Chinese social network Weibo today reported its first-quarter earnings results. With steady growth in the company's user base and in user engagement, revenues reached $458.9 million, up 42 percent year-on-year, beating expectations by $27.53 million.

Details: Strong marketing and advertising revenue are the main drive of the performance. Ad and marketing revenues were up 42 percent to $390 million, and VAS revenues advanced 44% to $68.9 million. The net profit, however, went lower to USD 49.8 million from 52.1 million. 

Monthly active users totaled 530 million, down 4% Y/Y and up 2% on the quarter. Mobile MAUs represented 94% of the total. While average daily active users recorded 230M, down 5% Y/Y and up 2% Q/Q.

Weibo will continue to tap into short video battlefield, whose user base is mainly Gen Z. And the microblogging service will try to become the portal of a short video for that particular group of users.

Context: This PingWest story showed that Weibo's biggest rival, in this case, could be Xiaohongshu. The latter had over close to a hundred million monthly active users, with 70% of the total user base categorized as Gen Z and 80% of which are female.

The "Pinterest plus Amazon" kind of social app challenges the dominance of Weibo in the flavor of young Chinese users.