Hao Cao : Let me answer your second question about MAU. As we have consistently communicated before, DouYu is a game-centric content platform that attracts and retains users by providing high-quality game-centric content and adopting user acquisition strategies to face different business environments. In 2023, to navigate the volatile macro environment with agility, we prioritized our long-term business profile, reduced our investment in traditional business lines with low ROI. Focusing on our user growth strategy of improving user quality, we strive to strengthen our content operations as well as explore commercialization avenues. Our total revenues are mainly contributed by our content-driven users with habits. We plan to largely cut our promotional expenses this year, which will directly affect our platform’s MAU in the short term.
Nevertheless, since most of these lower MAUs are short-term users on the platform, this strategy won’t affect our content operations or our monetization efficiency. In addition, with the purchase of copyrighted content, we expect to gain some tournament users. By observing traffic on our LoL game segment, we found that the increase in traffic that it brought, couldn’t offset the decline in user scale resulting from sustainability, decreased our promotional expenses. We believe that operational adjustments will enable us to increase our resource allocation in order to build a more sustainable content ecosystem. Although the return on this investment takes time, we will ultimately enhance our overall competitiveness and support our platform’s long-term development.
Thank you.
Operator: Our next question today will come from Yiwen Zhang of China Renaissance.
Yiwen Zhang : So I have a couple of questions. First question is regarding our DouYu’s content procurement. So can you assure our plan on how we plan to improve ROI on game content? And then secondly, can you give us an update on the 2022 whole year cash flow? Have we achieved positive operating cash inflow?
Hao Cao : Thank you for your questions. As to the first question on copyright procurement, copyrighted tournaments played an important role in stabilizing our platform’s traffic and improving our user engagement. In the past year, we adopted a selective copyright procurement strategy due to the overpricing of some copyrighted tournaments. With the price level of copyrighted tournaments gradually returning to a reasonable range, we have increased our investments in purchasing co-copyrights in 2023. Major copyrighted tournaments we have purchased so far include League of Legends; Honor of Kings; Peacekeeper Elite, Crossfire, and DOTA2. For the tournament copyrights we purchased, we will improve our return on investment through innovative operations.
In terms of enhancing user engagement, we will continue to upgrade interactive features on platform to meet users’ diversified needs by building on our accumulated experience in live streaming and operating copyrighted tournaments. For example, in LPL, by leveraging our top-tier streamer resources, we selected 12 streamers to do a co-streaming of the tournament events. These streamers included both official tournament commentaries and top-tier streamers with massive fan base in these tournaments and on our platform. This co-streaming initiative achieved good results. The DAU of live streaming channel is on par with that of our official channel. In addition, the number of buddy chats is several times higher than that of our official channel.
Furthermore, we featured more user-friendly access to videos and community channels, our live streaming channel, thereby, gaining more exposure for our diverse gaming content and attracted more users to join. In terms commercialization, we continue to integrate our copyrighted tournaments content with more refined operations. For example, we promote our game-specific membership services to tournament viewers. Meanwhile, we will explore more direct monetization opportunities based on copyrighted tournaments content. In addition to discussing the copyright price with copyright owners, we will communicate more proactively with them to explore reasonable long-term cooperation. So on the second question of cash flows. As of December 31, 2022, our overall cash balance, including cash and cash equivalents, restricted cash and deposits amounted to RMB6.81 billion, an increase of RMB170 million compared with RMB 6.64 billion in the same period of 2021.
