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Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Weibo Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I must advise you that this conference is being recorded.
I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker, Sandra Zhang, Weibo IR. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Welcome to Weibo's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me today are our Chief Executive Officer, Gaofei Wang; and our Chief Financial Officer, Fei Cao. The conference call is also being broadcast on the Internet and is available through Weibo's IR website.
Before the management remarks, I would like to read you the safe harbor statement in connection with today's call. During today's conference call, we may make forward-looking statements, statements that are not historical facts, including statements of our beliefs and expectations. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. A number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements.
Weibo assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements in this conference call and elsewhere. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in Weibo's annual report on Form 20-F and other filings with the SEC. All the information provided in this press release is occurring as of the date hereof. We will assume no obligation to update such information, except as required under applicable law.
Additionally, I would like to remind you that our discussion today includes certain non-GAAP measures, which excludes stock-based compensation and certain other expenses. We use non-GAAP financial measures to gain a better understanding of Weibo's comparative operating performance and future prospects. Our non-GAAP financials exclude certain expenses, gains and losses and other items that are not expected to result in future cash payments or are nonrecurring in nature or are not indicative of our core operating results and outlook. Please refer to our press release for more information about our non-GAAP measures.
Following management prepared remarks, we'll open the lines for a brief Q&A session. With this, I would like to turn the call over to our CEO, Gaofei Wang.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Weibo's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Earnings Conference call.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] On today's call, I will share with you highlights in Weibo's future product and monetization, review the progress made in 2020 and elaborate our strategies for 2021.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] Let me start with our fourth quarter financial results. In the fourth quarter, our total revenue increased 10% to $513.4 million mainly attributable to less impact from COVID-19 pandemic to the advertising business as well as our effort to optimize the competitive strategy for brand and performance ad business. Advertising and marketing revenue reached $453.5 million an increase of 12% year-over-year, with 91% of our ad revenue coming from mobile.
In the fourth quarter, non-GAAP net operating income reached $204.1 million, an increase of 21% year-over-year, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 40%.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] For full year 2020, Weibo's total revenues reached $1.69 billion, a decrease of 4% year-over-year. Advertising and marketing revenues were $1.49 billion, a decrease of 3% year-over-year. Non-GAAP operating income reached $579.6 million, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 34%.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] On the user front, Weibo's MAU reached 521 million, and average DAU reached 225 million in December 2020. A 94% of Weibo's MAU came from mobile.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] As we review 2020, we faced 2 major challenges. First, on the user front, although the pandemic in the first half of the year brought a large scale of users to consume pandemic-related news and hot trends, it had a negative impact on the content generation of entertainment vertical and certain other areas such as tourism and sports, which resulted in less user engagement in this sector. With progress made on the pandemic control, we adjusted our strategy accordingly in the second half of the year, putting more emphasis on our core competence in hot trends, social functions and video. So far, we have seen an uptick of our overall traffic in the first quarter compared to last December.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] Second, on monetization, the pandemic has hit some sector of our business hard early last year. However, with a well-controlled combative situation and the recovery of the ad demand, Weibo's social marketing value proposition earned wider recognition among brand customers, leveraging our unique marketing offerings such as hot trends, celebrity and KOL marketing as well as brand plus performance solution. As a result, our brand ad revenues delivered a solid reform in the second half of the year and achieved double-digit growth year-over-year in Q4, with number of branding customers standing with us setting a new record.
For performance ad business, despite certain pressure from advertisers and the market competition, the decrease of our performance ad revenue in Q4 further narrowed compared with prior quarters mainly thanks to the fully upgraded ad billing system, Super FSC, and continued robust growth in gaming and education sectors under the brand plus performance model.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] Next, let me share some color on our progress in product and monetization in Q4 as well as layout key initiatives for 2021.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] On the product front, starting from Q4 last year, we further enhanced Weibo's differentiated competitiveness in hot trend and social attributes. Coupled with efficient channel strategies, we stabilized our user scale and further drove user engagement. Concurrently, we also beef up our investment in the video sectors to strengthen user's mindset of using Weibo for video consumption so as to enhance our competitiveness in user acquisition.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] On the channel front, in Q4, we optimized channel strategy for new and record users combined with hot trend and topic products. When hot events occur, we'll encourage media accounts and KOLs to discuss around topics through product and operating mechanism, providing real-time topic-related content to users. With the optimized strategies, we further enhance the platform's confidence in this recall and retention with hot trends, bringing our strength in content offering into supply.
