
Messaging apps shouldn't make money – Pavel Durov and Telegram - bndr
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2015/03/features/messaging-apps
======
textrmessenger
I think the key thing here is that Durov has the money from selling stock in
his previous company (12% w/valuation of 3-4 billion) which means he can
afford to pay to support the app in the meantime without any external
financial help. I do think there are different ways to monetize messaging
outside of pushing advertisements into people's face or selling information
and third-party paid apps are a good option.

In that regard I think the title is misleading: Durov plans to make money
through the app eventually, just not through selling people's information or
push advertising.

~~~
caoilte
Nobody sets out to do evil but until he creates an ownership structure which
prevents himself from cashing in once he's won everyone's trust this is just
an underdog doing whatever it takes to attract customers.

To be succinct, one day he will sell out and the buyers will have every
incentive to make money out of their users.

~~~
knivets
What's funny is that he was also promising to not put any ads at VK (russian
social network he founded) ever, but pretty soon he acted in an opposite way.

------
trollkarl
No such thing as a free lunch.

Telegram hasn't done a very good job of eliminating the possibility of profit.
The secret chat feature is actually a marginal use case. By default messages
are readable by the back end. In fact, group chats are also reasable by the
back end always, and any conversation which can be accessed from multiple
devices. And last I heard, the official windows desktop app does not have
secret chats.

All of these messages are the normal use case on telegram. And the text is
being indexed by the back end for easy searching capabilities. So essentially
telegram has built a search engine for the conversations of tens of millions
of people who are slightly more paranoid and want a secure messenger. Not only
that, many of the tens of millions have shared their entire address book with
names and phone numbers because the official clients required them to.

If they're trying to avoid having valuable information that someone would pay
money for, they're not doing a very good job.

------
alexwebb2
This read like an ad for Telegram.

~~~
scosman
Yeah, but everything's true. Encrypted by default, huge bounty for security
researches, fast, great cross platform apps.

~~~
aw3c2
Encrypted with their home-grown crypto. Telegram is not fully free and open
source. Encryption by default? That has to be new, it was not when I recently
checked. And of course there is
[http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-
crypta...](http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-
cryptanalysis-contest)

Use Signal/Textsecure, folks.

------
fit2rule
Since the early 90's, newcomers to the Internet have attempted to monetize the
existing phenomenon which the Internet - in all its true free glory - has
allowed.

There have been countless attempts to 'own email', and before that, 'own
Gopher' and 'own Archie' and so on. There was, once, Hotmail. Then came GMail,
and then .. Facebook.

It's quite possible to maintain your own social network with email alone. You
can achieve the same results with a mailing list as you can with the Facebook
timeline.

The only difference is that you must educate the people in your network to
understand how the technology works, and how to operate it in order to
function in as effective a manner as is required to maintain a high standard
of communication. The fact that this is nearly impossible in the modern
context - that you cannot get a group of 200+ people to operate email in the
same, standardized manner, is what Facebook - and other mass-communication
media - depend upon in order to gain their market share.

I would abandon Facebook in 5 minutes if I could be guaranteed that the people
I care about - the links in my social network - were as competent at handling
the solution as would be required in order to maintain the quality of
communication that Facebook currently delivers. Alas, this is not possible -
and those who are attempting to monetize and profit from this mass stupidity
will do little to address the issue - for after all, it matters that people
don't know how to write a proper email. This is the only reason Facebook has
survived as long as it has.

If you want to truly revolutionize communications in this day and age, do
something that allows people to use the existing, free, technologies of
communication to increase the quality of communication among the masses. Alas,
this is a very difficult problem - and like all social ills, the solution is
education. The absolute hardest problem there is to solve, out there, today:
teaching someone how to use an existing technology to effectively communicate.

