Block ads on Kakaotalk client
The kakaotalk client on Mac is okay but the Windows client is full of ads: ads in friend list, ads in chat, ads in the corner of the screen, ad under your cursor.
It annoyed me to no end. So what’s the solution? Find a way to block it!
I used a nifty tool called TCP View (very old, but still works). It can resolve domains from IP address and is not as heavy as Wireshark 😉
I looked up the domains kakaotalk.exe connects to and found the following, so I added this to /Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts
#Block kakao ads
0.0.0.0 alea.adam.ad.daum.net
0.0.0.0 wat.ad.daum.net
0.0.0.0 display.ad.daum.net
0.0.0.0 analytics.ad.daum.net
0.0.0.0 ad.daum.net
And voilà! No more annoying ads!
Update
Since Kakao stopped offering the Windows Store version (which had less ads), it’s time for an update
There’s a Korean program that runs in the background and block the ads for you.
You can find it here https://github.com/blurfx/KakaoTalkAdBlock . The drawback is you need to install and keep it running with administrator priviledges, but at least it’s open source so you can have a look 🙂
7 Replies to “Block ads on Kakaotalk client”
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Hmm…I tried this but I still get ads? Does this mean that the 5 domains listed above are not a currently exhaustive list, or did I mess up by chance? I copied that and put it into my hosts file but I still get ads.
You need to clean the ad cache, probably do a disk cleanup, then do the ipconfig /flush, it should be gone
Thank you for your response T_T I only get one ad now – kakao for business? After trying both your suggestions it still won’t go away
Yeah, that one is internal to the client so you can’t block it. But it’s better that the blinking and pop up ads that infest the client otherwise 🙂
[…] ads on Kakaotalk for Windows can be a little overwhelming. You can apply this patch for download an application to hide those […]
Thank you so much. This worked and I don’t get the annoying popup ad anymore.
I wish they just add a “no ads” feature for paying customers or something though. This is so stupid its 2022 forced ads shouldn’t be a thing on a messaging app.
[…] ads on Kakaotalk for Windows can be a little overwhelming. You can apply this patch for download an application to hide those […]