the Board and Chief Operating Officer, and Mr. Sam Fan, Chief Financial Officer. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Fan, who will read the prepared remarks on behalf of Mr. Chen.
Sam Fan (CFO)
Thank you, Juliet, and thank you, everyone, for participating in our first quarter 2024 conference call to discuss our financial and operating results. I'm pleased to deliver today's opening remarks on behalf of Mr. Chen. 2024 will be a turning point in our journey towards profitability. We are already steadily on this path, advancing both our financial profile and community growth in the first quarter. Total revenues for the quarter came in at RMB 5.7 billion, up 12% year-over-year. Growth in our gaming and VAS revenues, in particular, accelerated at 31% and 17% year-over-year, respectively. With increasing revenue contribution from the higher margin ad business and our continued efficient operations, we achieved a notable 45% year-over-year increase in our gross profit.
Our gross profit margin reached 28.3% in the first quarter, compared with 21.8% in the same period last year, marking the seventh consecutive quarter of margin improvement. As a result, in the first quarter, our adjusted operating loss and adjusted net loss meaningfully narrow by 52% and 56% year-over-year, respectively. Meanwhile, we generated RMB 638 million in operating cash flow in the first quarter. The solid progress we have made is placing us firmly on track to reach our profitability goal this year. While we focus on improving our commercialization capabilities, we continue to attract more users and foster a vibrant community.
In the first quarter, our DAUs increased by 9% year-over-year to 102 million, and our MAUs grew by 8% year-over-year to a new high of 341.5 million. User engagement in the first quarter was also strong. Users are spending more time with us than ever, bringing our DAUs' average daily time spent to a record 105 minutes. As a result, user total time spent on our platform increased by 19% year-over-year. As we advance through the year, we will continue to dedicate our resources to enhancing our commercialization capabilities, particularly in our high-margin revenue streams. First, we are working to advance our advertising infrastructure and efficiency to sustain the positive momentum of our ad business. Second, we will bring more high-quality games to our users.
Our highly anticipated licensed game, San Guo: Mou Ding Tian Xia, is scheduled for launch on June 13. This is the first SLG game that caters to our expanding gamer base. In addition, we will continue to increase and diversify our VAS content offering to convert more paying users and improve margins. We believe these initiatives, together with our ongoing efficient operating leverage, will naturally lead to improved financial results. As we approach profitability, we remain committed to our core mission: building a stage for content creators to shine, fostering a healthy, vibrant community for users to enjoy, and bringing value to our shareholders and partners over the long term. With that overview, let's discuss in details our core pillars of content, community, and commercialization... beginning with content and community.
In the first quarter, our leading top content keeps thriving, with video views in games, entertainment, and tech and knowledge categories are increasing by over 20% year-over-year. Among these leading verticals, we have emerged as the go-to platform for AI-related content and the discussion in China. In the first quarter, daily active content creators and the video views of AI-related content grew by over 60% and over 80% year-over-year, respectively, driving a surge in AI-related ads, and making it one of our fastest-growing ad verticals. Also, we continuously bolstered our support to emerging content categories, providing customized operational and traffic assistance for high-quality content creation. During the quarter, video views in automotive, home appliance, and decoration, fashion, and the baby and maternity grew rapidly, all up by over 40% year-over-year.
These categories meet our users evolving content needs as they enter new life stages, while also inherently possessing strong consumer appeal. In many cases, good content can also be a good commercial, attracting more advertisers and incentivizing more creators to join our platform. For instance, ad revenues from home appliance and decoration increased notably by over 70% year-over-year in Q1, and the daily active content creators in this category grew by 30% year-over-year. As such, our community metrics in the first quarter are encouraging. Our average daily video views increased by 22% year-over-year to nearly 5 billion. Our users spent a record-setting 105 minutes on platform daily in the first quarter, compared with 96 minutes in the same period last year. Meanwhile, monthly interactions exceeded 16.4 billion, up 15% year-over-year.
