Thoughts on Monotype and its subsidiaries?

Matthijs Herzberg

Monotype is, by a long shot, the biggest type firm in the world. They own some of the largest distribution platforms (MyFonts, Linotype, FontShop, FontFont) as well as having absorbed many foundries.

Their main competition appears to be large companies which invest in type as a secondary feature, like Google and Adobe—all other font distributors are small time in comparison.

Because of their market share, they are able to set the rules that the rest of the type world has to play by. Prime example: the 50% commission split on MyFonts (a mediocre website the upkeep of which couldn't possibly warrant a 50% fee).

Many type designers have little choice but to sell on MyFonts and similar websites: the alternatives are smaller distributors which are unlikely to make nearly as many sales, or to build a distribution platform of one's own, which can be a huge investment of both time and money.

While sources are scarce, according to this Quora post (to which none other than @Thomas Phinney replied), Myfonts made roughly $80 million in revenue from retail fonts in 2013. If we assume that only half of this 80 mil comes from typefaces distributed but not owned by Monotype, and that the 50% fee is universal, they would've pocketed $20 million simply by selling other people's work on their websites.

Of course, Monotype can afford more than any others to advertise their platforms, to ensure that they're always the first to pop up on Google, etc, and thereby ensure that they retain their market share. Essentially, they are big because they are big.

In the meanwhile, Monotype is owned by a private equity firm, who profit from your* labor, by "merit" of having purchased a struggling business in the early 90's for pennies on the dollar.
What I see here is concentration and centralization of capital, which consequently leads to a position in which the distributor is more powerful than the designer, and can therefore set unfair rules.
Am I completely off base? Does Monotype not dominate the market as much as it seems? Do they do good in ways I'm not considering? Is it time for a type union? I'm happy to be proven wrong. I welcome your thoughts either way, as little discussion on this topic seems to exist currently.

*Presuming you sell on MyFonts.

EDIT: As a sidenote, I know I'm coming off rather opinionated here, but I don't really have a dog in this fight as I don't sell on any monotype platform.

John Hudson

Is it time for a type union?

You can't have a union unless you're employees. Organisation to protect or extend the interests of independent type designers and foundries would constitute a cabal and be contrary to antitrust laws. As I understand it, the only way independent designers and foundries could collectively organise and not run afoul of antitrust laws would be to cease to be independent and actually form some form of cooperative corporation with the same legal personhood as a company like Monotype.

[I have discussed this topic in the past with a lawyer, but I am not a lawyer and this does not constitute legal advice.]

JoyceKetterer

I've also discussed this with lawyers and am not a lawyer.  It's a bit more nuanced when the "buyer" is presenting one contract to all sellers, I think. Not to suggest that's the case with monotype but for arguments sake.  But yeah, a thing that would exactly be a union probably isn't legal. 

@Matthijs Herzberg Can you please tell us more about you and why you're asking?  

Matthijs Herzberg

@JoyceKetterer Hi, sorry I never did an introduction thread. I'm a freelance designer from the Netherlands, living in the US, came from lettering into type. Wouldn't say I'm a professional type designer but hoping to get there one day.
I'm asking because I'm relatively new to the industry and because I'm a bit inquisitive when it comes to ethical business practices, and I was wondering how other people feel about the subject.

Ray Larabie

Monotype appears to be leaving rivals in the dust if you're looking at traditional desktop license sales. My fonts are available through several distributors including MyFonts and Fonts.com. And if I were to look at desktop licenses alone, sure, Monotype is still ahead of the pack. When I look at web, app and other licenses, I don't see nearly the same performance with Monotype distributors. When it comes to cloud distribution I think you can guess who's winning by a mile. Of course, things change but if you're looking at today's Monotype through the desktop license lens: it looks like unstoppable megacorp. But look at it in terms of alternate licenses and cloud and the picture is different. When I think of all the distributors that have either gone away of are dwindling, it's all the ones that haven't expanded beyond the classic desktop license. That's my view of it anyway; I can only judge by how my own fonts are performing through various distributors. I think the smaller distributors that have dwindled or vanished were too slow to address non-desktop licenses and they neglected to incentivize exclusivity. I think Fontspring rose from the shadow of Monotype because they specifically focused on pleasing the non-desktop license customer.

Oliver Weiss (Walden Font Co.)

I can state that the small city of Woburn, Massachusetts, is home not to one, but two typographical powerhouses: Monotype, and The Walden Font Co. 

Matthijs Herzberg

@Ray Larabie Thank you for your insight! I hadn’t considered the split between desktop and alternative licenses. I really like fontspring as a company, and it’s a smart move on their end to attract customers with more flexible licensing, and foundries/designers with a better split. I hope they keep growing: significant competition would be an effective incentive for monotype to be better as well.

Scott-Martin Kosofsky

Woburn, Massachusetts, is best known for another reason entirely: a toxic waste (Trichlorethylene) calamity that poisoned the town’s drinking water and caused an outrageously high incidence of certain cancers. It was the subject of the book A Civil Action and a movie of the same name. Despite the most expensive cleanup operation in the nation’s history, some of the poisoned areas of the town remain off-limits today. 

