How to Advertise on LINE: Formats, Costs & Buying Routes

Most Western buyers meet LINE as a translation problem: a messaging app that happens to sell ads, filed mentally alongside WhatsApp or Messenger. That framing produces bad plans. LINE is the layer Japanese digital life runs through, its ad business is structurally unlike Meta’s, and it charges for things Meta gives away. The single largest mistake in a first Japan plan is assuming the Meta mental model transfers.

This guide covers the platform mechanics: what LINE actually sells, how each product is priced and bought, what targeting is available and where the data comes from, and what a foreign advertiser needs before an account will open. The wider market picture, including offline channels and regulation, lives in our Japan media landscape guide. No agency is named or recommended here.

What LINE is and who it reaches

LINE is operated by LY Corporation, the entity formed from the merger of LINE and Yahoo! JAPAN. That corporate fact matters commercially, because LINE inventory, Yahoo! JAPAN inventory and the audience data behind both now sit inside one sales organisation.

LY’s own media guide puts LINE at 98 million monthly active users in Japan as of late March 2025, which the company calculates as roughly 79 percent of Japan’s population of 123.744 million using Statistics Bureau definitive figures. Yahoo! JAPAN reports 54 million monthly logged-in user IDs over the same period, and approximately 28 million accounts are linked across the two services. The LINE Ads product guide adds a reach argument rather than just a size one: a substantial share of LINE users are reachable through LINE and effectively nowhere else, and the age curve is unusually flat, running from teenagers to users over 50 rather than concentrating in one band.

LINE is also the leading messaging app in Thailand and Taiwan, and LINE for Business runs a separate Thai-language ad platform with its own placement set covering the Home tab, chat list, LINE VOOM, LINE TODAY, the Wallet tab, OpenChat and Album. LY’s Japanese media guide does not publish market-level user counts for Thailand or Taiwan, and we are not going to invent them. Treat Thailand and Taiwan as genuinely separate buys with separate sales contacts, separate creative norms and separate account structures. Nothing in this page about Japanese pricing should be assumed to hold there.

The three commercial models

Almost every confusion about LINE costs comes from collapsing three unrelated pricing systems into one question. LY’s marketing product taxonomy separates them clearly, and a buyer should too.

Auction advertising (LINE Ads). Bid-based, self-serve or agency-managed, priced per impression, click, view or friend acquisition. This is the closest analogue to Meta or Google, and the only part of LINE that behaves the way a performance buyer expects.

Owned messaging (LINE Official Account). A monthly subscription with an included message allowance, plus a per-message charge above it. This is a cost model with no Western analogue: on Meta or Instagram, sending to your own followers is free. On LINE, every message to every friend has a unit price.

Reservation and sales promotion. Talk Head View, promotion stickers, LINE POINT AD, LINE Flyer and LINE de Obo. Fixed-price or impression-guaranteed, bought through LY sales or a sales partner, with lead times measured in weeks.

LINE Ads: placements, formats and bidding

The LINE Ads product guide, updated 15 April 2026, describes the platform as the product of three variables: the placement, the creative, and the delivery function.

Placements run well beyond the chat list. The published list includes the chat list itself, LINE NEWS, LINE VOOM, the mini app tab, LINE Points Club, LINE Brand Catalog, LINE Flyer, LINE Coupon, LINE My Card, the Home tab, LINE Monary, LINE OpenChat, the top of an Official Account chat room, Album, LINE ENTERTAINMENT and LINE GAME official account chat rooms, Note, the sticker shop, LINE family apps such as manga, camera and fortune-telling, and the LINE Ads Network of third-party apps outside LINE.

Creative is deliberately narrow. Static formats are Card at 1200 by 628, Square at 1080 by 1080, Carousel at 1080 by 1080 with up to ten cards, a small image at 600 by 400, and an animated version of that small image. Video formats are Card at 16:9, Square at 1:1, Vertical at 9:16, and small video at 16:9 and 1:1. Vertical video on the LINE VOOM following tab renders at 3:4 and expands to full 9:16 on tap, so subtitles positioned for a 9:16 safe area get cropped in feed. Not every placement accepts every format: the chat list, for instance, takes no carousel and no vertical video.

