Hello!
I'm conducting some research on the royalty rates offered by various font retailers and I need your help to complete the list below. Although I know the % offered by some of the popular distributors (as ITF fonts are available there), I don't have information about the rest. I'd appreciate if someone (who are offering their fonts from these channels) could help me complete this list.
- MyFonts: 50%
- Fontshop: 50%
- Fonts.com: 50%
- Linotype: 50%
- Fontspring: 70%
- Fontstand: 50%
- Creative Market:70%
- Adobe Typekit:
- Type Network:
- You Work For Them:
- FontHaus:
- Village:
- Font Bros:
- Hype For Type:
- Phil's Fonts:
- Type.co.uk:
If I've missed any retailer, please let me know.
Thank you!
Satya
Comments
Hype For Type: 50%
Font Bros: 65%
Type.co.uk: 50%
Adobe Typekit: A mix of flat annual subscription and a percentage of overage fees. You can't compare side-by-side with the others.
I was actually curious about Typekit because it's hard to calculate royalties from a subscription. So if no one use (or buy) your fonts through Typekit, you don't get paid at all?
do you know who runs http://maryamsoft.com? I can't search because it's all in Arabic.
To see who is who and what is what, please right click on http://maryamsoft.com/ to translate into English.
I wrote them back in 2014 to include ITF fonts but they never responded to my email.
Abobe has three different font related services and each is priced differently. For us, none are a flat rate.
1. Typekit web hosting ( Pricing is by tiers of page views and the foundry receives a pre agreed amount based on page views. I can't remember if we get a guarantee at the start of each contract year for this one. Web pays us so little I don't pay close attention it it. In this case the end user is charged overage if there is any and we do get our share of that)
2. Marketplace (sales of licenses for 1 CPU only. The price is set by the foundry which receives a traditional percentage. licensor is the foundry but it is a special license that is written with the service in mind)
3. Sync (adobe customers don't pay for this directly. It is part of their cloud account. Foundries are paid based on the number of end user accounts that include the fonts to their "sync" each month. We have a pre agreed guarantee amount that applies to all of our fonts (popular and unpopular alike). It's an amount per style that we get for every style in the system paid annually at the start of each contract year. If an individual style exceeds that amount we are paid for overage based on the same schedule of sync to cents that was used to determine the guarentee)
As an end user I’ve always been a bit curious about this. If I use a particular font (e.g.) four times in a month, does it matter from your revenue standpoint whether I sync the font once and leave it synced all month vs. if I sync and unsync it four times?
Monotype (Fonts.com, Fontshop, Linotype) pays only 25% royalties for web-fonts and 10% for OEM. But on MyFonts everything is 50%.
Additionally, we are still seeing a lot of direct sales that are referred from Adobe. This is one of three things: 1. an end client who's graphic designer found us through the Sync services and it won a pitch but the end client doesn't have Adobe licensing 2. large companies that can get better bulk pricing for the font from us 3. customers who use the Adobe access for all desktop use but need app embedding or (for technical reasons) to self host on web.
So, even if Adobe was providing us with a sufficient income to consider dropping direct sales the state of the technology is still such that we'd be leaving too much money on the table if we did so. I'm watching this closely because I think that in the next ten years we will reach a point where the old guard like us can still justify keeping our shopping carts open but new foundries are better off not.
I don't mean to imply the foundry model should cease. Just that direct sales of retail fonts may stop making sense (custom fonts being a different thing) as use moves more and more to the cloud. A foundry would still have a curatorial identity, still promote its fonts through advertising and micro sites - but the distribution channels would be elsewhere.
André G. Isaak said: I just saw your question. I really don't know the answer to this question because, as I understand it, the system is built with the assumption that end users will add a font to sync and leave it there indefinitely. Most users do have a limit to the number of fonts they can add but it's always pretty high and there's no more incentive to remove a font from your sync then there is to delete emails in gmail.
If your scenario is resulting in us getting paid four times it's a loop hole that Adobe isn't going to care about because that end user behavior is uncommon.
Interesting what happens when there is more competition in a marketplace.....
I'd prefer not to spill out more details publicly, since they are subject to change. I'll just say that we intend for our terms to be the most favorable to designers among retailers. If you'd like more information, you can write foundries@typekit.com.
As Joyce illustrates, we're getting pretty good at licensing type to individual customers at a massive scale. However, we don't offer volume, custom, embedding, or other licenses -- nothing beyond the desktop + web license that a typical individual Creative Cloud user is likely to need. Addressing the most common needs of our individual users is our focus.
Adobe wins when our users discover the power that great type has to transform their work using our tools. It makes them successful, which makes us successful -- more than we could ever be from taking your type and marking it up.
Hopefully this puts us in a position to be the best partner possible to the industry. We might not always get that 100% exactly perfect, and we have certainly had some trouble keeping up with our extraordinary growth, but we are trying like heck.
--Matthew