Chat app Line will soon let you sell your own stickers, unveils plans for cheap call service
Stickers have been all the rage on messaging services for some time — and now Japanese chat app Line is taking the sticker craze to a new level by letting all of its 360 million registered users sell their original stickers on its Web store.
The Line Creators Market, a brand new platform launched today, will only start accepting submissions from April onwards. It is free for all users to register on the Line Creators Market. Creators can sell sets of 40 stickers at 100 yen (about $1) per set once the graphics are approved by Line, and they will receive 50 percent of the proceeds.
Other than engaging its users further and adding another revenue stream, another impetus for the sticker market is global expansion. In a press statement, the company says it “looks forward to accelerating Line’s global expansion with the further localization of stickers through this effort.”
Line previously noted in an earnings report that rolling out stickers is the first step it takes to introduce itself in new markets. The chat app brought in 34.3 billion yen ($338 million) of revenue for its parent company throughout the whole year of 2013, mainly due to in-game purchases — which made up about 60 percent of revenue. That’s followed by sticker purchases, which accounted for 20 percent of revenue.
Engadget also reports that Line announced a new data-based call service today, due to launch next month in Japan, US, Mexico, Spain, Thailand and the Philippines. This service, which will let Line users call people who don’t use the chat app, is essentially taking on Skype, with prices lower than those offered on land-lines and mobile carriers.
Line has recently benefited outside of the markets where it’s strongest in, following WhatsApp’s outage. Line says it netted two million new users and saw “record-breaking” growth outside of Asia within the 24 hours that followed WhatsApp’s downtime.
Line, however, goes way beyond a basic messaging app. It has long offered voice/video chat, Vine-like short video capture, stickers and more. Aside from those chat features, it also provides a games platform, an opt-in to get messages from brands, and is dabbling in e-commerce. The latest announcements make it clear that Line is well on its way to evolving into a social platform.