At the end of the quarter, we had over 236 million official members, which increased by 15% year-over-year, and their twelve-month retention rate remained around 80%. In terms of recent community events, our sponsored esports team, BLG, won their first championship of League of Legends Pro League 2024 spring season, and the second place on Mid-Season Invitational 2024, joining more esports enthusiasts to our platform. What's more, our extensive content library and the user base give us a natural advantage to pioneer AI exploration. We are launching various AI-related applications to benefit all stakeholders in our community, including our users, content creators, and advertisers. With our AI assistants in searching and video watching scenarios, users can gather information more efficiently, and they receive more personalized content recommendations.
On the creator front, we launched the AI content creation tool, Bilibili Studio, and enable content creators to customize their digital human and voice, improving creative efficiency. As for advertisers, we are launching a creative center, which will enable advertisers to easily generate headlines and added materials for their ads. More importantly, with our AI-enabled algorithms, our content and ads can be more effectively matched with our users' consumption needs. Now, I would like to talk about our commercialization progress and how we achieve margin expansion and reach profitability. For the first quarter, our total revenues increased by 12% year-over-year to RMB 5.7 billion. As our biggest top-line growth driver, revenues from our advertising business was up by 31% year-over-year to RMB 1.7 billion. Performance-based ads continued to be the primary growth contributor, up over 50% year-over-year in the first quarter.
We are encouraged by the result we achieved in Q1, and expected growth momentum to continue. For the first quarter, our top five advertising verticals were mobile games, digital products and home appliance, e-commerce, automotive, and skincare and cosmetics. As I mentioned in our last quarter's earnings call, we are allocating more resources to integrate ad products within our content ecosystem in a more native, natural, and seamless way. We have made some remarkable progress in the first quarter. We integrated and upgraded our ad platforms with visualized data analysis and more user-friendly tools, empowering advertisers to build more efficiently. In addition, as we deepen our understanding of users' consumption profiles, we are further improving our ad matching algorithm to be more accurate and targeted. Collectively, these enhancements in efficiency, as well as our increasing traffic, enabled us to secure more advertising budgets from our ad customers.
In addition, our video and live commerce ad products with direct sales conversion tools continue to yield results. These transaction-based ads enable advertisers to effectively transition users from product viewing to making purchases. As of last week, our total video and live commerce GMV in women's fashion and clothing has exceeded the corresponding total GMV for the entire year of 2023. In addition, our video and live commerce products provide a great way to unleash commercial value for our content creators. The number of content creators who earn income via video and live commerce more than doubled year-over-year in the first quarter. On top of the progress we made in the first quarter, we are working on more product upgrades, some of which are ready to be applied in the upcoming 618 shopping festival.
We will unveil better ad placement and analysis tools, allow more flexible ad formats, and expand additional ad scenarios. This empowers advertisers to achieve smarter, more creative, and integrated advertisement across our content ecosystem, leading to better branding and conversion results. Turning to our VAS business. Driven by the growth of our live broadcasting, revenues from our VAS business increased by 17% year-over-year to RMB 2.5 billion in the first quarter. We continue to strengthen the synergies between our live broadcasting content offerings and our PUGV ecosystem, especially in our advantages content categories like games, VTubers, and entertainment. Moreover, through refined operational measures, we are also improving our growth margin while increasing the supply of high-quality live broadcasting content.
The number of premium memberships remained steady at 21.9 million as of the end of quarter, with over 80% of premium members on annual subscription or auto renewal packages. Users are also showing a growing propensity for spending on our other VAS products, including our premium online courses, exclusive fan charging video product, and the virtual community accessories. We will continue to actively explore these unique community features to provide users with products and experiences they love. Turning to our game business. Our revenues were RMB 983 million for the first quarter. In April, we launched an exclusive licensed game, Wuhua Mixin. This creative card game was well received by game lovers. Looking at our game pipeline, we expect to release our highly anticipated SLG game, San Guo: Mou Ding Tian Xia, on June thirteenth.
