Can Kakao Emoticon Artists Really Make Money? The Numbers Tell the Story

The Reality of Being a Kakao Emoticon Artist

Plenty of people have considered becoming an emoticon artist at one point or another.

For years, there has been a widely circulated idea that anyone with strong drawing skills can make money without a company or even an office.

And Kakao’s emoticon platform has genuinely grown into one of South Korea’s biggest creator ecosystems. Ten years after its launch in 2011, it had produced 10,000 creators.

But look a little more closely at those figures, and it becomes clear just how far the notion that “all you need is the ability to draw” is from reality.

It’s a Huge Market

Data released by Kakao itself makes the platform’s scale unmistakable.

In 2021, the platform’s 10th anniversary year, there were 10,000 creators and 300,000 emoticon sets had been launched cumulatively. The total revenue shared among creators stood at roughly 700 billion won.

Four years later, figures announced in 2025 showed further growth.

The number of individual emoticon products released had surpassed 700,000, while the market was worth more than 1.2 trillion won as of December 2024.

There are also genuine breakout success stories—the kind almost everyone has heard about, involving creators who made billions of won from a single emoticon set.

As many as 146 emoticon sets have generated more than 1 billion won in cumulative sales, while 17 have topped 10 billion won.

The real question is how widely that success is distributed.

Of the more than 700,000 emoticon sets released, only 2,885 have generated over 100 million won in cumulative sales.

That works out to just over 0.4%. The 146 sets that surpassed 1 billion won represent 0.02%, while the 17 that exceeded 10 billion won account for just 0.002%.

In other words, the overall market is certainly large, but most of its revenue is concentrated among a tiny minority. What remains is divided into very small—and often exceedingly small—shares.

The reason stories about people “making it big with emoticons” attract so much attention is that such success is rare, not typical.

That’s Not Where the Story Ends

The gap becomes even clearer when you look at how the revenue is divided.

Suppose an emoticon set sells for 2,500 won. After the app store takes its 30% commission, VAT is deducted from the remainder, and Kakao and the creator split what is left equally.

The creator ends up with roughly 750 won per sale—about 30% of the purchase price.

On top of that, getting into the market in the first place is no easy feat.

It is said that around 1,500 emoticon proposals are submitted each week, but only about 20 make it through review and reach the market.

That amounts to an acceptance rate of roughly 1%. Even if creators complete an entire set before submitting it, most proposals never make it into the world.

The point of laying out these figures is not to disparage the emoticon market.

Quite the opposite.

If only a tiny minority can make substantial money even in a market this large and well established, the reason may have less to do with talent than with the way the system is structured.

When every creator is competing on one platform, under one set of review standards, and in one market—KakaoTalk’s domestic user base—the competition can only become more intense.

This is where Decoblocks is trying to do things differently.

Creators can start selling as soon as they make a character, without waiting for approval from a review committee. And instead of presenting their work only to KakaoTalk users in South Korea, they can showcase their characters to WordPress users around the world.

Of course, as a newly launched marketplace, it cannot yet claim to be a proven, large-scale market like Kakao’s.

But rather than creating a system in which everyone lines up at a single narrow gate, the aim was to build one with lower barriers to entry and a market that is open to a much wider audience.

For people with artistic skill, the answer may not be learning how to compete even more fiercely at an increasingly narrow gate. It may be creating another door.

This post applies several of Decoblocks’ various writing and design tools, but the content itself is based entirely on facts as they stand in reality.