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Comment by kirkdouglas | Hacker News Reader

I hope that WhatsApp will resist adding all these stickers and games and find it's way to monetize (bring back paid subscription?).

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Stickers are great. Stickers let you quickly communicate a reply with two or three taps. They can also lighten things up; I giggle every time my boyfriend uses the "that's great but I am Trying To Work now" sticker I drew for him. What could read as curt and grumpy in text is instead expressed faster by a drawing that is a little bit inherently goofy.

YMMV obviously, maybe you're just too serious to ever want to use a cartoon zebra to express yourself.

Agreed. Stickers are harmless and a popular feature. That said, I find it strange how LINE suggests stickers/emoticons for almost every word possible.

>sticker I drew for him

That's pretty neat, but I haven't seen that; how do you do your own stickers? I don't think anyone would argue against being able to send free-form drawings. The stickers in Skype and Telegram, otoh, seem to be mostly "meme junk". Random clips of TV, or (IMO terrible) cartoony drawings.

My daughters use them sometimes, same with strings of emoji. But I find it expresses far less than words would do. It's like they're just hunting around for a cute image, with little thought beyond that.

Line and Telegram both let users upload their own sticker sets. And I am a professional cartoonist who thinks nothing of spending her spare time drawing a bunch of goofy drawings of one of her characters. Really I kinda had to; all my pro cartoonist friends have them too, and I felt naked talking to them without a set!

http://egypt.urnash.com/blog/tag/stickers/ has an older version of the set I did for myself. Still haven't posted the set I did for my boyfriend.

I'm looking forwards to being able to dump these into Apple's sticker market. Passive income off of something I did for my own use, woohoo!

(There's also a thriving trade in custom stickers: gimme a couple hundred bucks and I'll crank out a set of goofy, expressive drawings of a cartoon character you like to be on the Internet.)

These are awesome / hilarious! Awesome work!

That does seem like a fun hobby

if they charge $1 dollar a year and they have 1 billion users that is $1 billion a year in revenue. Suppose all 1 billion was profit and if you use cost of capital of 10%, you get a valuation of 10 billion.

FB paid 19 billion for it. If they charged for it people might just move to FB messanger or Viber or some free app.

They cancelled subscription just this year when they already had billion users. That means people are willing to pay for it.

I don't remember paying even the $1 to them ever and I've been using WhatsApp for a good few years. Every time the expiration date approaches, it automatically gets pushed away. Either they were just giving away subscriptions intentionally or I'm just one lucky bastard.

So, No, they never had 1 billion dollar paying customers.

They used to claim to charge you after 1 year, but I never got charged due to a combination of changing phone numbers, them not asking for it, etc.

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