If Kakao Keeps Rejecting Your Emoticon Submissions, Read This

How Hard Is It, Really, to Get a Character Emoticon Approved?

Have you ever received a rejection email with no explanation?

There is just one line—“We have decided not to accept this proposal”—and you never find out what went wrong.

If you’ve gone through the cycle of drawing another 24 images, waiting all over again, and receiving the same one-line rejection without even knowing what to fix next, I hope this article offers some comfort.

It May Not Be a Matter of Skill

Let’s start with the numbers.

Kakao Emoticon Studio reportedly receives around 2,000 submissions every week, of which only about 100 are actually approved.

Even a simple calculation puts the competition at roughly 20 to 1.

What’s more, the review process has a reputation for not providing specific reasons for rejection.

In other words, creators are left in the dark—not even knowing what they are supposed to improve.

More surprising still is the fact that beginners are not the only ones who hit this wall.

There have been public accounts of well-known creators who had already built a following on other channels being rejected repeatedly by Kakao over several years.

In some cases, beloved characters were rejected without explanation when their creators submitted follow-up releases, eventually prompting them to take those projects to other platforms.

If getting approved means being one of the top 100, that is closer to a matter of probability than ability.

Creators’ communities tell a similar story.

The prevailing view is that creators who already have name recognition—or who are working with an established IP—can often pass without much trouble, while unknown newcomers with original creations face a considerably higher bar.

That is why critics say luck plays a bigger role than skill. Put bluntly, the system is stacked against newcomers from the outset.

With thousands of people lining up for only a handful of spots, it is hardly surprising that most are turned away at the door.

The real problem is what this system leaves creators feeling.

After several rejections, the thought inevitably starts to creep in: “Maybe I’m just not talented enough.”

But if the approval rate is only around 5 percent, that frustration says less about your talent than it does about how narrow the door was in the first place.

One narrow gate is not the only option.

This is where Decoblocks takes a different approach.

Rather than forcing thousands of creators to compete for a limited number of slots, it lets them list their characters through the open distribution channel of the WordPress marketplace.

Because there is no bottleneck that allows only 100 submissions through each week, creators are far less likely to face the frustration of being rejected without knowing why.

Of course, there is still a basic review process.

It is not a completely unregulated system where anything and everything gets uploaded.

The fundamental difference, however, is that the review is designed not to filter out all but a select few, but to let anyone distribute their own characters as long as they meet basic quality and copyright requirements.

It is a structure in which the very idea of a competition rate does not really apply.

If Kakao’s door says, “Become one of these 100 people,” Decoblocks says, “There is someone out there who needs your character, so put it out into the world and see what happens.”

Your skill did not change just because you were rejected several times.

The door was simply narrow. You can keep trying to squeeze through that one narrow entrance, or you can take the characters you have already created to another door. Decoblocks aims to be that alternative.