Lines User-Generated Stickers Brought in £47.9m in First Year
- Monday, May 18th, 2015
- Share this article:
Lines Creators Market, which enables users of the popular OTT messaging app to make and sell stickers to be used in chats, brought in ¥8.94bn (£47.9m) in its first year of existence, with 390,000 creators registered on the platform.
Following service charges by the relevant app store, revenues from sticker sales are split approximately 50/50 between the sticker creator and Line. Creators from over 156 countries have signed up for the Creators Market, and around 100,000 sticker sets have been put up for sale.
For those creators with a strong following, sticker sales have proved a lucrative business, with the top 10 selling individual sticker sets bringing in an average of ¥50.5m, and the top 10 selling creators earning an average of ¥109m.
The company did not disclose how much is earned on average by the community as a whole, and as with most other marketplaces for user-generated content, it is likely that the top 10 represents a few breakout stars, while most other creators make relatively small sums.
However, with 181m monthly active users for the app as a whole, the Creators Market is a valuable platform for both the individual creators who manage to rise above the crowd, and the company as a whole.
“Many characters originally designed as creators stickers have received merchandising and publishing deals, and more still have gone on to collaborate with other corporations, proving that the sticker-based platform has become an incubator for creativity and nurturing new ideas,” said a Line spokesperson in a statement on the platforms success.
As a way to further incubate this community (and the revenues it generates), Line has announced a service called Line Creators Management, which will aid sticker creators in applying for copyrights and trademarks, and signing merchandising deals with other companies.
Lines own characters and their related merchandise have been a money-spinner for the company, popular enough in their own right to warrant pop-up merchandise stores across Asia and in Times Square.