I do not suggest that there is even the most remote link between the font business and toxic waste, but the town of Woburn remains forever tainted in the minds of many older Boston-area residents (the matter was made public in the 1980s). To announce “I’m from Woburn” is to expect the response, “I’m so sorry.”

JoyceKetterer

@Matthijs Herzberg Thank you for your answer.  I asked because this thread felt a bit like it was coming from a journalist and I wanted to know if that was the case before giving a substantive answer.

You are right that monotype looms large in the industry but I don't agree that they do so in a way that consistently benefits them.  They make stupid decisions on the regular.  So yes, when they sneeze we get the flu but also they leave room for us to have successful businesses if we stay outside their ecosystem.  That's basically Font Beauro's business model.

My Studio (Darden Studio) doesn't sell licenses through Monotype first and foremost because their process undermines license enforcement but secondarily because it allows us to pick around their corpse.  And make no mistake, it is a corpse at this point.

That said, I worry much more about cloud fonts.  For now, I'm happy with Adobe but the problem in general with cloud service of music/fonts/etc is that it eliminates a space for indies.  

Matthijs Herzberg

@JoyceKetterer I understand that my question might have appeared strangely inquisitive, but yes its just for my personal understanding. Anyway, thanks for your insight! If I may ask: when you compare monotype and adobe's models, what is it that makes adobe's cloud-based service more dangerous for small foundries?

JoyceKetterer

@Matthijs Herzberg Thank you for demonstrating that I wasn't clear.  This is going to be a long post.  Apologies.

To speak very plainly, Monotype's way of reselling font licenses is more dangerous to small foundries in the immediate term but doesn't have much reach if they aren't selling on the platform.  I worry about cloud fonts in the long term, not specifically Adobe Cloud fonts.  

What worries me about cloud fonts is that as time goes on customers will become more accustomed to starting their font search on cloud platforms.  That means I can't really opt out, which is never a good thing, and that new designers can't go on their own. 

Specifically about Adobe: they pay reasonable royalties for "basic"/"desktop" use.  Additionally, Typekit never really got traction for hosted fonts for larger companies, Adobe hasn't bothered to solve for app embedding, and is therefor sending us lots of referrals.  They have changed my business model so that my direct sales are predominantly for web and app but that's frankly better for me because it's easier to monitor and police.  

In the days before embedding, if I saw a use by a large company (print) I had no way of knowing if it was licensed, under licensed or whatever because all the work could be outsourced.  Its fine with static uses (print or rasterized digital images) for a license to be held by an agency because if the end client fires the agency and wants more branded product they don't have the font files present in their deliverable.  That's a clear signal that a new license is needed.  With web and app the font files are present and so Darden Studio requires that the license be issued to the the brand and held by the owner of the brand. 

This is my first problem with the Monotype model – they allow developers to get a license in their own name for a client project.  When a designer comes to me for help after they have tried and are failing to collect on a large license violation this is almost always the the source of the problem.  The end client points to the developer as the licensee and the developer points to the end client because they were fired some time ago and didn't have any control over the site/app.  The foundry can't really do anything because they not only don't have a contract with the end client but specifically have a contract with the developer.  It's different when the whole use is unlicensed but I wont digress.

I'm aware that most foundries still issue web/app licenses the way Monotype does (they sneezed and we got the flu) but they have the ability to change it if they decide it's not to their benefit.  We really still are in early days for web and app and I slowly see that foundries are listening to me about the logistics of enforcement and changing this.

Not only does Monotype not really care about that (their business is volume) but they issue "add-on" licensing using their own license even if the foundry has their own license documents and even if the client also has a foundry issued basic license.  I'm not a lawyer and I don't know if anyone has tested my theory on this but my guess is that when Monotype issues a license in their own name the foundry doesn't have the option to enforce it on their own.  If I'm right, in the case of a medium sized violation (10-100k), game changing to a small designer, which Monotype doesn't want to pursue you'd just be fucked.

Simon Cozens

JoyceKetterer said:

That said, I worry much more about cloud fonts.  For now, I'm happy with Adobe but the problem in general with cloud service of music/fonts/etc is that it eliminates a space for indies.  

Isn't this the problem that type.world is meant to solve?

JoyceKetterer

@Simon Cozens Maybe that's how they mean it but it wouldn't address the problem I'm trying to describe because it's still a platform you have to join.  My point about cloud fonts is that there's no way to self publish.

Matthijs Herzberg

@JoyceKetterer Thank you for the thorough explanation, I get it now!

Daniel Benjamin Miller

JoyceKetterer said:

@Simon Cozens Maybe that's how they mean it but it wouldn't address the problem I'm trying to describe because it's still a platform you have to join.  My point about cloud fonts is that there's no way to self publish.

