On July 4th this year, 14, the daily chat application Line was listed on the NYSE. In this IPO, Line*** raised US$ 654.38+03 billion, with a market value exceeding US$ 7 billion, making it the world's largest technology IPO after Alibaba's initial public offering.
Like WeChat in China and Ka Kao in South Korea, Line's main income consists of three parts: communication, content and advertising. However, in addition, he also relies on the emoticon sticker business. Around the emoticon economy, his income last year reached 268 million US dollars.
According to statistics, one of every 10 messages sent by Line is an emoticon. At the moment when super IP has become a new outlet, around the explosion of emoticons, how Line makes users willing to save money is a topic of concern to everyone.
The emoticon pack is a light IP, but its powder absorption ability is very heavyweight.
Line started late in the instant messaging software, and was officially launched in June of 20 1 1 year. The Chinese name is "Lian Me". For most people in China, the first time I saw Line was the 20 13 hit Korean drama You from the Stars with hot beer and fried chicken. In the play, Professor Qian and Professor Du's daily communication tools are exactly this line. Although there is Korean descent, 70% of the annual income comes from Japan, and nearly half of the Japanese have become users of Line.
In the eyes of Japanese users, what Line really attracts them is not the instrumental use of text and voice interaction anytime and anywhere when data traffic is turned on or wifi is connected, but the expressionless brown bear and versatile Kony rabbit in the application.
In fact, this is just an expression pack function that is often used in user communication. Compared with the animation literature IP with its own story system, only one original expression can only be regarded as light IP. But under the operation of Line, it has become an industrial chain.
The source of the industrial chain is that users pay to download Yan characters. Brown Bear and Connie Rabbit are cute and distinctive chat facial expressions designed by Line, which attract users to pay and send facial expressions to each other when chatting with friends. In 20 15 years, the sales of Yanwen alone accounted for a quarter of Line's annual income, and the number of users who bought Yanwen or games on a monthly basis was very stable, maintaining at around 8 million.
In the usual interpretation in the past, the situation of paying for this emoticon package is mostly summarized in one sentence-Japanese secondary users have the habit of paying for original comics, and paying for Yan Wen is only a pediatrics.
Is that all? It is a fact that products with expressions are really easy to be popular. In the communication era before Line, in the Japanese market of 1995, operator NTT introduced pagers with different characters, which won the favor of young people. Since then, this pager has gained nearly 40% market share. In the Line era, due to the leakage of Fukushima nuclear power plant caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake in March, Line, which came out in June of that year, was popular among Japanese users and was used by 4 million users in just a few months. But the real explosion point is 20 1 1 10. Due to the addition of the "Map" function,/kloc-0.0 million users were brought to Line in two days.
The powder absorption energy of the expression pack can be seen from this, even if it is a paid experience.
Selling cute and creating just-needed, typical Asian character exchange
Line has more than 400 million registered users, and the current monthly active users are about 2,654,388+0.8 million, of which two thirds are from Japan, Taiwan Province Province, Thailand and Indonesia. At the same time, users of Line send 398 million images including paid images and free images every day, accounting for 9% of users' total chat content data.
One of the fundamental reasons for the high data transmission rate of Yanzi is the unique label that Line puts on its Yanzi -cute. Especially in Japan, where cute culture prevails, Line has painstakingly launched a series of expression packs such as Brown Bear, Nicole Rabbit and Shantou, which can be described as "suitable for all ages". This situation also occurs in China, Taiwan Province Province, Thailand, Indonesia and other areas with high coverage of Line users.
Regarding the popularity of Yan Wen, the staff of the WeChat emoticon team said: "The social culture of Asian countries is conservative and traditional, which usually looks serious, but in fact, the heart is wild, and Yan Wen is a good way to express emotions." But in Line's view, this emotional expression is obviously not appropriate enough. More precisely, in the whole Asian cultural circle, the best way to express emotions is to show them by selling cute and a little embarrassed, so that they are both wild and subtle. Especially for the Japanese who are used to holding back, suppressing and hiding their feelings on weekdays. On the other hand, Koreans with more exposed and intense personalities are not very keen on Line.
One of the best examples to express this meaning should be "Moon", one of Line's iconic cartoon characters, who fell into a trough in his life while looking for a new job. After the bank deposit became zero, Moon made a mess at home, then passed the time by watching some pornographic content, and even tried to make friends with a cockroach.
This is also the place where the secondary culture with selling Meng as an important label originated in Japan and grew up. But how can we make users willing to pay? It's obviously not enough to show that Japanese users don't mind spending about RMB 12 per set of characters.
IP, iteration and cost, the secret of payment.
As long as we have a little look at the Yan characters of Line, it is not difficult to find a feature, that is, in addition to a batch of budding Yan characters IP created by Line, whether it is Japanese national anime images such as Hello Kitty and Lazy Egg in Sanrio, or Japanese popular movies such as Zootopia and Hero 6 in Disney, One Piece, Silver Soul and Attack Giant, etc., we can find corresponding theme maps on LINE.
In Japan, where intellectual property rights are strictly protected, such super IP characters not only have a strong powder absorption effect, but also effectively ensure that users are willing to pay for their love images in order to better use them for communication.
Of course, in order to make users follow the trend better, as long as a picture is popular, Line will be introduced immediately to meet the expression needs of users at the fastest speed, which just reflects the thinking besides rapid iteration.
All the expressions you need are sold here, and the sooner you send them, the better. This is Line's emoticon package sales logic. Even without the endorsement of intellectual property protection, the popular culture made under strong IP has formed an "undifferentiated" effect in the extremely rich expression library and fast iterative popular elements.
This is very different from the domestic expression pack strategies such as WeChat and Momo. Although there are also super IP authorized emoticons, such as Doraemon, Teenage Ninja Turtles, etc., most of them are only for commercial promotion to cooperate with the big movies released, so we can't choose the payment method.
