10 years, ~330 LINE stickers, ¥9.79M in cumulative payouts — the month Premium became 70% of revenue

Few creators publish their LINE sticker earnings with both monthly and cumulative figures, broken down by source. urajo, active for roughly a decade, is one of the rare ones who keeps doing it consistently. The August 2024 report puts a single month’s numbers on the same screen as ten years of cumulative totals, and in doing so visualizes the nature of this business itself.

August 2024 and cumulative numbers

Over roughly 10 years, urajo has produced about 330 stickers (including rejected ones). The profile bio reads “soon to be a ¥10 million creator,” and urajo himself notes, with some regret, “Just ¥210,000 more!! So close,” having narrowly missed ¥10 million in cumulative payouts.

Breaking down the numbers

Look first at the relationship between sales and payouts. Subtracting the ¥221,442 Premium portion from the single-month total payout of ¥322,211 leaves ¥100,769 attributable to unit sales. Dividing that by unit sales revenue of ¥282,544 gives 35.7%. Doing the same calculation cumulatively (¥5,806,519 ÷ ¥16,280,626) also gives 35.7%. This confirms that the payout rate has stayed nearly constant across the full ten years.

Next, the Premium side. Premium payouts are distributed based on send count, and urajo has derived a prediction formula from past results.

Return amount = 2.13 × (send count) + 2,605

Plugging August’s send count of 105,520 into this formula gives ¥227,362. The actual figure was ¥221,442, a 2.6% margin of error, which urajo himself calls “a pretty close estimate.” That works out to roughly ¥2.1 per send.

What stands out here is the ratio. Premium accounted for 68.7% of August’s payout. Yet the same ratio calculated cumulatively is only 40.7%. A single recent month far exceeds the ten-year average. Given that the cumulative figure includes years before Premium even existed, some gap is expected, but the size of the gap is too large to ignore. Looking at unit sales alone, August’s revenue was ¥282,544, of which only just over ¥100,000 actually reaches the creator. Of the ¥322,211 total payout, more than two-thirds was generated not by stickers being “sold” but by stickers being “used.”

No dramatic turning point in this story

To be honest, nothing in urajo’s ten-year account reads as a single moment where things suddenly took off. What worked was the sheer number of pieces produced, about 330, and the ten years of time itself.

Yet the nature of the revenue has quietly shifted. The structure has moved from being centered on one-time purchases (about 35% goes to the creator per sale) to one where Premium payouts, tied to send counts, now account for roughly 70% of the total. The creator’s own behavior didn’t change, the platform’s monetization model changed, and that change happened to act on an existing inventory of stickers.

At the same time, August was also a month that saw a “significant decline” from the previous month. urajo explains this as “last month was the anomaly,” self-consciously noting that a single month’s figures shouldn’t be read as growth.

Why the existing inventory mattered

If Premium payouts are determined by send count, then revenue is driven not by “how many were sold” but by “how many times existing users used them.” Under this formula, two variables matter.

One variable is the sheer number of stickers. With roughly 330 in circulation, each one keeps being sent independently. Even if any single sticker’s send count is small, the total multiplies across the catalog. urajo’s rabbit-character sticker alone has reached ¥920,000 in cumulative returns. Urajo writes, “This is proof that a single sticker can be expected to generate ¥1 million in returns.” That one sticker alone accounts for a bit over 9% of the ¥9.79 million cumulative payout.

The other is being designed for everyday conversation. urajo has followed a policy of putting text into almost every sticker and says considerable care went into font selection. Text-bearing stickers have clearer meaning, making them more likely to be chosen reflexively as a reply in conversation. Under a send-count-linked model, this “likelihood of being chosen” translates directly into revenue. Under the one-time purchase model, this quality was only ever evaluated once, at the moment of purchase. Under Premium, it’s evaluated every single time it’s used.

The accurate reading, then, is that a production policy urajo maintained for years happened, later, to mesh with a monetization model that arrived afterward.

Headwinds and cost-side moves

This alignment could also come apart.

In the article, urajo mentions LINE’s “sticker arrangement feature,” which could increase demand for text-free stickers, a direct headwind for a production approach built entirely around text. The stated response is “nothing much I can do; wait and see for now.” A catalog of 330 stickers isn’t a size that can be nimbly reworked in response to a spec change.

On the cost side, urajo reports canceling an Adobe CC subscription, saying it “felt like paying for apps I’m not even using.” Production now relies on standard fonts, fonts purchased with perpetual licenses, and free fonts. Even in a business generating a few hundred thousand yen a month in payouts, fixed costs are being trimmed.

What can and can’t be replicated

What can be replicated is the policy of accumulating volume and designing for sends. The average return per sticker is only about ¥30,000, dividing the cumulative ¥9.79 million by roughly 330 pieces. Put differently, reaching this level requires securing a large base rather than chasing a single hit.

Three things can’t be replicated. One is the ten years, which cannot be compressed. The second is the Premium program itself. Its per-send rate and continuation are outside the creator’s control. The slope of 2.13 in the prediction formula is a number the platform could change at any time. The third is whether you can land a single hit like the rabbit sticker that reaches ¥920,000 on its own, something that can only be known after the fact.

The value of this record lies less in offering a step-by-step recipe for success and more in publicly disclosing the actual payout rates and unit values in content-inventory businesses. Figures like a 35.7% unit-sale payout rate and roughly ¥2.1 per send serve as a benchmark other creators can use to calculate their own expectations.

Related reading

• 24 Kindle books’ worth of revenue records — a different platform’s version of building an average through sheer volume
• How Carrd reached ~$2M ARR — a case of running a single product solo, over the long haul