------
tedunangst
Woah. Hardcore encryption? Is that even better than military grade encryption?

~~~
AngrySkillzz
I don't think any reasonable person would refer to Telegram's horrific chimera
as "hardcore encryption."

------
zackmorris
I wish there was something like Bitcoin for messaging. Users need a better way
to prove their identities (or hide them, depending on the situation) and be
able to verify peers. The current hierarchical security system is probably
destined to require money, but the free alternatives make me uncomfortable
because they tend to need private keys.

What I really want is an open version of Skype where the private key can
always be generated by the user's mind, overcomes all the limitations like NAT
that make users second class netizens, has no central tracker, and
(optionally, but possibly required to work around the limitations) allows a
certain amount of traffic to be forwarded like Tor.

I don't see how we can have a conversation about who pays for messaging when
the underlying infrastructure for truly secure online communication hasn't yet
gone mainstream. I don't really trust Freenet or Tor and can't quite figure
out how come, so maybe we could start there and figure out why that is.

And a billion dollars for anything messaging-related completely blows my mind.
Most of the world-changing software was developed for a few thousand dollars
by a couple of people working in their spare time. To me, paying that much
completely misses the point and probably hinders progress by locking capital
up in niches that exclude developers who are working towards creating a non-
scarcity based economy.

~~~
ignoramous
[https://tox.im](https://tox.im) ?

~~~
zackmorris
That's really cool, I like how you just give the other user a Tox id token and
it sets up the secure channel. I wonder if that's a general approach for
secure communication, because as long as it's sent through another secure
channel (that may use the traditional SSL certificates from an authority) it
could be used to avoid a MITM attack.

Maybe a way to do this in the future with an insecure channel is to give the
peer your contact token using only context that both of you know. So the above
token could get converted to a human-readable string like "that place we met
that first time and what you said to me with 12345abcdef on the end" and the
other party would have to know you to figure out how to find you.

Proving who you are beyond that point would probably involve some back and
forth questioning like in spy movies or a video call (which could be faked in
5-10 years with computer rendering) so shared history will be key.

It already sounds like it can run over Tor, but it would be nice if it had a
standard socket wrapper that could be run over UDP NAT tunneling to look like
an SSH VPN. Maybe WebRTC could be integrated with it somehow. I just mean that
I'd like the negotiation phase to be separate so that if it works, you're just
presented with a secure socket.

------
bmmayer1
Just the opposite. The free software movement has led to apps and programs
where the users are the product, not the customer, and companies bend over
backwards for advertisers. The companies have no incentive to care about your
privacy, just your data.

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.

~~~
troymc
It seems you missed this chunk of the article:

<quote>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."</quote>

~~~
tedunangst
How do you collect rent on an open platform?

~~~
boomzilla
"How do you make money off search?" \-- question by a lot of smart people
around 2000.

~~~
guessbest
The commenter above, bmmayer1, noted advertisers would be how that would be
done. I believe a similar method was used with search engines.

------
amelius
Messaging services (with say >100k users) should fall under general laws for
telecommunications. For instance, this would solve the problem that messaging
services don't interface with eachother (lock-in), and it would solve the
problem of the provider peeking into any of the messages for whatever reason.

~~~
zaroth
Couldn't disagree more. Regulation has not solved any of these concerns, in
fact quite the opposite. Regulation of telecommunication has resulted in some
of the biggest and well-seated monopolies on the planet. Please, god, no.
Messaging services should fall under exactly one law of the land, and that's
the First Amendment.

------
dharma1
Have been using Telegram for work for a few months now instead of (or in
addition to) IRC - it's been very good, the mobile and desktop clients are
great.

Tested Tox last year but it was super buggy. TextSecure looked good but
doesn't seem to have as many users. I think Telegram will keep growing.

