A YouTuber yesterday said he decided to back out of a sponsorship deal with a Chinese mobile game company, after it demanded he take down a comment defending Taiwan’s sovereignty.
User Davie504, real name Davide Biale from Italy, has 13.6 million followers on YouTube, where he posts content playing bass and guitar.
Five years ago, the company “tried to silence me like they were running a covert government operation,” he said in a video posted yesterday.
Photo: screen grab from YouTube
The original YouTube comment read: “Taiwan IS a country, noobs.”
Biale stayed in Taiwan during the COVID-19 pandemic, and his wife is Taiwanese.
Five years ago, the unnamed mobile game company offered him US$60,000 for a 60-second shoutout video and an extra US$15,000 to be reimbursed for giveaways of bass guitars, totaling US$75,000 in compensation, Biale said.
He said he spent US$10,000 on buying bass guitars to gift to fans.
After the company approved the video and signed the contract, they contacted him and asked him to delete the Taiwan comment, or they would cancel the entire sponsorship, including the giveaway reimbursement, he said.
He said he refused to delete the comment, as it is “common knowledge” and he is not a political person.
He instead canceled the sponsorship agreement, published the video without mention of the company, doubled the number of basses in the giveaway and lost the US$10,000 he had already spent, he added.
As a result, he said he lost “the biggest sponsorship offer of my life.”
Biale made the video yesterday in defense of claims he was a “sellout” for accepting sponsorships.
Kenting National Park service technician Yang Jien-fon (楊政峰) won a silver award in World Grand Prix Photography Awards Spring Season for his photograph of two male rat snakes intertwined in combat. Yang’s colleagues at Kenting National Park said he is a master of nature photography who has been held back by his job in civil service. The awards accept entries in all four seasons across six categories: architectural and urban photography, black-and-white and fine art photography, commercial and fashion photography, documentary and people photography, nature and experimental photography, and mobile photography. Awards are ranked according to scores and divided into platinum, gold and
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus yesterday said it opposes the introduction of migrant workers from India until a mechanism is in place to prevent workers from absconding. Minister of Labor Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) on Thursday told the Legislative Yuan that the first group of migrant workers from India could be introduced as early as this year, as part of a government program. The caucus’ opposition to the policy is based on the assessment that “the risk is too high,” KMT caucus secretary-general Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) said. Taiwan has a serious and long-standing problem of migrant workers absconding from their contracts, indicating that
SPACE VETERAN: Kjell N. Lindgren, who helps lead NASA’s human spaceflight missions, has been on two expeditions on the ISS and has spent 311 days in space Taiwan-born US astronaut Kjell N. Lindgren is to visit Taiwan to promote technological partnerships through one of the programs organized by the US for its 250th national anniversary. Lindgren would be in Taiwan from Tuesday to Saturday next week as part of the US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ US Speaker Program, organized to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) said in a statement yesterday. Lindgren plans to engage with key leaders across the nation “to advance cutting-edge technological partnerships and inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers,”
RSS