Account structure is conventional, with one important detail. Campaign level holds the objective, flight dates and campaign budget cap. Ad group level holds targeting, placement selection, bid price, billing method, daily budget and the auto-optimisation toggle. That means bid and billing model are ad-group decisions, not campaign decisions, which is where most structural mistakes get made. Objectives available include website clicks, website conversions, app installs, app engagement, friend adds, video views and reach, each with a corresponding automatic bidding goal.

LY publishes minimum bids only for the friend-add product. For friend adds, CPF starts at 75 yen on automatic bidding and 50 yen on manual bidding, and CPM starts at 200 yen on manual bidding. Those are floors, not expectations. For actual clearing prices by market, see the LINE benchmark hub and the LINE benchmarks for Japan.

Targeting and where LINE’s data comes from

LINE’s targeting is worth understanding at the source level, because the data provenance is unusual and LY is explicit about it in its own documentation.

Audience segment targeting covers age, gender, region and interest, plus attribute segments including marital status, children, mobile carrier, estimated income and occupation, interest categories, and purchase-intent categories. Yahoo! JAPAN attribute, life-event, interest and purchase-intent segments can be layered in on top, which is the practical dividend of the merger.

The provenance note in LY’s guide is the part buyers skip. These segments are built from what LINE users registered across LINE family services, their behavioural history, their content-viewing tendencies inside LINE and their ad exposure inside LINE, classified into what LY calls deemed attributes plus a purchase experience signal derived from where real purchases occurred, all handled in a form that does not identify individuals. Deemed attributes are inferred, not declared. Plan accordingly: they are strong for scale and directionally useful, and they are not a verified customer database.

Custom audiences can be built from IDFA or AAID uploads, phone number uploads, email uploads, web traffic, mobile app events, video view audiences, image click audiences, and Official Account friend audiences. That last one is distinctive: you can build an audience of your Official Account friends, and separately an audience of users who have blocked you, then target or exclude either. Lookalike expansion runs from 1 to 15 percent of the LINE user base, or on automatic sizing, and takes up to 24 hours to become usable.

Official Account pricing: the model with no Western analogue

This is where Western buyers get caught. LY publishes three plans, all quoted excluding tax.

The Communication plan is free and includes 200 messages per month, with no option to buy more. The Light plan is 5,000 yen per month for 5,000 messages, and it also cannot exceed its allowance: hit the cap and you must upgrade. Only the Standard plan, at 15,000 yen per month for 30,000 messages, supports additional messages on a metered basis.

Additional messages are priced on a declining volume table. LY’s Official Account product guide lists 3.0 yen per message up to 50,000, 2.8 yen from 50,001 to 100,000, 2.6 yen from 100,001 to 200,000, 2.4 yen from 200,001 to 300,000, 2.2 yen from 300,001 to 400,000, 2.0 yen from 400,001 to 500,000, then continuing down through 1.5 yen at the one million mark and 1.1 yen in the 7 to 10 million band. The guide’s own worked example: 200,000 additional messages costs 550,000 yen, being 50,000 at 3 yen plus 50,000 at 2.8 yen plus 100,000 at 2.6 yen.

Two things follow. First, a message counts per recipient, so a single broadcast to 100,000 friends is 100,000 messages, and a weekly broadcast to that list is an annual line item of real size. Second, LY’s plan page announces a pricing revision effective 1 October 2026 which simplifies the tier table, so check the current tiers before modelling anything.

Two adjacent products are worth knowing. A Premium ID, a chosen rather than randomly assigned account ID, is 100 yen per month or 1,200 yen per year excluding tax. LINE Official Notification is a separate service that delivers to a user by phone number even where no friend relationship exists, restricted to genuinely important non-advertising messages such as delivery and reservation notices, and priced from 500,000 yen per month plus a 200,000 yen UX review fee per UX on the flexible version. It requires a verified account and an authorised provider.

Reservation inventory: Talk Head View, stickers and points

Talk Head View sits at the top of the chat list, the first screen of nearly every LINE session. LY’s product page describes it as offering the largest domestic reach available and cites approximately 75 million viewable reach in a single day with even coverage across age groups. It is bought on a viewable-impression basis, with Custom and Premium variants, and LY does not publish a rate card. Any figure you see quoted for it online comes from an agency, not from LY.

