No need to make them pay or support it with ads. Keep offering it to them for free and make a killing front-running them on commodities trades. Or just trade regular stocks since the whole market seems to move based on the crude prices. Either way, it should be pretty easy for a hedge fund to make way more money from eavesdropping than it costs to run the service.
It would be a good way to teach an industry with plenty of money the virtue of paying for mission-critical services. Given that the industry runs on a service like Yahoo's, it's a pretty good bet that you could slip an innocuous looking change to the privacy policy past them.
I'm sure they can't wait to begin using a chat service that not only has no qualms reading their private communications, but actively undermines their business as well.
That's the whole point. They need to learn the point contracts, SLAs and all that goes along with paying for mission critical software. The fact that they haven't been taken advantage of as I suggested is only due to the benevolence of the provider. If Messenger was bought by an entity that was not so benevolent, they'd learn the value of paying for their mission critical tools very quickly. Because what they're doing now is irresponsible given how much money is involved.
It would be a good way to teach an industry with plenty of money the virtue of paying for mission-critical services. Given that the industry runs on a service like Yahoo's, it's a pretty good bet that you could slip an innocuous looking change to the privacy policy past them.