Over two million players have already pre-registered as of today. We also plan to launch a Japanese RPG title, Heaven Burns Red: Zhi Yan Tian Qiong, in the third quarter. Last but not least, as we make progress on commercialization front, we are actively shouldering our social responsibilities as a cultural enterprise. We published our 2023 annual ESG report last month, outlining our efforts in creating and bringing value to young generations in China. Collaborating with content creators, employees, and industry partners, we strive to explore more technological innovation and engage in social welfare activities to positively impact society at large. This concludes Mr. Chen's remarks. I will now provide a brief overview of our financial results for the first quarter of 2024. I'd now like to review our first quarter financial highlights.
For a closer look at our financial results, we encourage you to refer to our press release issued early today. Our commercialization and operational efficiency enhancement initiatives continued to yield great results in the first quarter. We improved the quality of our revenues, expanded our margin for the seventh consecutive quarter, and significantly narrowed our losses based largely on our revenue growth and platform efficiency. Total revenues for the first quarter were RMB 5.7 billion, up 12% year-over-year. Our total revenues breakdown by revenue stream for Q1 were approximately 45% VAS, 29% advertising, 17% mobile games, and 9% for our IP directives and other businesses.
Our cost of revenues increased by 2% year-over-year to RMB 4.1 billion in the first quarter, while our gross profit rose 45% year-over-year to RMB 1.6 billion. Our gross profit margin reached 28.3% in Q1, up from 21.8% in the same period last year. Our total operating expenses was down 2% year-over-year to RMB 2.4 billion in the first quarter. Sales and the marketing expenses increased by 5% year-over-year to RMB 927 million, mainly due to early promotion expenses related to the release our upcoming SLG game. G&A expenses was RMB 532 million, down 7% year-over-year. R&D expenses were RMB 965 million, down 6% year-over-year.
We cut our adjusted operating loss and adjusted net loss to RMB 512 million, and RMB 456 million in the first quarter, narrowing these losses by 52% and the 56% year-over-year, respectively. Our adjusted net loss ratio in the first quarter improved to 8% from 20% in the same period a year ago. For the first quarter, we also generated RMB 638 million in positive operating cash flow, demonstrating our business ongoing healthy path for sustainable development. We expect to reach positive non-GAAP operating profit in the third quarter of 2024 through our sustained top line growth and gross profit margin improvement. As of March 31, 2024, we had cash and cash equivalents, time deposits, and short-term investments of RMB 12.9 billion or $1.8 billion US dollar.
In March this year, we completed the repurchased rights offer for our April 2026 notes. After completion of this transaction, the aggregate outstanding principal amount of April 2026 notes, 2027 notes, and the December 2026 notes was $433 million. We believe our cash position is sufficient to cover all of our remaining convertible bonds. Thank you for your attention. We would now like to open the call to your questions. Operator, please go ahead.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask questions on the phone, please press star one one and wait for your name to be announced. For the benefit of all participants on today's call, if you wish to ask your questions to management in Chinese, please immediately repeat your questions in English. The company will provide consecutive interpretations for management statement during the Q&A session. Please note that the English interpretation is for convenience purposes only. In the case of any discrepancy, management statements in their original language will prevail. One moment for the first question. Our first question comes from the line of Thomas Chong of Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Thomas Chong (Managing Director)
Thanks, management, for taking my question. My question is about our online advertising business. Given advertising growth exceed our expectation, can management comment about the key growth driver? What are the areas that we have strengthened in our ad product offerings and our ad technology upgrade? On the other hand, if we look into the Q2, in particular for June 18, can management comment about the advertising trend and how we should think about 2024 advertising outlook? Thank you.
Rui Chen (Chairman and CEO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
Our ad revenue in Q1 reached RMB 1.67 billion, up 31% year-over-year. Among them, performance-based advertising saw a strong growth exceeding 50% year-over-year. Speaking of the key driver, one of the driver is that while maintaining a good user experience, which we care a lot, we increased our overall advertising inventory. We further expanded our ad scenarios such as moment and search.
