Mainstream Advertising on Rogue Websites in Hong Kong: A Comparison of Chinese and Western Titles

Abstract

A number of studies have recently investigated the role played by mainstream internet advertising in supporting the revenue of rogue websites (Taplin, 2013). Such advertising by household names -- including multinational corporations, governments and charities -- generates enormous profit margins for operators of these websites, and present an ongoing threat to the viability of Hong Kong’s creative industries.However, a recent study by Watters (2014a) indicated users were much more likely to be exposed to “high risk” advertising on such sites, relative to mainstream ads. Australia (Watters, 2014a), Singapore (Watters, 2013a), Canada (Watters, 2013b) and New Zealand (Watters, 2014b) all had mainstream ad prevalence rates of 1-10%, while high risk ads had prevalence rates of 90-99%. High risk ads are those which have the potential to cause harm to users, and include pornography, gambling, malware and scams.These studies all investigated web pages that were sampled from Google’s ad transparency report for movies and TV shows or music downloads, having been verified as being in breach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). However, the Google report is heavily biased towards Hollywood TV/movies and music in English, so another study (Watters, 2014c) investigated Hollywood content in Taiwan, where the sites were presented in Chinese. It was found that mainstream advertising was much more prevalent for locally-developed sites with Hollywood content, compared to viewing Hollywood content sites in the other countries examined. 61% of ads were Mainstream, while 39% were High Risk for local content. A key question remains whether Mainstream advertising would also be more prevalent not just for sites written in the local language, but also promoting local content (eg, a Chinese language website providing links to Chinese language titles).In this study, we directly measured prevalence rates for High Risk versus Mainstream ads for local versus Hollywood content for movies/TV in Hong Kong. A sample of expert-identified rogue sites hosting local content was identified, and all ad banners comprising part of the sample were downloaded and identified, along with the ad network serving each banner. A comparable sample was taken from Google’s ad transparency report. For local content, 61.36% of movie and TV ads were Mainstream, while 38.64% were High Risk. In contrast, 3.84% of Hollywood ads were Mainstream, while 96.16% were High Risk. Like Taiwan, this suggests that Mainstream advertisers in Asia are being drawn to local language sites, whereas Mainstream advertising rates for Hollywood titles are similar to other countries.In summary, local content sites were many times more likely to be displaying mainstream ads when compared to Hollywood content sites. The levels of mainstream advertising were almost identical to Taiwan for local content, and were similar to Canada, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand for Hollywood content.The policy implications of this result and future research directions, including methodology enhancements, are discussed.