Recently, many netizens reported on social platforms that iQiyi pushed advertisements for anti-drug-themed film and television dramas such as "Desperate", "The Raid" and "Drug Hunt" on the pause page of the series. The above-mentioned advertising scenes use "drug lords imprisoning female police officers as undercovers" and "binding, drugging, and torture" as the promotional points, focusing on scenes of female abuse. The copywriting of Guanggong was paired with vulgar and novelistic copywriting such as "girls being drugged" and "Southeast Asian cannibalism park", which caused controversy.
In response, iQiyi customer service responded that "it will be dealt with after verification" and did not directly respond to key issues such as the advertising review mechanism.
When asked whether only non-member users would see such advertisements, iQiyi customer service said that "every user is the same". The specific display shall be subject to the front-end display, and the delivery cycle of such advertisements shall also be subject to the front-end display.
On the evening of April 23, iQiyi’s official spokesperson account “Taochang is online” officially issued the following response:
The recent content about iQiyi’s suspension of page advertising has attracted attention. Thank you all for your supervision and criticism. Here we make the following explanation:
User experience is always our focus. We have taken the relevant advertisements offline as soon as possible and investigated such advertisements. We will further strengthen the relevant review mechanism in the future.
It is worth noting that this is not the first time that iQiyi has caused controversy due to vulgar advertising. Public information shows that the platform has been complained about "forced pop-up bad ads" many times in recent years, and was questioned by netizens as "relying on novelties to gain attention under the pressure of delisting."
In 2019, iQiyi pushed pornographic comic ads on the headlines of its homepage. The images and dialogue were unsightly and were criticized by users.
In July 2018, iQiyi was criticized by users for pushing vulgar advertisements. At that time, iQiyi publicly responded on its official Weibo, saying that it would conduct an investigation on the entire site, "comprehensively remove vulgar advertising content, and conduct relevant advertising inspections." The plaintiff has closed the account.”
It is understood that iQiyi’s stock price has plummeted from its peak of US$46 in 2018 to the current US$1.25. It has been included in the pre-delisting list of US stocks and is facing greater operating pressure.