Second good growth driver is that we have integrated our Sparkle and our advertising system as well as improved our ad placement tools. We have enabled and achieved smart ad placement in different scenarios. In Q1, over 50% of the Sparkle apps also purchased our content promotional service, aka Project Takeoff. We also launched a creative center to enable bulk processing of ad materials, and also we believe the continuous exploration of AIGC related function can help us to improve our ad efficiency.
Rui Chen (Chairman and CEO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
And secondly, on our content creator side, we've launched our content promotional tools for content creator. Project Takeoff now has been officially upgraded to a new product called Bihuo, which was made available to all content creators in Q1. The function allows content creator with one-stop service to promote their content through paid traffic amplification. They can also increase fans and improve their monetization capabilities. The number of clients who purchased our content promotional service in Q1 increased by 190% year-over-year, while the repurchase rate and the satisfaction rate continues to improve.
Rui Chen (Chairman and CEO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
And thirdly, we have optimized our marketing data infrastructure and improved our algorithm efficiency. We refined various commercial tags to provide advertisers with more comprehensive measurement and guidance on branding and marketing outcome. Currently, we have already launched a trial version of our B-Data and Z-Index for advertiser in game, mobile phones and cosmetics. We expect Q3 and Q2 will push it out to more industry verticals.
Rui Chen (Chairman and CEO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
And the fourth growth driver is that we have deepened our vertical industry solutions. In Q1, games, digital products, and home appliances, and e-commerce platform are our top three growth sectors, with growth exceeding around high double-digit year-over-year. In the gaming sector, we have focused on high quality games, covering all stages in their, in their game operation, from pre-launch to long-term operations. Notably, we have captured incremental shares in mini-games market, resulting a 50% increase in daily ad spending. And on digital and home appliances, we've already took over about 10% of the market share in smartphone app market, and in the future, we believe there's still significant growth potential for other digital products and home appliances. As we move on to the e-commerce platforms, for this quarter, we have achieved diversified customer structure.
Besides the traditional partner, Taobao, Jingdong, Tmall and Pinduoduo, we have expanded our collaboration with Vipshop, DeWu, and Xianyu. We improved our ARPU during our non-shopping festival periods and introduced additional budget with other key active merchants, and we do expect those advertising budget from merchants will continue to drive our advertising growth. As to sum up, we do expect we can replicate that ad solution and apply to more additional verticals, including automotive, internet services, healthcare, and education industries. Meanwhile, we will continue to expand to more clients with more industries.
Rui Chen (Chairman and CEO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
You asked about our June 18 performances. We do expect we estimate the growth during June 18 shopping festival this year will be around will be over 30% year-over-year. We have further increased our shares of advertising budget at this significant shopping festivals. This year, we'll continue to execute our open loop strategy, establishing deep, deep partnership with Alibaba, JD, Pinduoduo, Vipshop, and others. Additionally, we also have two upgrades in our strategy. First is that we will upgrade our partnership from pure traffic collaboration to traffic plus content collaboration. Brand advertising revenue is expected to increase by 40% year-over-year during this period. This year, Taobao also introduced a new budgeting targeting total GMV from purchasing Sparkle plus content promotion.
JD is also actively engaging in our integrated marketing activities, combining both traffic and content value strategies. Secondly is that we will transition from platform to platform collaboration to platform plus merchant collaboration. Platform budget for 618 will be expected to increase by 30% year-over-year, while the merchant budget is expected to increase significantly over 250% year-over-year. We will strengthen the collaboration with more vertical industries and encourage more consumption-related behavior from product seeding to purchasing transitions during the period.
Carly Li (Vice Chairwoman and COO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
Speaking of the June eighteenth shopping festival, let me briefly touch on some of the data points that reflects the current situation on Bilibili. So first of all, is that we've noticed that consumption willingness among Bilibili users have further improved. In Q1, the number of users have watched transaction related content has reached over 37 million, nearly doubling year-over-year. And we believe our users has more mindset and perception towards watching commercial or e-commerce related content on our platform. At the same time, our content creator are benefiting from this improvement. Content creator has received an income or generate revenue through live and video comments, also increased over 100% year-over-year.
