The Reality of LINE Sticker Side Income: ¥1,807 in 2 Years, ¥1,502 in 5. Two First-Person Records Map the "Distribution of the Dream"

The Published Numbers

Run discloses the monthly payout history in full, October 2024: ¥6, November: ¥2, December: ¥39, January 2025: ¥2, February: ¥4, March: ¥8, April: ¥37. The level is: “almost no trace of standalone sales; a few sets attract a buyer a few times a year (about 3 people annually).” Pota likewise admits the totals are “mostly me buying my own stickers and gifting them to acquaintances.”

Why Put These Two Household Ledgers Side by Side

The culture of publishing earnings carries heavy survivorship bias: those who earned write, those who didn’t stay silent. ¥1,807 and ¥1,502, numbers you would not even bother converting to an hourly wage, make these two records rare documents precisely because they were published anyway. LINE stickers are the poster child of the “set it and forget it” side hustle, typically introduced as “make it once and it keeps selling,” yet almost no measured record exists of the expected value for someone entering with zero promotion.

Pota’s 2 Years — Starting from 3 Days of Home Quarantine

Pota started making stickers at the end of August 2023, during home quarantine with COVID, after remembering that an acquaintance sold LINE stickers. The only tool was ibisPaint on a smartphone. The debut set, drawn with a finger, “Otaku-Life White Cat [Red-Oshi Edition]”, was finished in 3 days. Idea → illustration → registration on LINE Creators Market → sales application → approval: anyone can put a product on this shelf. That near-zero barrier to entry is the setup for the market structure discussed below.

More sets followed, and in a December 2025 post Pota published two years of sales: ¥1,807. The best-sellers: #1 “I’m Socially Awkward, Enaga-san [Negative Edition],” #2 “Something Like a Dog (Big English Text Stickers,” #3 “Something Like a Dog) Chat-Style Stickers (Polite Edition).” But the majority of those were self-purchases and gifts to acquaintances. Pota attributes the defeat to being “bad at promoting on social media,” while still concluding “I’m glad I made them.”

The Run Household’s 5 Years — The Month the Payout Was ¥2

Run, a company employee, and Pecha, a part-timer, a family of three in Sapporo, have been selling stickers since 2021. They made both private-use sets (configured with no revenue share) and for-profit sets, releasing multiple sets of the latter. The result: ¥904 in the first payout application in 2023 (after fees were offset), an unclaimed balance of ¥598 as of June 2025, roughly ¥1,502 in total. Payout applications require sales of ¥1,000 or more, and transfer fees plus about 10% income tax are deducted, meaning that after four years they still have not reached the threshold for a second payout.

Because the private-use sets are set to “no revenue share” and thus excluded from the earnings tally, the ~¥1,502 is the pure performance of the for-profit sets, which sharpens the precision of the record. Run’s verdict: “trying to earn seriously here looks pretty tough,” while also writing, “it adds up bit by bit, pocket money that arrives after you’ve forgotten about it.” What makes this record honest is that it holds two views at once: the recognition that this is an income stream for professional illustrators, not a place for amateurs to earn, and an appreciation of the value of “turning memories into something tangible.”

Of Each ¥120 Sale, the Creator Gets ¥35–40

The granularity of these numbers comes from the revenue-split structure. Per Run’s explanation, when a ¥120 sticker set sells, roughly 30% goes first to App Store/Google Play fees, LINE takes its share of the remainder, and the creator’s cut lands at roughly ¥35–40. The ¥2 and ¥4 monthly payouts come from LINE Sticker Premium (the subscription all-you-can-use plan), 30% of subscription fees form a pool distributed pro-rata by usage. Run’s measurements: about ¥5 in a typical month, ¥30–50 in months when someone used the stickers. Pota, also enrolled in Premium, writes that “a little revenue trickles in now and then”. The two records are the outcomes of the same machinery.

Working backwards from that unit price, Pota’s cumulative ¥1,807 corresponds (roughly, since it includes Premium payouts) to a few dozen set sales over two years. Cross-check that against the testimony that most were self-purchases and gifts, and organic market purchases come out to maybe a few sets a year, nearly the same level as Run’s “about 3 people annually.” Two independent records point to the same number.

Why Sales Are This Low

The structure of the LINE sticker market is stark. The barrier to entry is near zero, and the supply glut runs to millions of sticker sets. In-store discovery depends on rankings and search, and there is no shelf where an unknown new release gets exposure. And even when a set sells, the take is a few dozen yen, meaning the expected value for an entrant who cannot generate their own exposure is asymptotically zero. Pota’s self-diagnosed weakness, “bad at promotion”, looks like a personal shortcoming but is actually the market’s entry requirement.

This does not mean “you can’t earn with stickers.” Popular characters, and creators who already hold an audience on social media, still sell today. As with the ceiling of online salons, the ones who earn are those who bring their own audience from outside the platform. The platform does not do your customer acquisition for you.

Why a “Few Yen an Hour” Side Hustle Is Worth Recording

This site recorded stock photography at ¥185,000 over 4 years (¥4,000/month) as the median of “set it and forget it” side hustles. LINE stickers with zero promotion sit two orders of magnitude below that. A market whose median outcome is effectively ¥0. Even within the same “place your work on a shelf” model, expected value differs by orders of magnitude depending on the shelf (stock photos ≫ Kindle ≫ stickers). Making that gap concrete with real numbers is the value of these two records.

The records also contain the reason the supply glut never clears. Pota’s first set was finished in 3 days of home quarantine on a single smartphone, when the cost of entry is that small, entry never stops even at near-zero expected value, and the shelves keep filling. The lightness of entry and the impossibility of earning are two faces of the same structure.

If we force a statement of the conditions for reproduction, it reads like this. For profit, this shelf works only for creators who already hold an audience on social media or elsewhere. But as Pota’s “glad I made them” and Run’s “turning memories into something tangible” show, if the goal is making things for fun or making stickers for your own family, this shelf (zero upfront cost, complete on one smartphone) works perfectly well. Only when the goal is mistaken does ¥1,807 become a number of disappointment.

Further Reading

• Stock photos, 4 years at ¥4,000/month — the median of “set it and forget it” side hustles
• 24 Kindle books at ¥50,000–70,000/month — same model, higher-expected-value shelf