Taking the New Year's Eve as example, the number of New Year's Eve related posts surpassed 120 million, up 77% compared with last year and recorded more than 16 million users back to our platform.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] On the social front, for these users' recall through hot event toward channel investment, we focused on improving their consumption depth and use the frequency in the relationship-based feed. To elaborate, we focus on improving user experience in relationship-based feed to data mining on quality, social content based on several financials, such as intimacy of social relations, frequency of visits and amount of discussion by followers, et cetera. With such quality content offer, we could further deepen their consumption as well as enhance user retention.
Additionally, we focus on enhancing diversity of content distribution in the information feed in order to drive business fitness, interaction and consumption. For instance, in the fourth quarter, we extended real-time consumption of video content through simultaneous distribution in our core feed. As a result, we set the time spent per user on a post video recommendation feed increased over 30%. And the effect of video views post each recommendation increased over 10% compared with Q3.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] On the video front, in 2020, we reinforced our product offerings and operation mechanism that attracted a great number of quality video content creators to Weibo. In the second half of 2020, we launched the video account program to incentivize Weibo's top content creators to shift toward video content generation so as to encourage more video production and consumption. We saw a significant uplift in the number of video accounts. Currently, the number of registered video accounts has surpassed 1 million, among which over 15,000 video accounts already have more than 1 million followers for each.
By verticals, there is a good proportion of video produced by top content creators in the media and variety show verticals, but we still need to increase that to many other sections on the platform. This year, we will continue to improve the overall experience for video accounts, still up video content generation among top content creators as well as strengthen the effective distribution of video content in feed and video community so as to boost the video content consumption and improve the platform's overall video content ecosystem.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] Let me briefly lay out our strategies for 2021 on the product and operation front. We seek to extend user base and engagement from the following 3 aspects.
First, on the channel investment, leveraging our competitive advantage in user acquisition costs will ensure channel investments through traditional channels and focus more on channel investment to improve user engagement while strengthening the synergy between channel investment and subsequent content consumption and thereby increasing user engagement and retention.
Second, on core competence, we will continue to solidify Weibo's competitive moat as a leading social media platform. From product perspective, we will improve core features of hot trend and social interactions and improve user stickiness and interaction among users' core user groups. On the content systems side, we will step up our efforts to empower top content creators to monetize within our ecosystem, which will, in turn, stimulate their content generation and interaction with them, driving Weibo's user engagement.
Finally, on video content, through video account, we will accelerate the transformation of video's key -- Weibo's key content creator group toward video creation and promote the supply and consumption of Weibo's video content. And meanwhile, we are focused on hunting operations on key verticals such as TV series, variety show and gaming verticals to cultivate users' consumption behavior through our differentiated video content offerings and further strengthen uses loyalty to the platform through videos.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] On the monetization front, our KA revenues in Q4 increased 18% year-over-year. The rapid recovery of KA business in the second half of the year were mainly driven by the following factors. First of all, from the perspective of the marketing environment, most industry sectors has returned to normal operation in the second half of the year and has gradually resumed ad placement, except for a key factor such as entertainment and tourism that has not fully recovered from the pandemic. And meanwhile, the pandemic has further driven a better shift from off-line to online with our top brand customer and also those emerging brands embracing Internet platform as their major campaign arena.
Secondly, KA clients have shifted more of their budget from TV and long-form video platforms to social and short video platforms, allowing the user engagement shift. With this trend, social platform had more strength in KA marketing.