I just watched Durov's talk with Jimmy Wales from a couple of years back and
he comes across like he genuinely cares about ideas that benefit all internet
users more so than money.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEHd4HbOLYM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEHd4HbOLYM)

Still, doesn't seem like a sustainable path to have the messaging
infrastructure be a responsibility of one company, both for security and
financial reasons. Surely some kind of tox style p2p infrastructure would be
better?

~~~
dmix
Interestingly in the talk he showed that VK had 33 million visitors monthly
and Telegram apparently already has 35 million.

His new project is even more successful.

------
zanny
> "We're trying to create a new type of IT company, one that never focuses on
> maximising profits, but instead provides value to society,"

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.

~~~
vbezhenar
XMPP have troubles with synchronizing chats between clients, with push
notifications, with user-friendly mobile clients. I like XMPP, I did set up my
own server, but I finally abandoned it. It's usable only with one client,
preferably on desktop.

~~~
catern
>synchronizing chats between clients,

The Carbons XEP[0] is now fairly widely supported and does exactly this.

>user-friendly mobile clients.

Conversations[1] is excellent and is free software.

>push notifications

The centralized system of push notifactions on Android and iOS is not yet
supported, it's true, but XMPP with its extensions has pretty good support for
battery-constrained devices with intermittent network connections.

I use XMPP across multiple devices with my own server to communicate to other
people running their own server and it works great. Setting up your own server
is extremely easy ("apt-get install prosody" works out of the box on Debian;
stay away from ejabberd which is a pain) and I highly recommend it.

[0]
[http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html](http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html)

[1]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conve...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conversations)

~~~
drdaeman
Not to diminish the good sides, but multi-device XMPP experience is a quite
complicated matter even today. For example, you'll have to give up on OTR, and
you'll have to choose the software carefully.

~~~
StavrosK
You don't really have to give up on OTR, but OTR has to get a lot more user-
friendly for that use case. Right now it breaks all over the place, and with
some really obvious bad UX, too.

------
wmeredith
This raises the obvious question, then who is going to pay for them?

~~~
learnstats2
Who pays for e-mail?

~~~
api
Google and every other company that invests the immense time and money
required to keep it clear of spam. Email without a large spam filtering
infrastructure is unusable.

~~~
Zigurd
I used email before there were infrastructure-based spam filters. It was very
usable with client-based spam filters. You can't do encrypted email without
either a whitelisting system or client-based spam filters.

------
Animats
Is it open source and open protocol?

If so, that's what we need. Email was once a bunch of proprietary systems -
MCIMail, CompuServ, AOL, etc. It was inconvenient that they didn't
interoperate. All those proprietary systems were wiped out by an open one.

------
aaggarwal
Either users will pay with their money or pay with their data (getting ads),
else the model is not sustainable. Since, messaging using Internet is being
considered here as basic necessity, one could argue that Messaging apps turns
to be non-profit organizations or government supported organizations (but
anonymous).

~~~
joelthelion
Costs are very low. If the owners don't want to maximize profit, the service
can very well run like this for a very long time.

~~~
aaggarwal
You are only considering the cost of infrastructure. What about the basic
salary for the people working on the application and monitoring
infrastructure, who will pay for that, if not users and not ads and not
government?

------
boomzilla
The team is amazingly technical. Nikolai Durov is a triple IMO gold medallists
(and from Russia where selection is much more competitive than most other
countries)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov)

------
inevrela
It's either app, or users are the product. When I was in Hong Kong recently,
listening to talks about WhatsApp & Facebook, each person using these services
was worth +- $48. Sub. fee? Anything like that.

------
harunurhan
Telegram is a great messaging apps. Private, desktop and web support, fast,
better UI compared to WhatsApp. The problem is my friend don't know it so I
have to be stuck with WhatsApp for now.

~~~
free2rhyme214
The fast follower problem.

------
trollkarl
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9284782)

------
benihana
> _Secure messaging should be free for everyone. Displaying ads alongside your
> private communication seems out of place, even immoral_

I completely agree. In this ideal situation, who pays for it? The article
seems to have left this small detail out. How do you plan on getting this
service to work without someone footing the bill?

~~~
avalaunch
It wasn't left out. You must have missed it.

 _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."_

