Joseph C. Tsai - Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
Management
Scott, hey. I will try to answer your first question. I think when you look at a marketplace where a big part of the monetization relates to online marketing services, sort of performance-based marketing, you have to look at the nature of the marketplace. I think we have a superior marketplace in that there's really no church and state when it comes to content and ads, because when the user comes to our marketplace they have very high commercial intent. So when you look at an ad listing versus a "organic" listing in our marketplace, it's basically the same thing. It is basically an item that a merchant has put up for sale that they want to sell. So that has implications for ad load, for example. In a Google or Facebook context, ad loads are quite limited because if they start to load in a lot of ads, then that really affects the user experience. So they have to be very careful about it. Now, we philosophically are very careful about layering in ad load. And as you have referred to last year, we had an ad load increase by increasing one slot in our P4P advertising, and now we've seen the full effect going forward. And that Maggie referred to as sort of the anniversarying of that effect making the year-on-year comp a little tougher. But let me just say this, for those users – for those of you who actually use our app and our user interface, there's actually not a lot of ads. So, we're still being very, very conservative when it comes to ad load. And obviously that has implications to the volume question. The other driver of volume, which is clicks, is technology. If your recommendations for the ads are more relevant to the user, then the click-through rates can increase and you get more clicks. So, with our ability to basically personalize every single user interface, so every person, every consumer coming to the platform can see different products and different recommendations, that's drastically increases our ability to generate relevant clicks and drive performance on our online marketing platform. So that's another driver to the volume question. As Maggie has referred to before in her script, I think this quarter mainly we are getting the revenue increases in online marketing from the volume side of things, in other words clicks, and click-throughs and increasing click-throughs as opposed to price increase of the ads. So I hope that answers your question.