Promotion stickers are the LINE product with a genuinely public rate card, and it is worth reading because it calibrates what premium LINE reach costs. For the period from October 2026, LY lists a Sponsored Sticker at 35,000,000 yen for a set of 8 stickers or 40,000,000 yen for 16, excluding tax, with three regular slots released each Tuesday, a four-week display window in the sticker shop, and a 180-day usage life for the user after download. A Sponsored Targeting Sticker, served against a deemed gender attribute, is 25,000,000 or 30,000,000 yen for the female attribute and 20,000,000 or 25,000,000 yen for the male attribute. A Direct Sticker, which carries no sticker-shop placement and relies on the advertiser’s own promotion, is 10,000,000 yen for 8 or 15,000,000 yen for 16, with a 12-week download window extendable in four-week blocks at 1,000,000 yen each.

Those numbers are real published prices, not estimates, and they explain why sticker campaigns are a large-advertiser product. They also explain the sticker’s persistence: a user who downloads one keeps sending your brand asset to their friends for 180 days.

LINE POINT AD and LINE Points Friends AD reward users for completing a specified action, including adding an Official Account as a friend. The mechanic is being reworked: LY has announced that LINE Points and PayPay Points are merging, after which the point type a user receives depends on whether their accounts are linked, with PayPay Points carrying no expiry and unlinked LINE Points expiring 180 days after the last point earned. Advertisers cannot choose which point type is granted. If you are planning an incentivised acquisition campaign, confirm the current state of that migration before committing, because it changes the reward’s perceived value.

Account setup and eligibility for a foreign advertiser

The sequence is fixed: LINE Business ID, then a LINE Official Account, then an ad account, then review. Verification of the Official Account, if you need it, is its own application requiring the registered business name, a contact name, a working email and phone number, and a business website or equivalent URL, with a stated 5 to 10 business day review.

Payment is the practical gate. LY’s LINE Ads billing manual lists credit cards and coupons as the payment methods for online clients, accepting VISA, Mastercard, American Express, JCB and Diners Club, and warns that some debit and prepaid cards are blocked by the issuing company. Invoice billing exists but is arranged through LY sales or a sales partner rather than in the self-serve interface. A foreign advertiser without a Japanese entity or a Japan-issued corporate card will, in practice, buy through a sales partner or an agency that holds the billing relationship. That is a routing question, not a barrier, and it is how a large share of LINE spend transacts regardless of the advertiser’s nationality.

Creative and copy must be Japanese, and the reservation products in particular carry review steps measured in business days rather than hours. Build the review time into the flight plan.

What LINE costs, honestly

LINE does not publish a general price. It publishes minimum bids for one auction product, a full rate card for stickers, plan prices for Official Accounts, and nothing at all for Talk Head View. Any source offering you a tidy LINE CPM is guessing, and we are not going to join them.

What you can do is hold quotes against dated benchmark data for Japan specifically. Auction prices move with seasonality, category competition and format. Reservation prices are list prices with negotiation around volume and timing. Messaging costs are deterministic and entirely within your control, which makes them the easiest part of a LINE budget to get right and the most commonly overlooked. Start from the benchmark database and the LINE benchmarks for Japan.

LINE against the rest of a Japan plan

Dentsu put Japan’s total advertising expenditure at 8.0623 trillion yen in 2025, up 5.1 percent, with internet advertising at 4.0459 trillion yen, up 10.8 percent, crossing 50 percent of the total for the first time. Television media held roughly flat at 1.7556 trillion yen.

Against that backdrop, the sensible split is by job rather than by vendor. Google and Yahoo! JAPAN carry search intent, and Yahoo! JAPAN is not optional in Japan the way it is elsewhere; see the Google Ads benchmarks for Japan for cost context. Meta carries a real but narrower audience, covered in the Meta benchmarks for Japan, with video and short-form on the YouTube and TikTok benchmark pages. Rakuten anchors retail media and loyalty-point commerce, a distinct route that rewards separate planning. Television and out-of-home remain substantial at national scale, with context on the Japan TV cost and Japan out-of-home cost pages.

LINE’s job in that mix is reach plus retention: near-universal messaging penetration at the top, and an owned, permission-based channel underneath it that no search or social platform replicates. The closest structural parallel in the region is Korea, where KakaoTalk occupies the same position; the Kakao benchmarks for Korea and the Korea guide are a useful comparison, and our platform guides index covers the other regional platforms. For how these buying routes work in a multi-market APAC context, the Singapore agency guide covers the regional coordination problem.