And we believe there's a lot more potential for us to further get into. And for the transaction related advertising sectors, the top four industries in terms of transaction volumes are digital products and home appliances, food and beverage, apparel, and beauty and cosmetics. And to sum up, we remain very confident to maintain a high growth rate for our advertising for the full year. Thank you. Operator, next question, please.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Next questions comes from the line of Lei Zhang from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Lei Zhang (Research Analyst)
Thanks management for taking my question, congrats on a strong advertising growth. My question is mainly about the game business, can you give us some updates on the overall game outlook for this year, and also your expectation about the upcoming new game, San Guo: Mou Ding Tian Xia. Thank you.
Carly Li (Vice Chairwoman and COO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
So Bilibili has always has the largest and the most high quality, game related content library. At the same time, we have the highest density in terms of high quality gamers. This give us, a great advantage in the gaming business.
Carly Li (Vice Chairwoman and COO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
For the full year, when we think about game business, there's two words to sum up our direction. One is stable, and two is we're looking for new things.
Carly Li (Vice Chairwoman and COO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
Stable is referring to that Bilibili is paying a lot of attention to our legacy classic games. We expect to achieve a very long term observation, maintaining the stickiness of our gamers, and also to see continuous innovation in terms of content. We have witnessed that for the gamers in our legacy games, their retention level and engagement level has increased, continuously, at the same time showing a very robust, longevity.
Carly Li (Vice Chairwoman and COO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
FGO, one of our most popular legacy games, have entered, has already launched, been launched for eight years. And for this year during its April content upgrade, this game has returned to the top iOS grossing chart. As for Azur Lane, it's also, it's a seven years old game, and for the seventh year anniversary, just happened just now in May, this game once again returning to the top 10 grossing chart on iOS as well.
Carly Li (Vice Chairwoman and COO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
From Bilibili perspective, to operate this tested games for longer period of time, its return for us is even better than seeking new games. So what we will plan to do is continue to refine our operation, maintain a long life cycle. As an FGO player myself, I can see that FGO has become part of my life and I will continue to play it if the game is there. So we are confident we can continue to operate this game towards its tenth year anniversary or even longer.
Carly Li (Vice Chairwoman and COO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
Speaking of new games, we actually launched a new game in April called Artifactors. It's a Chinese style ACG game. This, the artistic style is close, can be classified as ACG title, but the story and the plot and the gameplay is actually very traditional Chinese. It was based on cultural relics as its own persona. Very creative! We've noticed this type of game has opened a new demographic to us, the traditional Chinese cultural lovers. So we'll continue to look for new opportunities with the ACG plus new categories to help us to expand to more gamer demographics. As for this game, Artifactors, we think its performance so far has met our expectation and will contribute to our game revenue in the second quarter.
Carly Li (Vice Chairwoman and COO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
As for on another game, I would like to make an example of it. San Guo: Mou Ding Tian Xia. You were asking for this game, we already set the launch date at June 13th.
Carly Li (Vice Chairwoman and COO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
For this game, it already has over two million pre-registration users, and we have done multiple rounds of paid non-paid beta testing, as has received a very good feedback from the gamers.
Carly Li (Vice Chairwoman and COO)
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
We'll elaborate a little bit how we plan to explore into our new field. For this SLG San Guo: Mou Ding Tian Xia game. Actually, we signed this, we have signed this game the year before last year. The reason behind that is not, it's not a spur-of-the-moment, is that we have discovered on Bilibili, there's a big demographic who are interested in topics and history, military, political knowledge, as you know, that knowledge has been a very big content categories on Bilibili. So to satisfy this group of users or gain potential gamers needs, we have signed this SLG game. So far, the feedback has been very positive and showing that this strategy is working.
