How to disable ads in FeedDemon
Q: I am seeing too many ads in my free rss reader FeedDemon, how do I remove them? – Budfred
A: For those who are not aware FeedDemon is the most popular desktop RSS reader for Windows. Originally a paid application, it was made free about an year ago.
There are generally two areas where one sees advertisements in this desktop application.
- Immediately below the rss feed items.
- Displayed at the bottom left of FeedDemon’s user interface.
How to remove advertisements from rss feed items in FeedDemon?
FeedDemon - Feeds showing Feed ads.
The advertisements below the individual rss feed items are inserted by the publisher of the feed utilizing the services of popular ad networks like google, pheedo etc,. They have nothing to do with FeedDemon. These can be disabled easily by adding rules to your firewall or through the use of HOSTS file.
Instead of manually adding entries to your HOSTS file, I recommend using the regularly updated HOSTS file maintained at the mvps.org. For example the a google adserver seen serving ads in feeds are blocked by the following entries in the MVPS Hosts file:
- 127.0.0.1 4.afs.googleadservices.com
- 127.0.0.1 feedads.googleadservices.com
- 127.0.0.1 imageads.googleadservices.com
- 127.0.0.1 partner.googleadservices.com
- 127.0.0.1 www.googleadservices.com
How to remove advertisements shown by FeedDemon?
The auto-refreshing advertisements at the bottom left of FeedDemon are displayed by the application itself in an attempt to generate revenue from the software, which classifies it as an Adware. According to the author Nick Bradbury “The ads refresh every 2min, provided that FeedDemon is the active application. They don’t refresh when you’re using another app”.
The ads are delivered by thedecknetwork.net which routes ads through northmay.com. This domain may be blocked at the firewall or by adding to your HOSTS file as follows:
- 127.0.0.1 www.northmay.com
- 127.0.0.1 northmay.com
As FeedDemon uses the IE (Internet Explorer) engine extensively, the URL’s may also be blocked using the “Restricted Sites” option in Internet Explorer. The domain northmay.com is already blocked by various block lists available for Mozilla Firefox plugin Adblock Plus. The MVPS HOSTS file is yet to block this domain.
Note: FeedDemon is ad-supported only from version 2.8 RC1 which is a pre-release beta software. The stable version 2.7 is ad free and available for download at FeedDemon 2.7 For Windows.
Sorry but version 2.7.0.0 is not Ad-free… Maybe the AD code is directly added in the post text using feedburner… It’s time to go back to google reader (and firefox Ad-block plus
)
JeKo, the application (FeedDemon 2.7) itself is free of ads. As you have rightly mentioned the ads in the indvidual feeds are managed by the respective publishers of the rss feeds. The feed ads can be disabled by the use of methods suggested in the article like using a HOSTS file or by tinkering with the IE options.
Uh…. ehm… sorry…
I thought you where writing about AD in the posts and not in the software
[...] Via | Malware Help [...]
[...] ads are served by deck network and thanks to Malware help we can block the banner ads from Feed demon 3 beta version too. Please note that this method can be [...]
1. download reshacker (http://angusj.com/resourcehacker/)
2. close feeddemon if open and open feeddemon.exe in reshacker
3. in left tree expand folder “23″ and “IDH_THEDECK”, select branch 1033
4. delete whole .. section and line “Ads via The Deck”, delete background-image: url($IMAGEDIR$bg-ad.png); from style and replace background-color: #555555; with background-color: #E6EDF9;
5. click “Compile Script” button
6. File > Save
7. close reshacker and open feeddemon