App Sticker Popularity
─Helen Yeh
The craze for app stickers has taken over Asia, with Cony, Brown, Hello Kitty, and other characters gracing billions of mobile app messages each day. These digital stickers are also responsible for the popularity of Asian app giants like LINE, WeChat, and KakaoTalk. For example, LINE, a service with more than 400 million registered users, sold stickers worth a total of nearly $70 million in 2013, making up twenty percent of its total earnings that year.
Now, these services are looking to enter the North American market, and whether or not they'll be successful depends largely on the fate of these stickers across the ocean. Stickers are popular in Asia because they can be used as a sort of visual shorthand. Typing Asian characters using smartphones designed with the Latin alphabet may be tiring. Stickers let users communicate quickly and efficiently without using strings of characters. With stickers, users can also express ideas indirectly, thus avoiding embarrassment or offending people. For example, to decline someone's invitation to dinner, one could send a sticker to get that message across in a cute way, rather than saying "no" or "I can't" outright.
貼圖風潮，全球引爆？ 應用程式貼圖的風潮已經席捲亞洲，可妮兔、熊大、凱蒂貓和其他角色每天妝點了數十億則手機應用程式訊息。這些數位貼圖也讓LINE、WeChat、KakaoTalk等亞洲應用程式巨頭大受歡迎。舉例來說，LINE這個擁有超過四億個註冊用戶的公司，在二○一三年售出的貼圖總值近七千萬美元，佔了該年整體營收的百分之二十。
如今，這些公司正試著要打進北美市場，而它們能否成功主要取決於這些貼圖飄洋過海之後的命運。貼圖在亞洲受歡迎是因為它們可用來作為一種視覺上快速傳達訊息的方式。用以拉丁字母表設計的智慧型手機來輸入亞洲文字有可能很累。貼圖讓使用者無需使用一連串的文字就能快速又有效率地溝通。有了貼圖，使用者也可以間接表達想法，因而避免尷尬或冒犯別人。比方說，要婉拒某人的晚餐邀約，你可以傳送一張貼圖、用可愛的方式把訊息告訴對方，而不用直接了當地說「不要」或「不行」。 |
沒有留言:
張貼留言