Coke, Samsung pull Vietnam site ads
HANOI, Vietnam—Coca-Cola and Samsung have pulled their advertising from a popular Vietnamese website notorious for providing unlicensed downloads of Western and local songs, in a rare victory against online piracy in a country where it has grown unchecked.
The companies abandoned Zing.vn after The Associated Press alerted them to local and international concerns about the website, which is the sixth-most visited in the nation of 87 million people.
Zing’s audience of young, tech-savvy web users has made it attractive to companies wanting to promote their products in a fast-growing Asian market where some 30 million people are online.
The presence of international advertising added to the legitimacy of Zing, causing particular anger among Vietnamese artists who felt the site was profiting from their work without compensating them.