Carly Li (Vice Chairwoman and COO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
So as we set up the target on SLG strategy, we have worked together with the game developer to conduct many innovations in the games. As you know, that we have a massive Gen Z users. For this group of users, their preferences towards SLG has evolved compared to the older generation. They value a lot of the gameplay, the fun and the gameplay over the competition, the battle itself, and also they care about whether it requires to top up a lot of money and spend a lot of time on the game. So on this field, we have increased targeted solutions and to improve this gameplay. So far, the user feedback has been very positive.
Carly Li (Vice Chairwoman and COO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
Those two examples show our strategy and thinking in terms of the game business, innovation and, and long-term strategy. As a matter of fact, Bilibili is the biggest game content community, has the largest game related video library, so we'll continue to focus on this track and aim to bring more high-quality games to our users. Operator, next question, please.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for the next question. Our next question comes from the line of Xueqing Zhang from CICC. Please go ahead.
Xueqing Zhang (Media Analyst)
Thanks management for taking my question. My question is about user engagement. The company's first quarter time spent hit a new high, and the average daily UV also achieved good growth. So, what's the main driver behind that, and which content categories are expected to have great potential in the future?
Thank you。
Carly Li (Vice Chairwoman and COO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
So as a matter of fact, Bilibili has its own content categories that are very advantageous compared to other platforms, and users have a strong mindset of looking for that type of content on Bilibili. This includes knowledge, ACG, tech and digital products, and et cetera. And for this type of content categories, users have hardcore needs. They naturally want to watch this type of content. As long as we stay competitive, continue to enhance our leadership in this category, we will experience natural traffic growth. For example, this year, we are looking at the technology, tech, knowledge, and game sector. For these sectors, Bilibili has increased 37%, 28%, and 24% respectively. As we enhance our leadership content categories, we are also actively exploring new categories.
For example, our average age, the average age of Bilibili user is already 24 years old. For some of the demographics, by theory, their children could be around 1 years old. So we've naturally seen those content consumption needs rises, including baby and maternity, automotive, and home appliances, et cetera. For example, in Q1, video views in baby and maternity grew by over 100%, and we're also seeing strong growth for automotive and home appliances, home decorations. At the same time, for this emerging content categories, we are naturally attracting more content creators to join our platform, forming a virtuous cycle. So, in the first quarter, our overall community has delivered a strong growth. Our DAU grew by 9%, and our video views grew by 22%.
The daily average user time spent has reached a historical high of 105 minutes. This all demonstrating our strategy of content development and community operation is very effective. We will continue to execute a strategy and to achieve sustainable growth going forward. Operator, next question, please.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for the next question. Our next question comes from Felix Liu from UBS. Please go ahead.
Felix Liu (Executive Director)
Thank you, management, for taking my question, and congratulations on the company's good gross margin performance in the first quarter of this year. My question is also about gross margin. I want to see specifically in which aspects we did well in terms of gross margin. Additionally, how do we view the company's medium- to long-term profit margin, and has our profitability target for the third quarter of this year changed?
May I check, you know, what specific areas you did well in cost control? How do you see the mid long-term margin outlook, as well as the third quarter profitability target, if any update to that? Thank you.
Sam Fan (CFO)
Thanks, Felix. This is Sam. I will take this question. In Q1, our total revenue grew by 12%, when cost of revenue only increased by 2% year-over-year, so our gross profit increased by 45%. Thanks for the improved operational efficiency, our non-GAAP operating expenses decreased by 2% year-over-year, and 8% quarter-over-quarter, which lead to further loss reduction. Our path to profitability is mainly driven by the revenue growth and the continuous growth profit improvement, which we believe is more sustainable. Specifically, the gross profit margin has increased.
