Line Makes $1.5m From Selling User Stickers

Japanese messaging app Line has made $1.5m in a month from selling personalised stickers.

In May, they released a Selfie Sticker app, which lets users create and sell their own stickers on a marketplace.

Once the creator’s stickers have passed Line’s review process, they are made available for other users to buy.

Around 50% of the sales generated from the stickers are given to the creator.

Since launch, they have registered over 80,000 creators, and 12,000 sticker sets.

And after a month, over 1.7m sticker sets were sold, the total sales of which reached $1.5m.

This marketplace is only live in four countries at the moment: Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan and Thailand.

Line is a hugely popular messaging app that monetises through mobile games, stickers and official accounts.

They sell over $10m of stickers every month.

Companies who use Line to create their own branded stickers have to pay for the service. 

Through this, Line has already made $338 million, despite the fact that it is a free app.

Shintaro Tabata, SEO and head of corporate sales, said:

“Some people think using stickers could be regarded as a very childish behaviour. But we don’t think so.”

Line currently has over 400m subscribers and aims to hit 600m by the end of 2014. 

In comparison, WhatsApp has around 500m active users and Chinese messaging app WeChat has 396m.