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Comment by textrmessenger | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I agree with everything you said and I think protecting users versus monetizing is a fine line that every field has to work with.

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.

You can always say that the messaging app itself isn't making money but the underlying technology is.

I think that is a good point. For start-ups who are interested in making messaging services, I wonder what Durov's recommendation would be as far as financials go. One has to be able to support the team they are working with and there are few people out there who can take the route Durov has due to his financial freedom.

In certain way, cost of doing business has reduced because of cloud service providers. However, network effects and the scale requirements still add up and make it hard for startup's to work on their long term vision. It would be nice if computation was similar to electricity. That way, the onus of paying for the services lies on the end users - the more you use, the more you pay. It is more straightforward and startups can sustain paying themselves for few years without having to worry about paying for computation, storage and network.

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