What the heck are stickers? A half billion dollar and growing business…
http://youtu.be/o5LKXDwpqPE I've noticed something when talking to friends about messaging. If they're not from Asia (yes, technically I live in Asia, but Israel is not Asian in that sense) they don't get what stickers are all about. Why would they really? In the United States, and I believe Europe as well, stickers are more or less irrelevant. I would venture to guess that most Americans think stickers are just fancy emoticons. Facebook added stickers to it's messenger app, but although it's called the 'Sticker Store' it appears they're all free. Perhaps this is a first step towards commercialization in the future, but I think if you get something for free you don't really appreciate it, and in this case it probably means most Facebook users ignore this feature. It's also, as I mentioned, viewed as just bigger emoticon. Viber, which just sold a couple of days ago for $900M to the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten, implemented a sticker store as its first monetization strategy, followed by connecting calls to the traditional phone network. Stickers, in fact, are available on all the major messaging platforms with the solitary exception of WhatsApp. See the nice chart from Mark Watts-Jones on the 10 ways…