LINE stickers are just awesome
Personal view on how LINE differentiates itself from other messaging apps
Still, not many people know about the fact that LINE is actually a South-Korean company. LINE Corporation is a Japanese entity headquartered in Tokyo, a subsidiary of Naver Corporation. Naver chairman Lee Hae-Jin is the man who orchestrates everything from Korea along with a large team working on global operations except for Japan. As far as I know, there’s another office in Los Angeles — managing Europe and Americas, and planning to open up satellite offices in Madrid, Sao Paulo, and Southeast Asia.
LINE’s growth has been really impressive. I personally believe LINE is THE BEST messaging app out there, and this is what I primarily use to communicate with my wife and our teammates at work. What makes the difference is the only one thing — stickers.
Figures:
- 420 million registered users worldwide
- 1.8 billion stickers sent each day
- 10K stickers produced by LINE in house.
First and second one is what my wife sends me when she’s angry. (Yes, I am the dead rabbit…) Third one is celebrating when there’s a happy news. Of course, there are stickers and emojis in other messaging apps. But the quality is unmatchable. Compared to LINE stickers, the others are just “ugly”.
Once we started communicating with LINE’s next-gen stickers, we could not possibly go back to Kakaotalk or FB messenger. Of course, you could still just text — however, it’s just not the same. My wife and I completely switched over to LINE, and I think this is happening in Seoul to certain degree among early adopters.
LINE seems to know this quite well, and have launched an interesting program recently. It’s called LINE Creators Market. Anyone can create and sell their own stickers.
Showing huge traction already — sold $1.5M during its first month after launch. According to the creators website, creators get to keep 50% of the sales revenue. There’s a huge marketing push in Korea as well, trying to attract people to become a “sticker creator” for LINE.
I love their marketing tactic here in Korea. LINE just announced a sticker creating competition. In addition to cash prize, winners get “bonus points” when they apply for a job at LINE in Korea. Yes, the students would be the best potential creators and they are desperate at getting a job in companies like LINE :-)
We should keep an eye on whether LINE can make traction outside Asia/South America with stickers, and also if LINE can break KakaoTalk’s dominant position in Korea.