Moreover, the WeChat official has been absent from the expression layout. Although there was sporadic expression development before, it was not until May 2065438+2005 that the expression department was established, and the WeChat expression open platform was released in July, which made the number of overall expression packages on WeChat, which has been in operation for many years, too rare and the user's choice was too low. Most users have long been used to expressing their emotions with various free and self-propagating emoticons. It is difficult for users to reverse their usage habits, which is the key to the difficulty for domestic instant messaging applications to copy the paid expression route.
The 20 15 China social application user behavior research report shows that only 26.6% of domestic mainstream social applications mention activities such as "buying goods in the station". Even WeChat and Momo only account for 8.4% and 18.8% of their total income, which is weaker than Line.
At the same time, the facial expression customization service was officially launched at the end of 20 13, and the related application expression me was also officially launched on 20 14. The specific rule of this application is that the user takes an avatar, and then DIY various colors and characters that can be used directly on WeChat and QQ. Different from this customized expression mode, Mengdao platform, which has gathered more than 400 expression creators, 1200 domestic expression images and about 20,000 foreign expression images, pinned its hopes on enterprises, with a view to customizing expression packages at the enterprise level, triggering users to spread themselves, thus forming an advertising marketing effect and realizing profits. However, at present, these two modes have failed to form a real user detonation, which is further away from income.
The truth of payment is that 12 yuan is not the key, but how much cost (including time cost) users need to find the same level of free expression when they get what they need. Above 12 yuan, users will choose to pay.
Line successfully achieved this goal, but this is not the real success of its expression library.
Super IP materialization, derivative chain is the main battlefield
Line has a rich expression library, but the most famous is the combination image of Line friends. According to the official introduction, the main members of this group include Uncle, Nicole Rabbit, Steamed Bread Man, Brown Bear, James, Sally and Jessica, relying on the world system formed by each other.
After the expression pack became famous, Line was not satisfied with letting these light IPS just act as an expression. Super IP must be materialized. To this end, Line has developed a series of comics, animations, peripheral and offline experience stores.
Kanahei, a Japanese female illustrator and cartoonist, as one of the most popular characters on the Internet, is the beneficiary of this derivative experience. In addition to earning about 36.8 million yen from at least one popular digital map series every year, the Yan characters she created were also made into a mobile game called "kanahei Radish" by game developer United in early 20 16.
This is just a small fragment of IP materialization of Line's various expressions. Only in China, Tuanxian friends not only have dolls, mobile phone cases, notebooks, small wallets and other peripheral products printed with combined images on Tmall, but also set up cafes and cosmetics stores with different styles in Shanghai and Dalian. There are 44 Line friends theme stores in the world * * *, and their products span many categories such as life, stationery, toys, ornaments, fashion, electronic products, medicines, books and more than 7,000 kinds of goods.
In addition, Line also plans to open a Line theme park, where customers can have fun, browse scenic spots, enjoy exhibits and taste delicious food, including multimedia interactive, exhibition, retail and entertainment equipment (3D cinema). With the government support of individual cities, online friends will also integrate different businesses such as hotels in outdoor theme parks.
This is actually a Disney-style IP derivative industrial chain construction model. At present, the paid download of IP images and related derivative products has accounted for 40% of Line's total revenue, and the derivative revenue is close to the level of paid download accounting for 22% of the total revenue. Such IP materialized consumption will also make the Line expression pack that has entered the revenue bottleneck stage usher in the "second battlefield" of industrial value-added.
A big blue ocean of light IP with cute expression, deep powder absorption and rising economic dividends of fans is unfolding, which is not weaker than the strong IP fan system in the Marvel-style strong story universe.
Similar industrial chains derived from emoji packaging are also sprouting in China. According to the official data published by WeChat, expressions related to "Long Grass Yan Wen Daily" were sent more than 1 51month. Although the sending volume is amazing, it is a pity that there is no charge for five sets of Yan characters in the WeChat emoticon store.
Although the expression can be freely used, the long grass swallow, which has begun to take shape under the super IP paradigm, has also begun to explore the road map of derivatives and materialization. It cooperates with some brand merchants to combine the original image of Changcao Swallow with offline brands to customize its cultural and creative image. According to the original image, many cultural and creative products have been derived, involving cultural household goods, dolls and so on. Even, it has reached a cooperation with Hunan Satellite TV's related entertainment programs, providing them with various series of expressions for a long time to enhance the entertainment and interest of the programs.
Similarly, there is another popular emoticon pack "My Emperor Sleeps" in China, which is gradually exploring to become a profit model for comics, mobile phone themes and cultural and creative peripheral products. However, these explorations only stay at the point of "tinkering around the edges".
On the contrary, an "unexpected" Wenchuang IP has risen in China. Previously, through the way of "selling Meng", some cultural relics became popular through animation and became the Palace Museum, and expression packs were widely spread on social networks. Taking "Meng" as the design concept, 8,683 kinds of Beijing Forbidden City cultural and creative products, such as palace dolls, pearl headphones, emperor folding fans and hualing umbrellas, were launched, and the sales of cultural and creative products in the Forbidden City also increased from 200% to 200%.
Tencent, which has a huge social network, also took this opportunity to jointly announce the establishment of a partnership with the Palace Museum on July 6 this year. With the "NEXT IDEA Tencent Innovation Competition" as the platform and the classic ip image of the Palace Museum or related traditional cultural content as the prototype, it cooperated around the two major events of "Expression Design" and "Game Creativity" to explore the practice of activating traditional cultural IP.
Obviously, this China expression IP road will be the same as the Line mode, but different, so that the light IP of the expression will be thickened from the traditional cultural level, forming a completely differentiated "expression experience" ...