China’s long-form video platform iQiyi again faced a user backlash over removing the ad skip option from basic membership,Secret Tutoring (2018) as recent discussion prompted iQiyi to respond that basic membership is for users who find ad watching acceptable as the price for access to members-only content at low cost. The Baidu-backed platform said on its official Weibo account, “Consumers can see the difference in price and service between basic and gold memberships on the subscription page before choosing on-demand and purchasing.” In the first quarter, iQiyi saw subscriber service revenue down 13% to RMB 4.8 billion from last year, attributed by the company to “the high base effect in the same period last year.” [iQiyi, in Chinese]
