CATDOLL: Station B issued a statement on the advertising incident: All contract fees for five animations will be refunded

Recently, some netizens discovered that some popular animations on B station, such as "Re:Zero -Starting Life in Another World" and "Naruto", were preceded by 15-second advertisements. B station had previously promised that there would be no advertisements in B station's videos. This behavior now surprised and puzzled many netizens. In response, B station officials also issued a statement last night (May 24), saying that the advertisements were added before these five animations because of the copyright holder's request. At the same time, B station officials also stated that they would refund the contract money for these five animations and would try their best to maintain the original promise to everyone. B station will never deteriorate.

Official statement from Station B:

I'm sorry to explain the situation only now. We have been communicating with the copyright holder for the past two days, and we can only disclose the details after getting the copyright holder's permission.

A few months ago, Bilibili made a major breakthrough in Japanese animation copyrights. We reached a cooperation with a core copyright holder. The copyright holder agreed to package and license its new animations to Bilibili.

Three other domestic peers also obtained authorization. However, one of the peers did not want Bilibili to join this "circle of friends", so it proposed to the copyright holder on the grounds of "commercial fairness": all authorized companies must uniformly use patch ads as a business model. Out of consideration for "harmony", the copyright holder agreed to this request.

During the process, we proposed several times to replace the patch ads with other forms (such as new episode contracting plans, peripheral sales, etc.), but we did not get the approval of the copyright owner.

In order to win the hard-won copyright cooperation, we had no choice but to adopt a "fake advertisement" plan. In January 2016, with the launch of the new episode of the copyrighted work, we added a 15-second "fake advertisement" (which can be skipped by dragging the progress bar) before the new episode, which contained 2233 Niang's WeChat emoticons.

But the trouble was not over.

In the past few months, enthusiastic people have repeatedly reported to the copyright holder that this "advertisement" is not a real commercial advertisement. So the copyright holder asked B station to immediately replace it with a real patch advertisement, and the deadline is May 23, 2016.

Faced with the pressure, we had to rush to shoot a commercial ad, which was urgently released on May 23, before the following five new series: "Re: The World from Zero", "Naruto", "Onmyoji of the Twin Stars", "Hundred Arms War", and "Pripara 3rd Wonderful Paradise 3". Moreover, new series that cooperate with the copyright holder in the future can only be handled in the same way.

That's what happened.

Because we are not capable enough to fully implement the promise we made in 2014 that "bilibii's genuine new anime will never have interstitial ads", hereby, on behalf of bilibili, I would like to apologize to all users.

We are sorry to everyone.

At the same time, we make the following explanations:

1. Any user who has watched any anime series on Bilibili (not limited to the five above) will not see this patch ad.

2. For users who have already subscribed to the above five TV series, we will return the subscribed amount in full. At the same time, we will close the subscribed function for the above five TV series.

3. For users who have not subscribed to the anime series, they can choose to manually skip the patch ads.

4. For all genuine animation series other than those from the copyright holder, we will continue to implement the "New Animation Contracting Plan" and will never add interstitial advertisements.

5. If similar uncontrollable situations occur again in the future, we will issue an announcement one week in advance. If everyone is unwilling to accept this kind of skippable ads, Bilibili will respect everyone's opinions and would rather not put the show online.

In the past day, we noticed that many users on Zhihu, Tieba, and Weibo were concerned about Bilibili, and some users were worried that Bilibili would become something they didn't like.

We appreciate everyone's concern. Your support for Bilibili is our motivation to persist in running Bilibili.

Here, I can tell you for sure:

Bilibili may go bankrupt in the future, but it will never deteriorate.

bilibili Chen Rui, bishi

May 24, 2016