Whether ordinary users or webmasters, everyone is familiar with the “ad blocking” feature by now — both Tencent’s PC Manager and Qihoo’s 360 have ad-filtering functions. But can this thing really filter ads?
For now, the various PC managers and security guards mainly target personal sites with their ad blocking — for example, the Baidu Union and Google AdSense ads most common on personal sites. They don’t yet filter ads on Baidu Search and Google Search, don’t filter ads on portal sites like Sina by default, and don’t support filtering ads on video sites like Youku.
The reason for this is probably that personal sites are the easiest to bully. Baidu’s bidding ads and Youku’s video ads, etc., are the core businesses of these companies, generating most of their revenue. If a client blocked them, it would surely provoke a strong counterattack. In 2010, 360 used its client to block ads on QQ, provoking Tencent’s猛烈 “choose one of two” counterattack, which stopped QQ from running on all computers with 360 software installed, forcing 360 to announce the “recall” of its earlier “360 QQ Guardian” software, and also dragged it into a long-term legal dispute with Tencent. This shows that neither 360 nor Tencent could easily decide to block Baidu Search ads, and Baidu also preemptively launched software like Baidu Security Guard and Baidu Antivirus to guard against the unexpected.
So ad filtering still bullies the small webmasters; the real ads can’t be blocked — those are the companies’ bread-and-butter projects, and they dare not block them, leaving personal sites and small companies to suffer in silence.
However, they can only block ads from these ad networks. If you put up your own ads, they can’t identify them, so ads you find advertisers for yourself are still safe, but ad-network ads often get knocked out.