Stickers? Is That How We Plan on Making Money From Voice and SMS? Seriously?

Stickers seem to be all the rage now, with Viber joining the fray.

Telecommunication a 1.5 Trillion dollars industry is "brought to its knees" by OTT players – companies like Skype, WhatsApp and Viber who are outdoing the carriers by offering a free communication service on top of the carriers' network. We have come to a point when all the widely known OTT players are now at the size of tier-0 operators if you rate them by their user base: 150M and more subscribers is the size to be at as a messaging OTT player to be noticed. It is probably also the point in time when pressure to make money begins…

So what does an OTT player to do? Search for a revenue stream of course, which proves to be rather tricky for someone who starts off offering his base service for free. And somehow, now OTTs are adding stickers as a the obvious solution – Viber just added them. Jon Russell provides a great overview on the use of stickers by messaging apps on The Next Web.

Best Sticker Company at the moment is probably LINE, with over $10 million dollars a month from sticker-selling. While an impressive number for a startup, it comes from a user base of over 200 million. That's an ARPU of $0.05 a month from stickers – ridiculously low in carrier terms.

No wonder then that you will be hard pressed to find any of the messaging vendors heading for an IPO – they haven't found any viable business model yet. It is looking harder to find one for communications than it is for the likes of Facebook and Twitter…

I have my doubts about stickers as an important revenue stream for OTT players down the road. It can be one of many monetization mechanisms, but I don't see it as taking center stage. The rush towards it says some grim things about the prospects of these vendors and indicates to me that most of them are on the lookout for a sugar daddy to back them up or acquire them – or they already succeeded in that goal.

A stickers business model? I don't buy that.

As a disclaimer – I believe that carriers should join the game in some way, either by partnering, acquiring and building their own services, but somehow these Telco OTT services need to be different than the "classic" OTT offering.