[LINK] A New Direction For Stickers

Earlier this week GetGlue quietly announced that they are changing the way they do things.

If you’re not familiar with GetGlue, it’s one of the most popular check-in sites where viewers can say they are watching a TV show or movie and earn a virtual sticker.  Once a user had earned 20 virtual stickers, they could request that GetGlue send them physical copies of the stickers for you to do with as you pleased.

Then on November 26th, a few days before Thanksgiving, GetGlue posted to their blog about how they were going to start having animated stickers and who their partners were and oh it’s so exciting!…

…oh yeah, and btw, no more physical stickers, kthxbye.

As you can imagine, the comments section of their blog is full of lots of lovely, well thought out reactions to this announcement. I totally understand this decision on GetGlue’s part.  Printing and mailing all the stickers could not be cheap.  Plus, many times they had issues with the stickers arriving in a timely manner or at all, prompting probably more helpful comments from the same people leaving notes on their blog.  But, let’s face it, the reason GetGlue won the check-in site war was because it offered these physical items for people to collect.

I think GetGlue should do what so many other companies have done in the past – pass the cost on to the consumer.  Why not keep the whole 20 check ins unlocks the stickers but instead of mailing out the physical stickers, allow the users to pick their stickers and then download a high quality PDF that they can print out onto a sticker sheet or take to Office Depot or some other store that does high quality printing. Without the promise of the physical stickers, I have a feeling many people will stop feeling the need to check-in.  At least a lot of the original users who joined the site because of the stickers.

What do you think?  Do you use GetGlue?  Did you ever order stickers?