Comment Ads Land Outside Membership
Paying subscribers found brand messages inside a benefit they had already bought.
A paying iQiyi member reported seeing two blocks of brand bullet-comment advertising totalling about 20 seconds within a single episode while casting to a larger screen, and customer service said such bullet-comment ads fall outside the membership’s ad-skipping entitlement. The episode points to a broader pattern: as subscriber growth flattens, long-video platforms are selling attention in the gaps of paid tiers, which creates new high-attention inventory for brands at the cost of trust.