Finally, in KA advertising, we will highlight this marketing strength based on KOL content IP and the brand plus performance offerings, leveraging its robust content ecosystem. For one thing, we facilitate better content marketing for top KA clients. For another, we lower ad placement barriers for brand customers, especially mid-tier customers through brand plus performance ad offerings and, thus, deliver better ad efficiency. For example, throughout 2020, we had nearly 1,000 content marketing projects, leveraging hundreds of celebrities, thousands of KOLs and more than 30,000 KOCs to participate in brand content-based campaigns, achieving way better results than pure branding campaigns.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] Moving on to SMEs. In 2020, we continue to see intense competition in the performance end market. That said, our SME revenues decreased 5% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, improving from last quarter in terms of any trends. Let me briefly recap our progress made in our performance ad sector in this -- in the year of 2020.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] On the ad product front, first, we focused on enhancing the overall efficiency of our real-time bidding system, namely Super FST, and further optimizing its algorithm. Second, we launched several advertising tools such as television and ad solution, which enables marketing content posted by celebrity and KOLs to reach a more accurate target group instantly. Leveraging the influence of celebrities and KOLs, we can maximize the campaign effect while reducing customer cost at the same time.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] On the sales operation front, first, we optimize the SME sales model for key industries to directly serve more clients so that we could respond to and fulfill price needs more efficiently. Secondly, we further led agency to improve their service capabilities and transform into service providers. Third, we offer industry-specific ad solutions to improve ad performance for different industries, leveraging our operational capability around topics and events. With implementation of these above-mentioned strategies, we saw robust growth in gaming and education sector this year, maintaining a triple-digit growth year-over-year in the fourth quarter. In the second half of the year, we gradually expanded such industry-specific solution to Internet service and some off-line O2O industries to capture the higher wallet from key industries.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] In 2021, we will continue to enhance our monetization scale and efficiency from the following aspects. First, on ad products, based on Weibo's unique attributes as a social media platform with younger users, we will continue to strengthen the competitiveness of our social ad products and further capture brand plus performance budget and KOL marketing ad dollars to reach more emerging clients as well as obtain incremental budgets from middle tier and top clients. Hopefully, both client number and our part could serve as drivers of our growth.
Second, on sales operations, we will further develop our industry-specific solutions and support our industry-based sales team to improve organizational efficiency from aspects of sales policy, operational synergy, product optimization and service capability, et cetera. As such, we could improve our wallet share through more diversified drivers from industry perspective.
Finally, on ad technology, building on the upgraded Super FSC, we will continue to optimize the ad targeting and the conversion rate of OCPX so as to increase the placement efficiency and ROI for clients. Coupled with the full funnel ad optimization, Weibo is well positioned to improve our ECPM in 2021. And meanwhile, we'll strengthen our video ad technology and monetization efficiency to gradually unleash the potential of video traffic monetization.
To sum up, in 2021, with more monetizable traffic generated from the growth in user base and engagement, we will step up our efforts in ad products, sales operation and ad technology to increase Weibo's monetization skill, efficiency and market competitiveness.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] With that, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for a financial review for the fourth quarter and the fiscal year 2020.
Thank you, Gaofei, and hello, everyone. Welcome to Weibo's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Earnings Conference Call.
Let's start with review of the metrics. In December 2020, Weibo's MAUs reached 521 million, represent a net addition of 5 million users on a year-over-year basis. Weibo's average DAUs reached 225 million, representing a net addition of 3 million users on a year-on-year basis. Global MAUs represented approximately 94% of total MAUs.
As a remainder, my prepared remarks would focus on non-GAAP results, and all comparisons are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Now let me walk you through our financial highlights for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2020.
Weibo's fourth quarter 2020 net revenue was $513.4 million, an increase of 10%. Operating income was $204.1 million, an increase of 21%, representing an operating margin of 40%. Net income attributable to Weibo reached $212.7 million, an increase of 21%, representing a net margin of 41%. Diluted EPS was $0.92 compared to $0.77 in 2019.
For full year 2020, total revenue reached $1.69 billion, a decrease of 4%. Operating income was $579.6 million, a decrease of 12%, representing operating margin of 34%. Net income attributable to Weibo reached $547.5 million, representing a net margin of 32%. Diluted EPS was $2.38 compared to $2.78 in 2019.
Let me give you more color on our fourth quarter and full year 2020 revenue growth. Advertising and marketing revenues for fourth quarter 2020 was $453.5 million, an increase of 12%. Mobile ad revenue reached $413.8 million, representing 91% of our total ad revenue, up from 88% last year. Full year 2020 advertising and the marketing revenues reached $1.49 billion, a decrease of 3%, with mobile ad revenues contributing 90% of total ad revenue, up from 87% in 2019. Despite unprecedented challenges from COVID-19 and resulted full year single-digit revenue decrease, we are pleased that with the solid recovery in the second half of 2020, underpinned by the overall ad demand pickup in the domestic market, rest of new economy bringing incremental marketing demand as well as our relentless effort to capture new ad margins and additional ad wallet share of existing plans.
