301 followers, ¥100,000/month in LINE stickers — how "releasing 10 titles" reversed a ¥120,000-a-year slump

You often hear that earning money from LINE stickers requires a substantial follower base. The record kept by Yukie Matsumoto, creator of the “Hiroshima-dialect Maru-chan” series, directly refutes that conventional wisdom. At the point she hit ¥100,000/month, her follower count was 301 on Twitter and 404 on Instagram.

This case is also, at the same time, a record of seven years. Seven years passed between her first release in March 2016 and reaching ¥100,000/month, including a stretch she describes as “a period when I accidentally landed a job at a terrible company and couldn’t release anything at all.”

Seven years in outline

Total cumulative releases stand at 27. Comparing herself to other creators, she lists “Nagano-san… 73 titles, Ishii Tomoko-san… 672 titles, Beni Orange-san… 223 titles,” and writes, “With just 27, I’m still a total newbie.” Cumulative sales are described as “probably around 50,000 sets sold so far.”

Scale, viewed through unit price

The article also gives a breakdown of unit economics: “LINE stickers sell for ¥120, with roughly ¥31 going to the creator.” That’s about 26% of the sale price.

Multiplying that ¥31 by the seven-year cumulative total of 50,000 sets comes to roughly ¥1.55 million. Divided across 84 months (7 years), the average works out to just over ¥18,000 a month. The ¥100,000 achieved in the record month is more than five times that average.

A caveat is needed here, though. It’s not clear from the article whether the ¥100,000 figure reflects unit-sale payouts alone, or also includes LINE Sticker Premium payouts tied to send count. A simple conversion at ¥31/unit implies roughly 3,200 units sold in a single month, over 6% of the seven-year cumulative 50,000 concentrated into one month. Given the nature of the numbers, the possibility that Premium payouts are included can’t be ruled out. The lack of a disclosed breakdown is a limit worth keeping in mind on this record.

The turning point is the concentrated release push of 2022

This case has a clear turning point, and the creator herself spells out the causal link.

2021 was a year with zero releases, and income came to about ¥120,000 for the entire year. The following year, 2022, she decided to “really get serious about LINE stickers” and released 10 titles over the course of the year. As a result, ¥100,000/month appeared in January 2023. Income that had totaled ¥120,000 for a full year moved to a level that hit ¥100,000 in a single month. A before/after this clean-cut is rare.

There’s essentially one variable at play: the number of releases. The artwork, the pricing, and the distribution channel all stayed the same. Only the release count changed, from 0 to 10.

The mechanism by which releases drive sales

Why does the release count matter this much? Her own explanation reveals how the LINE platform behaves.

When a new title is released, LINE delivers two kinds of exposure: a new-release notification sent to people who’ve bought that creator’s stickers before, and placement in an ad slot on the chat screen shown to users likely to like the artwork. The notification, she says, “seems to go out roughly 2-3 days after release, and suddenly sales start pouring in”, a distinct, felt moment.

What matters more is what happens next. As she puts it: someone discovers the new sticker, likes it, and then checks out her past work, buying several older titles as well.

What’s happening here is traffic being driven to the entire catalog, not sales of the new release itself. One release functions less as a sale in its own right and more as a trigger that re-exposes the shelf of 27 existing works. Firing one notification with a catalog of 27 works behind it yields a very different return than firing the same notification with only three. 2021’s ¥120,000 for the year can be read as the baseline for a year in which this traffic-generating event never happened once.

And the party doing this distribution is LINE, not the creator’s own social media. That’s why it works with only 301 followers. On the relationship between follower count and sales, she states: “It’s not proportional to sticker sales at all. It’s barely led to follower growth.”

What lit the initial spark

Even if LINE handles the distribution, there’s no one to notify when you start with zero purchasers. What lit that initial spark was distributing stickers to friends.

“I handed out released stickers like crazy to friends who I thought would use them.” The rationale traces back to her own purchasing behavior: “When I buy a sticker, it’s usually because a friend sent it to me and I clicked through to the store from there.” Getting stickers used in group chats also means one act of distribution can reach multiple people at once.

The choice of who to give stickers to is tied to the persona-setting done during production. “I think carefully about who would use it, and in what situation, when I’m making it.” Specific examples cited include a sticker made for a friend obsessed with strength training toward a bikini fitness goal, and a Okayama-dialect sticker made for a friend from and living in Okayama, in hopes she’d use it. When no persona comes to mind, “I think it’s fine if the persona is ‘myself.’” “Hiroshima-dialect Maru-chan” itself originated from the idea of a sticker she herself wanted.

The choice of dialect-based stickers fits neatly into this structure. Because the scene of use and the user are narrowed from the outset, it becomes obvious who to hand a sticker to for it to actually get used. Generic, cute stickers don’t allow for that kind of reverse-engineering.

Limits, and the range that can be copied

¥100,000/month is a single month’s figure, January 2023, and no continuity is demonstrated. The structurally thin 26% cut of the sale price is also a constraint: the only way to grow the amount is to accumulate more units sold. The goal she sets for 2023, three releases per month, implies 36 titles a year, a workload that would exceed her entire seven-year cumulative total of 27 in a single year. Given her past history of releases stalling due to a punishing job, this fragility in the assumed pace of work can’t be ignored.

What can be copied is deliberately increasing release frequency, and narrowing the persona down to a granularity where you can picture exactly who you’d hand a sticker to. Neither costs anything.

What’s hard to copy is the existence of the 27-title catalog built up over seven years. Release notifications work because there’s a shelf to re-expose; raising the release cadence before that inventory exists yields little return from a single notification. This case is as much a story of “release frequency matters” as it is a story of “frequency only matters once inventory exists first.” On top of that, the reliance on subject matter tied to her own regional roots (Hiroshima dialect) and on LINE’s own notification/recommendation specs remain preconditions the creator doesn’t control.

Related reading

• 24 Kindle books’ worth of revenue records — a structure where release volume determines exposure on the platform
• Hitode’s blog revenue — a case where continuity itself, over years, becomes the asset