Messaging apps shouldn't make money – Pavel Durov and Telegram

This is dreadful. The Free software movement has existed for decades and Telegram brings nothing new to the table that Google hadn't already a decade ago (open yet crippled protocol, proprietary servers). There is nothing new here, besides the fact that Telegram basically makes no money. Which is also nothing new, since Google Talk and Voice never made money either!

I don't mind it, because we know the protocol and can reengineer the clients easily in the event they betray their users trust. It is much better than WhatsApp or Skype being a whole-pipe black box. But at the end of the day, XMPP has existed, has improved, and today provides all the features of all these other messaging transports and more, the problem is there is no money to be had in providing an easy signup XMPP service, so nobody advertises them. Which makes Telegram perplexing, because their only valuable resource is their userbase, and they are not directly monetizing it at all. Contrast that with Duckduckgo having an XMPP server @dukgo.com that basically got a blog post and hasn't been talked about much since, that I use all the time on all my devices.

But fundamentally none of this absolves how stupid all these companies re-implement a wheel poorly (XMPP) because the old wheel is so well known and understood that you can't lock people in or profit off the users using it.

Paid messaging apps, however (at least until they get acquired by advertising companies like Facebook), give companies incentives to service their customers first, and the users are actually the customers. That's why Slack and WhatsApp and HipChat and Basecamp have taken off--because they offer the security and paid customer/company relationship.

This article's title is woefully non-conclusive. Sure it would be wonderful if ALL messaging apps could by built and funded by Russian billionaires such they were private and free for the end user, but the fact is that to support the infrastructure of a billion+ user messaging app, you need to make money. And if you can't make money from the users to whom you are promising security and privacy (and thus to whom you owe allegiance), you have to make money elsewhere. And the alternative is arguably what has caused so many security and privacy problems in the first place.

Will he continue to bankroll the business -- or does he see revenue opportunities? "We will become financially sustainable at some point," he says. "It will most likely involve third-party paid apps built on the Telegram platform."