Reaching like 28% in Q1. The main reason for this improvement, contributed by the high margin business, such kind of our ad, ad revenue, which increased by 31% increase, year-over-year, and now the sales mix has come to like 29%. Based on the current business development trends, we expect that in Q2 and Q3, with the continuous rapid growth of the advertising business and the recovery of our game business, will, you know, resume the year-over-year growth. Our gross profit margin will further improve quarter-over-quarter, and to reach 30% gross profit margin in Q3, and we were achieving the GAAP operating, you know, non-GAAP operating breakeven in Q3. We are quite confident to achieve that.
In the longer term, the gross profit margin will depend on the scale of the revenue and the mix of each business line. We still believe there are great potential there. Meanwhile, the achieving breakeven is just our first step. We will allocate more resources on enhancing our commercialization efficiency, while continuing to refine the operational strategies to achieve sustained improvements in both of the gross profit margin and the net profit margin. Thanks for the question.
Operator (participant)
Thank you.
Rui Chen (Chairman and CEO)
Next question.
Operator (participant)
Our last question comes from the line of Lincoln Kong from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Lincoln Kong (Executive Director)
Hey, [Foreign language]
[Foreign language]. So thank you, management, for taking my question. So my question is about the paying users business. So we see the company has now close to 30 million paying users. So on top of this traditional subscription membership, we have also successfully launched a value-added service, such as content creator charging, paid courses, or community decoration. So how does company think about the prospects of this community-based content payment business? Thank you.
Rui Chen (Chairman and CEO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
Bilibili has always been an interest-based video community, and Bilibili user has three key characters: one, high retention level, high engagement level, and high ARPU. And because all the users have strong sense of belonging towards our community, and also have sense of belonging towards the community, it all makes content pay for content is a natural monetization method for Bilibili.
Rui Chen (Chairman and CEO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
On our premium membership business, at end of first quarter, we have close to 22 million premium paid members. And this interesting number is that 80% of them chose a long-term commitment payment, AKA, the monthly sub automated subscription or yearly subscription. This is what sets us apart from the regular content platforms.
Rui Chen (Chairman and CEO)
[Foreign language]
Juliet Yang (Executive Director of Investor Relations)
So on top of the traditional live broadcasting and premium membership, we have continuously explore more business model to better combine our community and content. This includes the premium courses, charging station for our content creators, as well as the cosmetic custom business. And users generally will gain more experience and feel better after paying for this type of service. At the same time, they can also express their liking, appreciation towards their favorite content creator or their favorite IP.
At the same time, our content creator can gain a new avenue of monetization. This is forming a virtuous growth cycle for our community. In Q1, the premium membership, premium courses, charging, as well as the community costumes combined together, their total revenue is already close to RMB 1 billion. First, as on the premium courses, on top of the traditional professional courses, our courses covers a wider category, including life skill set, interest-based knowledge, even relationships, is more diversified, and the premium courses has already become a primary and important avenues for our content creator in the knowledge sector to monetize. In Q1, the number of content creator that gain revenue from the premium courses has grew by over 450%, and the overall revenue also increased by 45% year-over-year.
And secondly is that we have upgraded our charging program recently to extend it to exclusive fan charging videos. In Q1, the number of content creator that received income from the charging program project has increased 47% year-over-year, and the total GMV of the charging program has increased 125% year-over-year. An example would be one of our content creator named Shi Pin Dao. Over the past six months, he released four episodes of high quality documentaries, and at end of the first half of May, his GMV has exceeded RMB 10 million. And from this case, we do think that in many new areas, such as the short play, short documentaries and short movies, actually has great potential, and we are quite excited about Bilibili.
In the second half of this year, we plan to systematically review and upgrade our value-added services, including those content services. We are quite confident for this part of the business will continue to bring additional revenue and help our content creator to gain more revenue. Thank you. Operator, that concludes this question.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. That concludes the question and answer session. Thank you once again for joining Bilibili's first quarter 2024 financial results and business update conference call today. If you have any further questions, please contact Juliet Yang, Bilibili's Executive IR Director, or Piacente Financial Communications. Contact information for IR in both China and the U.S. can be found on today's press release. Thank you, and have a great day!