Let's start with KAs. In the fourth quarter, our KA ad revenues were $226.8 million, an increase of 18% or 26% excluding the impact from better transaction. Our KA business booked accelerated year-over-year growth, with the number of brand advertisers spending with us reaching a new record. Industry-wise, the recurring momentum for our KA business continued to be broad-based with key sectors such as FMCG and automobiles closed the year on a higher note. Our fleet bed, entertainment channels and real estate sectors remained pressured as the sporadic COVID-19 cases in China in part postponed the recovery pace of new sectors in late 2020.
Full year 2020 KA ad revenues reached $741.5 million, an increase of 2% or 9% excluding better impact, representing 50% of Weibo's total ad revenue. Our KA business demonstrated resilience against past market environment, speaking to Weibo's unique value proposition to brand customers. Weibo has gradually become the costume of many advertiser's marketing spends as we offer further marketing solutions to serve their branding plus performance needs.
In 2020, we also notedly captured an incremental ad wallet through our differentiated KOL marketing tools as well as unique products such as search and the topic products as it resonated well with customers' demand.
Looking forward, with continuous recovery of ad demand and opportunities brought forth by new economy, we continue to see headroom incenting our customer base as well as potentials to tap into incremental ad wallet. We believe we are well positioned to solidify and further uplift our competitiveness in the brand advertising market.
Turning to SMEs. In the fourth quarter, Weibo's SME ad revenues were $167.2 million, a decrease of 5%. We continued to narrow the year-over-year decline rate, leveraging the net momentum of online sectors, particularly gaming, education and e-commerce. That said, certain offline customers continue to face headwinds particularly amidst sporadic outbreak of COVID-19 cases in multiple areas in China.
Full year SME ad revenues were $592.7 million, a decrease of 16%, representing approximately 40% of Weibo's total ad revenues mainly due to significant impact on COVID-19 especially for offline sectors as well as application revenues. Although the performance ad market in 2020 was challenging in many ways, we may drive in expanding oCPX coverage, driving video ad penetration as well as developing integrated industry-specific ad solutions, which all aim to enhance our ad performance.
We are delighted to see this initiative already absolute in early stage with the gaming and education sectors booking triple-digit growth this year. The early momentum for these 2 sectors demonstrated Weibo's potential in delivering relatively competitive ROI in the market, leveraging our unique strength in integrating Weibo's resources, incumbent, KOLs and traffic.
Ad revenues from Alibaba in fourth quarter were $59.5 million, an increase of 57%, reflecting our collaboration with Alibaba to drive value for both platform brands and more chance during the peak e-commerce promotional season. Full year ad revenues from Alibaba were $152 million, an increase of 55%. Apart from the fact that 2019 was relatively low base, the momentum of Alibaba ad revenue also reflected our efforts in serving integrated marketing demand for both platform brand ad markets.
That said, ad spend from Alibaba highly correlated to its own business operations, especially these marketing strategies, which may change from time to time. As communicated earlier, we cannot ensure that such robust growth will be sustainable in the future.
Value-added service net revenues were $59.9 million in the fourth quarter, a decrease of 4%. The decrease was primarily resulted from the decrease of live streaming business and was partially offset by the revenue contribution from the interactive entertainment the company acquired and consolidated with the company in November 2020. Full year 2020 VAS revenues were $203.8 million, a decrease of 14%, mainly resulting from a decrease in live streaming revenue.
Turning to cost and expenses. Total cost and expenses for the fourth quarter was $309.3 million, an increase of 3%. The increase was primarily due to higher personnel-related costs and step-up in marketing trend and was partly offset by a decrease in general and administrative expense. Full year cost and expenses totaled $1.11 billion compared to $1.10 billion in 2019.
Operating income in the first quarter was $204.1 million, an increase of 21%, representing an operating margin of 40% compared to 36% last year, reflecting our solid recovery post health -- COVID-19 and our capability of delivering decent margin profile amid market competition. Operating income for full year 2020 was $579.6 million, representing operating margin of 34% compared to 37% in 2019.
Turning to income tax under GAAP measure, income tax benefit for the fourth quarter was $25.3 million compared to an expense of $31.1 million last year. The income tax benefit was primarily due to the recognition of preferential tax treatment for certain of the company's PRC subsidiaries as well as reports of recognition of deferred tax liabilities in prior periods related to certain investments. Full year income tax expenses was $61.3 million compared to $109.6 million in 2019. The decrease was primarily resulting from changes in deferred tax liabilities related to fair value changes on investments.
Net income attributable to Weibo in fourth quarter was $212.7 million compared to $176.5 million last year. Net margin was 41% compared to 38% same period last year. Net income for full year 2020 was $547.5 million, representing a net margin of 32% compared to 36% in 2019.
Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow items. As of December 31, 2020, Weibo's cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments totaling $1.5 billion compared to $2.4 billion as of December 31, 2019. The increase was primarily due to net fees from $715 million senior notes issued in July 2020 for general corporate purpose and cash provided by operating activities and was partially offset by the investment activities we made during 2020. In the first quarter, cash provided by operating activities was $321.2 million. Capital expenditures totaled $8.4 million. Other depreciation and amortization expenses amounted to $10.7 million. On a full year basis, our cash provided by operating activities was $741.6 million. Capital expenditures totaled $34.8 million. And depreciation and amortization expenses amounted to $32.1 million. We delivered approximately $706.8 million free cash flow in 2020, an increase of 30% year-over-year, representing our capability of delivering high profitability and generating strong operating cash flow.
Lastly, let's talk about our financial outlook. We anticipate our first quarter of 2021 revenue to increase by 25% to 30% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. This forecast also reflects Weibo's current and preliminary view and is subject to change.
With that, let me now turn the call over to the operator for the Q&A session.
[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Tian Hou of T.H. Capital.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] Gaofei has already elaborated our 2021 strategy, can you elaborate a little bit in detail about your outlook in the user growth and as well as your channel strategy?
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] So relating to this question, before answering the question about 2021, let's talk about the issues that we had in 2020. So for example, due to the COVID-19, that we really had a historical high or reaching a peak of those number of users in Q1. But actually, normally, in the past, after consuming some of our products like the hot topic products, or hot trend products, those consumers or those users are going to live with us and retain with us to further consume the entertainment and also the other vertical-related products. But actually, because of the COVID-19 in the second half of 2020, we had a very good management and also the restrictions on the entertainment-related product consumption, so the retention rate of those kind of customers or users dropped. So those are the major reasons of causing us to have a decreased number of users in Q2 and Q3 majorly.
So in Q4, we have been doing some kind of work, for example, increasing the investment to the user acquisition cost. And also, we really increased some kind of productization in order to attract and also retain those kind of the users.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] And also, you can see that we have been doing some kind of things right now because rather than paying attention to MAU, now we pay more attention to the total consumption as well as the frequency of the consumption specific. So we can interpret that into the following kind of the parameters, for example, DAU and also some kind of frequency of the consumption and also the total scale of the consumption. So that is actually going to really help us to improve our competitiveness as well as our kind of inventory of the monetization.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] And also, in terms of our strategy in the future in 2021, we really would like to focus on the following items. So first of all, we had our traditional advantage in terms of acquiring those users through our hot trends. So in the past, in 2020, actually, we had some of issues occurred in terms of increasing the retention ratio and also helping the users to actually stay with us more and consume more frequently. So actually in 2021 and Q1 and also later this year, we're going to further emphasize on these 2 particular points. So that is to say, first of all, emphasizing on the consumptions related to the relationship they see. And also, we are going to encourage those video accounts to actually publish more videos and also help and trigger the consumption around the videos by the users. So actually, through these kind of ways, especially through videos, we're going to really help to increase the retention ratio of our users. So actually, we are very confident in overcoming the difficulty and also get ourselves improved in later this year.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] And also, lastly, I want to say that in terms of the 2021 trend, so first of all, talking about the year-on-year comparison, because we had a very high historical figure in Q1 of 2020, so it's not that meaningful for us to compare. But actually, we are very confident to realize a month-to-month growth in 2021 Q1. And also another thing is that in terms of our channel strategy, we're going to really focus on increasing the retention ratio of our users and also really help to build a very good and also healthy growth on the number of users. So we are very much confident in driving the traffic and also driving the activity and also the retention ratio of the users in 2021.
Your next question comes from the line of Miranda Zhuang of Bank of America.
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] So my question is can you please share the spend outlook for the 2021 and what kind of your ad products and services will particularly gain traction and gaining the incremental budget allocations among your KA and SME clients across different industry sectors.
[Foreign Language]
And so let me answer this particular question. So first of all, in 2020 Q4, we have been seeing a very good recovery of our KA customer, especially we returned to the triple-digit growth. And also, we although had a year-on-year decrease on SME in Q4, but still that particular decrease rate has been reduced. And also further in 2021, we're going to really see a kind of a very good growth on the brand customers, especially the FMCG and also automotive as well as the luxury as well. And also in 2021, we're going to see also a very good growth for entertainment as well.
