During the sticker market presentation this week the topic of comparable metrics from Line was brought up. Without anyone having the data I decided to read through their latest annual report which can be found here: LINE Corporation | IR library
If you rather not read through the 316 page report I’ll share some interesting data points I found in it below.
As of December 2018:
Line had:
144 million monthly active users
4 Billion daily messages sent (27 daily avg per user)
374 million daily average number of stickers sent (2.5 daily avg per user)
9.6 million monthly users that paid for Stickers or Themes (6.5% of users)
1.1 million monthly users that paid for line games (1/2% of users)
Sticker and theme sales by Line and 3rd parties made up 13.8% of revenue @ ~$265MM ($1.84 per user)
Sales of virtual items in Line games made up 18.5% of revenue @ ~$354MM
The largest revenue category was Account advertising (Official account, sponsored stickers and LINE point ads) which made 27.4% of revenue @ ~$526MM
Display ads made up 17% of revenue.
Other interesting notes, mostly copy paste from here:
At the heart of our platform is the LINE mobile messaging application, which enables users to communicate with family, friends and other people they care about in the following ways:
- We address people’s basic communication needs.
We focus on serving users’ everyday
communication needs by supplying easy-to-use tools, including chat, voice call and video call, with reliable and secure connectivity wherever they are. As a result, our services have already become a meaningful part of the daily lives of many of our users.
•
We enable closed and real relationship-based communication.
We believe that the most rewarding
and lasting forms of expression are those involving private, two-way exchanges between people
with real relationships, which enhance intimacy and security. Our users can connect with other
users they know by directly adding them as friends on LINE or by importing their mobile contact
list into LINE. We believe that closer, intimate relationships are integral to the broader social web
of activity, representing a more meaningful and influential subset of social networks.
•
We make communication more enriching and expressive.
We are a pioneer in the creation and
design of Stickers, our larger and more expressive version of emoticons. Users can express their emotions or actions by sending a single Sticker instead of a thread of plain text. We believe that Stickers have made communication more convenient, creative and enriching
Page 45
Sponsored Stickers.
Our advertisers can offer “Sponsored Stickers” to LINE users to promote their
brands, products and services. We work with advertisers to design sets of Sponsored Stickers,
which often feature the advertisers’ proprietary characters. Sponsored Stickers are available
globally and downloadable during a pre-determined period of time for free by users who add the
sponsor as their LINE friend. We charge the advertisers fees based on the number of Sponsored
Stickers offered by them as well as a Sticker design fee. Advertisers may add an advertisement on
our virtual Sticker shop for an additional fee, as well as offer “Sponsored Themes” that customize
the look of the LINE messaging application using the advertisers’ proprietary characters.
•
LINE Point Ads.
We offer “LINE Point Ads” to our advertisers which enable our users to receive
LINE Points for free upon downloading certain applications, watching certain video commercials
created by our advertisers or adding certain Official Accounts as LINE friends. We charge
advertisers a fee per specific action taken by our users. Prior to May 2016, LINE Point Ads were
referred to as LINE Free Coins