Sohu Asked for Compensation of 2 Million Yuan for Intentional Ad Blocking in Its Videos
Ad Blocking
Considering the big loss for blocking advertisements in Sohu TV by the APP Kingmaster, Sohu, Inc., which is located in Beijing, filed a suit against the APP operator Guangzhou Yunxun Information Technology Co., Ltd. and the software promotion platform Dalian SJKP Technology Co., Ltd.. The plaintiff requested the defendants to immediately stop the related unfair competition and asked for compensation of 2 million Yuan. The case was accepted by the People’s Court of Haidian District, Beijing Municipality.
According to the plaintiff’s statement, it was the official owner and operator of the website tv.sohu.com and all versions of Sohu TV applications. Sohu TV aims at providing a significant amount of licensed videos and programs without fees. To keep the operation of the website going and to cover the expensive copyright costs of licensed videos, the operating revenues for Sohu TV mostly came from two parts. The first part is to play a few short advertisements before videos, which will make no adverse effects to the users because of its short duration. The second part is the subscription fees paid by the users to enjoy ad-free videos, which could be considered as an alternative for the absence of advertisement revenues. In general, these are the common operating revenues for most of the domestic licensed-video streaming websites .
After the investigation held by the plaintiff, they found out that Guangzhou Yunxun Information Technology Co., Ltd. provided its APP Kingmaster on almost every Android APP market. Meanwhile, Dalian SJKP Technology Co., Ltd.’s APP Kingroot would automatically install the APP Kingmaster if the system blocking feature is on. After the installation of Kingmaster, the users could completely skip the advertisements played before and during the videos on Sohu TV. According to incomplete statistics, the number of downloads for this app has reached as many as 900 million times.
The case is still under investigation at present.
June 2, 2019
Source: bjhdfy.chinacourt.gov.cn
Photo from: 6199pic.com
