The biggest tech public offering of 2016, Line Messenger started trading on the New York Stock Exchange and Tokyo Stock Exchange, and is now valued at over $8.6B. We take stock of interesting aspects of the messenger, and recount some of the innovations it has brought to the messaging space.
1) It’s not a Japanese company
Line Messenger was created by a Japanese subsidiary of the Korean internet search giant Naver in 2011.
2) The seventh most popular messenger globally
According to SEC filings, Line messenger had an active user base of 218 million MAUs globally in March 2016. That makes it the seventh most popular messenger, after WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, QQ Mobile,WeChat, Skype, and Viber.
3) Big in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia
Line messenger is particularly strong in Asia – with 152 million MAUs located in its four largest markets.
4) A pioneer in stickers
Like WeChat, Line Messenger is an innovator in stickers, which are highly a prevalent form of messaging in Asia, and a larger more expressive mode of communication over plain emojis. Line users in aggregate sent an average of 389 million Stickers per day in March 2016. Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz highlights the importance of stickers to the messenger, by pointing out that it took them almost four months to reach two million users, and two days to find the next million after stickers were introduced.
5) Brown and Cony are household names
Made popular by their stickers, Brown and Cony have their own merchandise and TV show.
6) Games accounted for 40.9 percent of Line Messenger’s revenue
According to Line messenger’s SEC filings, games accounted for 654 million downloads, with 14 games exceeding 10 million downloads each. According to Statista, a majority of the company’s revenue is brought due to games.
7) More than just a messenger
Line messenger is more like a platform, providing services like taxi booking, beauty salons, travel agencies and restaurants. It also offers a real-time video streaming service, and LINE TV, an on-demand video service, and has its own payment service called LINE Pay.
8) The largest non-game revenue earner
According to App Annie, Line ranked as the world’s largest mobile publisher based on non-game gross revenue from iOS App Store and Google Play, combined.
9) Does not take a commission from sticker creators
Line launched a Creators Market which lets users design and retail their own stickers in 2014, and receives contributions from 171 countries. In order to promote the creator ecosystem, Line does not charge creators anything more than a small processing fee to offer their Stickers on Creators Market.
10) Lets you send ephemeral texts
Made popular by Snapchat, Line launched an option to make texts disappear in two seconds or up to a week, along with an option to encrypt the chat in July 2014.