Kuaishou quantified short-play ad spending once, then stopped

The figure or the record

On 25 March 2025, Kuaishou Technology (HKEX: 1024), the Hong Kong-listed platform, announced its fourth-quarter and full-year 2024 financial results, stating that 'marketing spending from commercialised short plays surged more than three-fold year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2024', inside a content-consumption segment it called 'faster growing' within online marketing services. A year later, on 25 March 2026, the company's fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results again named 'short plays' as a revenue driver for the fourth quarter of 2025, without repeating a comparable multiplier.

What the documents establish

Kuaishou's own filings establish that short-play content drives advertiser spending on its platform — money paid by marketers to promote short-play titles and apps to Kuaishou's audience — not a paid-viewing or subscription line Kuaishou collects directly from short-drama viewers. The 2024 release names a specific multiplier (more than three-fold growth); the 2025 release, covering the same quarter one year on, drops that multiplier and instead attributes 'other services' revenue growth of RMB22.2 billion for full-year 2025 to 'e-commerce business and Kling AI business', with short plays absent from that specific attribution. No release names a standalone paid short-drama revenue figure in RMB for any period.

Scope and caveats

Both figures come from Kuaishou's own quarterly and annual results announcements, filed with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and distributed via PRNewswire on the company's investor-relations site; they are the company's own audited or unaudited consolidated figures, not a third-party estimate. But 'short plays' inside these filings measures advertiser demand for short-play-related marketing, folded into a broader 'online marketing services' line that also covers e-commerce, games and other verticals; it is not broken out in RMB, and cannot be reconciled with a store-measured IAP figure from an analytics firm, since Kuaishou's short-drama-adjacent ad revenue and any consumer app's IAP are different things.

What to watch

Editorially, the absence is the finding: a reader should watch whether Kuaishou ever discloses a standalone short-play revenue line, the way it already breaks out e-commerce GMV and Kling AI's run rate; until then, any 'Kuaishou short-drama revenue' figure circulating elsewhere is not sourced to the company's own filings.

• Does a Kuaishou-linked short-drama figure come from the company's own filings, or a third-party estimate applied to Kuaishou?
• Is 'short plays' revenue described as advertiser spending, consumer IAP, or both, in the same sentence?
• Does a year-on-year multiplier reappear in the next comparable filing, or was it stated once and dropped?

A platform naming short plays as a growth driver twice, a year apart, without ever quantifying the underlying revenue, is itself a data point about how little of this sector's advertising-side economics reaches public filings.