And also, next part is about the SME. So this year, for example, we have seen a very good trend for gaming or Internet service as well as online education, et cetera, et cetera. But actually, we're not quite sure whether or not we're going to see another doubling effect or doubling results of the gaming industry this year.
And also, talking about the other traffic diverting related SMEs, without a very strong demand on branding, actually, in 2020, we were talking about those O2O or e-commerce businesses. We had a little bit not a ideal performance in 2020, but still in 2021, we are going to see a further intense competition in the area that I mentioned.
[Foreign Language]
And also, next part is about the products. So based on the social nature of Weibo, so we are going to really focus continuously on the kind of strategy of the brand plus performance and also the content and also IP-based marketing strategies. So based on this particular content and IP-based marketing as well as the strategy of brand plus performance, we have a very good advantage in gaining the budget from the top-notch customers.
And also, we do see that the kind of short video is actually a very big competitor to the OTV area, so we can see that in this particular thing, we do see that those customers from OTV actually had a very high requirement over the kind of content and also the IP as well as the famous KOLs in this area. So based on the unique advantage of Weibo in terms of the IP and KOLs and celebrities, we are very much positive to actually have the advantage of those OTV converted or transferred budgets and gaining that.
And also next part is that we had also a very good development in terms of our information flow, like the Super FST has been upgraded further. So we're going to see a kind of triple-digit growth on OCP as well and also the gaming as well as the education as 2 verticals are increasing dramatically and also because of our upgraded algorithm in this particular area.
And also talking about those particular customers, they do have the requirements not only to gain traffic, but also, they would like to do some kind of brand promotion work. So because of that, we have seen that in 2021, we are very much positive to actually have that particular development especially talking about the customer and e-commerce and also Internet services, et cetera.
We'll take the final question from Alicia Yap of Citigroup.
Congratulations on the results and the guidance. My question is related to the ad inventory and also the competitive landscape. So how does management elaborate the situation you are seeing in 2021 versus last year in terms of the ad pricing pressure and the supply for these ad inventory as compared to last year and even as compared to 2019? And also, any comments on the margin trend for 2021. Let me translate very quickly. [Foreign Language]
[Foreign Language]
[Interpreted] So first of all, talking about the ad inventory, so before, in the first question and answer to that first question, I already mentioned that actually this year, in terms of our strategies for the users, we are going to actually see that more of our investments and also the product-related strategies are going to focus more on the DAU and also the consumption frequency of the users and the per capita consumption traffic of the users from the previous major focus on MAU. So that is to say this particular DAU increase and also more frequency of the consumption of users will definitely drive the development and growth of the ad inventory. However, currently speaking, based on the Q1 result, it's very difficult for me to give you a kind of forecast about this particular ad inventory in 2021, especially for Q1. And of course, we do have seen very good growth on the other video platforms. But still, we are very much focused on increasing the DAU and also the frequency of the consumption of users. And these strategies will definitely bring a growth on the ad inventory.
In terms of your margin question, I will try to take this question. With the revenue growth as our primary goal and at the same time, we want to enhance our competitiveness of our platform, so we may increase our investment in marketing channels compared to last year, 2020. So on this basis, we expect our operating margin to still reach revenue in the high level, that is to say maybe no less than 30%, but there still will be a certain decline. Maybe we expect the decline we'll see single digit, maybe 5% compared to the level of last year.
So in summary, in this year, the company's overall strategy is mainly focused on improving our revenue growth and continue to improve the competitiveness of the platform at a user product level. So at cost and expenses level, the main areas of investment will be increased, will include marketing channel investment. In last year 2020, due to the pandemic and other impact, market channel investment was conservative. That is down from the year 2019.
So considering the competitive user market,and the leveraging Weibo's relatively advantage in user acquisition costs, we will ensure our coverage of basic channels such as free installation and focus on increasing the investment in user engagement. And another area is personnel-related cost. To maintain -- in order to maintain our competitiveness in the market, in some key department such as our advertising business department and our RMP department, there are certain personnel increase, headcount increase and also the salary raise. So last year, due to the impact of the pandemic, the company also enjoyed some government benefit. This will impact our margin this year. So in summary, we expect our margin will drop from year-to-year.
This concludes our conference call today. Thank you for joining. We'll see you next quarter. Bye-bye.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now all disconnect.
[Portions of this transcript that are marked [Interpreted] were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]