JOYY posts 16% revenue rise as BIGO Ads surges 53% year on year
JOYY Inc., the Singapore-headquartered technology group behind live-streaming platform Bigo Live, programmatic advertising unit BIGO Ads and e-commerce platform Shopline, reported second-quarter 2026 net revenues of US$590.8 million, up 16.3% year on year and 6.3% on the first quarter. Operating income more than doubled to US$13.8 million from US$5.8 million in the same period of 2025, while non-GAAP EBITDA rose 18.1% to US$56.9 million.
The headline figure was driven principally by BIGO Ads, which grew 53.1% year on year to US$133.7 million. Within that, the BIGO Audience Network, which aggregates third-party publisher inventory, grew revenues 74.1% year on year, supported by a 37.7% increase in SDK advertising requests. Web-based demand on the platform grew 91.7% year on year, and in-app advertising spend was up 70.6%. JOYY attributed the acceleration to expanded multi-channel attribution, refined user-profiling models, and improvements to compute scheduling that held infrastructure costs in check despite rapid request-volume growth.
Segment performance
Social Entertainment, which encompasses live-streaming revenue across Bigo Live, Likee and imo, contributed US$422.7 million, up 7.4% year on year. Core live-streaming paying users grew 3.9% to 1.56 million, and average revenue per paying user rose 2.4% to US$220.5. The company noted that average daily active streamers increased 4.4% quarter on quarter, partly attributed to AI-driven content-distribution improvements. In May 2026, AI-generated interactive virtual gifts accounted for 34.3% of total virtual gift consumption on Bigo Live, a figure the company cited to illustrate the deepening role of generative AI in its creator economy.
Shopline, the omnichannel commerce platform, grew revenues 28.6% year on year to US$34.4 million, with cross-border merchant revenue up 73.5% year on year. The company said Shopline expanded integrations with AI agents during the quarter to help merchants capture traffic across channels and convert operational data into proprietary assets.
Group global average mobile MAUs reached 277.1 million, up 5.5% year on year, with the company focusing marketing spend on return on investment and high-value user cohorts rather than raw acquisition volume.
Market context and shareholder returns
JOYY operates at the intersection of three competitive sub-markets: live-streaming social entertainment (contested by domestic and Southeast Asian peers), programmatic advertising (where scaled platforms with first-party data pools compete on targeting precision and publisher reach), and SaaS-based commerce tooling (a sector that includes Shopify and a range of Asian-market competitors). The 53% BIGO Ads growth rate is notable in the context of a programmatic advertising market that has seen pressure from signal loss following mobile privacy changes by Apple and Google. JOYY's reliance on its own MAU base and SDK-integrated third-party traffic as an alternative signal source appears to be producing differentiated returns.
The company guided Q3 2026 revenues of US$602 million to US$622 million, implying continued single-digit sequential growth. For full-year 2026, management said it expects non-GAAP operating income to grow approximately 20% year on year, a forward-looking projection that carries the usual caveats around macroeconomic uncertainty.
JOYY maintained a substantial net cash position of US$3,059.3 million at 30 June 2026. The group returned US$358.8 million to shareholders in the year to 21 August 2026 through a combination of US$142.4 million in dividends and US$216.4 million in share repurchases. A quarterly dividend of US$1.55 per ADS for Q2 2026 was declared, payable on 16 October 2026. The board-authorised US$600 million repurchase programme, effective through end-2028, had approximately US$471.6 million of capacity remaining as of 21 August.