You may have heard of stickers, the cutesy, cartoonish version of emojis, but did you know that they can also be a money-spinner?
Japanese mobile messaging app Line is banking more than $20 million per month selling sticker packs, which typically trade for $1-2 for sets of 12-18, according to data from the company.
Line finally filed for a dual U.S.-Japanese IPO last Friday following aborted efforts in 2014 and 2015, thereby opening some of its previously tightly guarded financial information to public eyes.
It’s not an overstatement to say that Line has single-handedly pioneered stickers, which are now a fairly staple part of most social apps. But, beyond being cute, they generated the company an altogether-not-too-shabby JPY 28,725 million ($271 million) in revenue in 2015 — that’s up 38 percent on the previous year.
It’s also more than double the already impressive $10 million that the company was banking in 2013, and it accounts for around one-quarter of Line’s total sales. That’s important since Line is dependent on Japan for nearly 90 percent of its revenue, and stickers have appeal outside of the country and among more casual users. Indeed, Line said that its users send an average of 389 million stickers — paid and free — each day, that’s around nine percent of the total number of messages sent on the service daily.
Stickers aren’t the only surprising form of income for Line: the company also disclosed that it made over JPY 2 billion ($18.8 million) from sales of merchandising and licensing deals last year for its Line characters, the figures who star in its sticker packs and front its brand. That’s double the 2014 figure.
(Source: Tech Crunch )