20th September 2019 – (Hong Kong) There have been numerous speculations on social media that our Dimsumdaily.hk is owned by one purported marketing company called Asia Media United Limited on social media after we wrote an article labelling a foreign blogger based in Hong Kong a “CIA agent”. The article received several backslashes from the blogger’s supporters and they decided to conduct their own investigation to find out who we are.
If you follow Dimsumdaily social media closely, you will notice that we post funny and viral content regularly. The word “CIA Agent’” was purposely described in inverted commas as a troll. This was to insinuate others who repetitively called him a CIA agent and also he labelled himself as ‘CIA undercover operative’ on his Twitter account. We are surprised that some Hong Kongers do not have any sense of humour and they take things at face value. Avid followers of Dimsumdaily will know that we always troll people and post funny stories and we have never positioned ourselves as a serious media outlet.
We are in fact flattered that we are receiving so much attention for being labelled as a ‘Fake news’ and ‘pro-Beijing’ media outlet since we are still a very much small viral media company whose articles are written by freelancers many of whom are students.
Dimsumdaily.hk which started in 2017 also has regular contributors who email articles to us and we will publish if the facts are verified, we have published both pro-democracy news and police brutality cases on many occasions. The domain of Dimsumdaily.hk was procured via a vendor and the domain was legally assigned to us because one cannot transfer the ownership of .hk domain. Dimsumdaily.hk is in fact owned by a BVI entity backed by local Hong Kong investors.
Asia Media United Limited was one of the many companies that approached us in early 2018 to market our platform and we would not screen advertising agents because if anyone would like to collaborate with us, we would be more than welcome to say yes. Dimsumdaily.hk started in 2017 as a viral media Facebook page (Our original Facebook page which was started in 2017 was removed in early 2019 due to violation of Facebook policies as we posted a suicide news, our total followers were over 100,000 then, meanwhile, our Instagram account started in 2017) long before Asia Media United Limited was set up. It would not make any sense for Asia Media United to claim ownership of it. It came to our recent knowledge that they have deleted their website which contained a screenshot of our website as we understood earlier that they labelled us as one of their partners under ‘OUR BRANDS’. We would always welcome anyone who wants to collaborate with us on marketing.
However, Asia Media United never procured any advertiser for our site and we did not hear from them after that in early 2018. Unlike other media outlets in Hong Kong which are either pro-Beijing or mostly supportive of protesters, we report news from both sides without fear and hence, we are able to build a strong readership within such a short period of time. Either Hong Kongers are very gullible or they are fans of ‘fake news’. Our total visits reached 1.45m in mid-August.
We managed to build a loyal audience base during times of protests because we were able to present on the ground information that was factual. We also reported other local incidents as they happened. We are in fact more balanced as compared to the other local media outlets who are mostly one-sided. If we are indeed a ‘fake news’ outlet as claimed, no readers will follow our website.
At Dimsumdaily.hk, we will continue to bring breaking news to our readers at speed and we hope our readers will continue to support us.
From the editors of Dimsumdaily.hk.
