Since its launch earlier this year, LINE Creator’s Market, a store for selling user-created stickers, has amassed millions of sales.
LINE is looking to simultaneously continue and bolster this success with newly announced changes in the service’s review and sales processes. These changes include the addition of categories next spring and payment changes coming in February.
Changes include addition of categories next spring and payment changes coming in February
We’ve listed these changes below along with LINE’s explanations for each change:
1. Addition of Categories (Spring 2015) – With the number of creators stickers growing every day, many users have mentioned that it is difficult to find the stickers that they want to buy in the Sticker Shop. In order to improve visibility and functionality, we will be adding categories to the Sticker Shop.
In addition to categories, we will also be overhauling the Sticker Shop to make it easier for LINE users to find and buy stickers, such as by actively featuring creators’ stickers that tend to hide in the shadows of other stickers.
2.Review Process and Period – Reducing the review period, something many of our creators have requested, is at the top of our to-do list. In particular, we will be expanding our review staff in order to speed up the process, and upgrading our systems to process large amounts of sticker submission data in a short amount of time. This system upgrade will be complete as quickly as February 2015, after which the waiting period between submission and commencement of sales will be shortened significantly. We appreciate your patience as we work on this.
We will also be publishing a FAQ for the review guidelines in response to comments from our creators. These are just some of the many efforts planned to make the Creators Market more open to participation from all creators across the world. We truly hope you like these changes.
3. Payment Share Received by Creators – a. Lowest Payment Amount Lowered to JPY 1,000 (February 2015) – Currently, creators are unable to apply for bank transfers if the total sales of their stickers do not exceed JPY 10,000. To help more creators enjoy the fruit of their labor, the lowest payment amount will be lowered to JPY 1,000 as of February 2015 (tentative). If you have been unable to apply for a bank transfer because your sticker sales have not exceeded JPY 10,000, you can now do so and be rewarded for your creations.
b. New Share Percentage for Stickers Submitted from February 1, 2015 – Currently, 50% of the total sales amount goes toward the creator. Beginning with stickers submitted for review from February 1, 2015, creators will receive 50% of the amount after App Store or Google Play transaction fees (30%) have been deducted, or 35% of the total sales.
Since submissions of creators’ stickers opened this April, we have received an overwhelming number of submissions, greatly exceeding our initial expectations. As a result, we were not able to expand our review team and upgrade our systems in time, leading to frustrations with the review process being too slow and stickers being difficult to find.
We have been paying the App Store and Google Play transaction fees out of the share of sales received by our company (LINE Corporation). To resolve the core issue, we will be distributing the total sales minus the transaction fees 50-50 between the creator and the company in the future. Using this revenue, we will further expand our review team and develop the necessary systems to implement categories and shorten the review period, and the operation of the service.
Please note that stickers reviewed, updated, pending review, rejected, or on sale before January 31, 2015 will continue to enjoy the old share (50% of the total sales) after February 1. If you are preparing to submit your stickers, we recommend clicking the Request button by January 31.
LINE says it will be modifying its User Agreement in “early January 2015” to accommodate the new changes.
What do you think of these new changes? Have you created a LINE sticker in the market yet?