I think Live Messenger(the product) succeeded immensely with tens of millions of users. However, Live Messenger(the business) failed. People don't like to click

I think Live Messenger(the product) succeeded immensely with tens of millions of users. However, Live Messenger(the business) failed. People don't like to click on ads, and the server and engineering costs are non trivial. I don't think AOL, Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk or Google+ hangouts, FaceTime are making any money(if they're not losing money i.e). Notice how each one of them is owned by a megacorp and is/was part of a bigger ecosystem that subsidizes it. I even wonder if Skype is a viable business by itself, though they have Skype credits for calling regular phones.