It's interesting, because to me, the prevalence of web/cloud fonts represents a sort of "one step forward, two steps back" for small outfits. It's technically possible for anyone to publish web/cloud fonts (provided you can get the auth-token configuration together, if you want to restrict them to certain licensees, or just the server capacity if you want them to be freely accessible). But software platform development is hard (and expensive), and even if you can get that right, scaling is hard (and expensive). And so (marketing/awareness problems aside) an independent outfit would find it hard to compete with Monotype, simply because you now need lots of resources in order to support many people using your fonts again. This is similar to how one used to need lots of resources to supply physical type and phototype to customers in the olden days.

The desktop font revolution — when all you needed was to be able to send a file, not host it for every instance in which it was used — seems to be a rare blip in time when an independent foundry without much in the way of resources could conceivably scale in terms of font prevalence on the same level the giants always could. It's a sad thing to me that as people move back to the cloud it seems that we've taken two steps back towards necessary dominance of the giants.

What concerns me is that I'm not sure how the indies could compete on that front, except by (1) encouraging use of desktop fonts rather than cloud fonts and (2) encouraging clients to host the fonts on their own servers (which would scare people away because it's harder). I'm worried about a cloud font monoculture, where to most people, if you can't copy-paste a JS snippet from MyFonts/Adobe/Google, the font might as well not exist…

(Though considering the lead that a handful of popular fonts have always had in usage rates, it could be argued that a font monoculture has largely always existed for many people who only would use Times, Palatino and Helvetica…)

JoyceKetterer

@Daniel Benjamin Miller I agree with most of what you said but I think your conclusions are a bit too "desktop" focused (mentally insert quotes going forward). As with everything in this era, shit's getting automated. 

I think the saving grace from an income perspective is going to be the move from graphic designer heavy output to embedding because I don't see developers wanting hosted fonts for apps or web any time soon. They have various concerns including hosting outages and security. So, I can keep selling those licenses directly.

The problem is that the desktop users will always be the ones who find and specify the font so we can't just turn our backs on desktop cloud fonts.  

As an established foundry I'll be fine but I always think about those just starting out.  Everything about how Darden Studio does things is influenced by the ways that Josh got a raw deal with Freight and the awareness that it's a common tale for young artists in music (an industry with a lot of similarities to fonts).  

Christopher Slye

It’s important to remember that “cloud fonts” largely grew out of web font services (e.g. Typekit ➝ Typekit Desktop ➝ Adobe Fonts), so I think to some extent the cloud solutions for desktop fonts wouldn’t have happened so easily if web services hadn’t appeared. And Typekit, et al., provided something that many foundries were pleading for at the time -- to give them a secure web font solution that wouldn’t result in fonts sitting open on servers everywhere. I don’t see it as large companies coercing small designers into a big corporate model. (There are still plenty of fabulous, successful foundries that have done fine without Adobe/Typekit or Monotype’s help.)

Also, through most of the ’90s, it was still pretty hard to distribute a typeface without the help of one of the established distributors. Before HTML/CSS got sophisticated, I think it was very difficult to a designer to succeed on their own. (It happened, but I think it was not easy.) Given the relative ease today of developing a website with seamless ecommerce, I’d say things are much better today for independents.

I don’t know what’s in store for Adobe now, but last year I heard a lot about how foundries were starting to feel they had no choice but to join Adobe Fonts. That was a sign of a certain kind of success, but I always wanted Typekit/Adobe Fonts to be a choice designers took because it was a sustainable, beneficial partnership for them (e.g. to reach many, many more users than they could otherwise), not because they had to. I do understand that there are certain unintended consequences of someone like Adobe or Monotype massively scaling up a service for millions of people, but for now it seems like there are still many options for a type designer to succeed on their own terms.

JoyceKetterer

@Christopher Slye I think cloud font are predominantly a good thing.  It's an improvement from a licensing perspective but it does represent a contraction.  There's always a price for progress.  

Chris Lozos

Throughout the history of type, type designers have been at the mercy of the technology of their time and, mostly, the gatekeepers to that technology (the Monotype of their day). There was a wonderful period 15 years or so ago when the small foundry had a greater voice in their financial success. That was a beautiful time and type design was mostly about type design. Will it ever happen again or are we tilting at windmills?

Daniel Benjamin Miller

Chris Lozos said:

Throughout the history of type, type designers have been at the mercy of the technology of their time and, mostly, the gatekeepers to that technology (the Monotype of their day). There was a wonderful period 15 years or so ago when the small foundry had a greater voice in their financial success. That was a beautiful time and type design was mostly about type design. Will it ever happen again or are we tilting at windmills?

The era of paying for font licenses seems to be drawing to a close, or is in decline. Not in the sense that fonts won't be licensed — they still will be — but rather that the license won't be what is so often paid for. Before digital fonts, people were paying for the physical items necessary for printing. Then, for a brief time, people paid to license the design. Soon, people will be licensing the design, but really paying for the infrastructure to use them as web fonts (or somesuch) principally…

JoyceKetterer

@Daniel Benjamin Miller I don't see it that way at all. We're doing very well and the move to embeded fonts makes it easier for us to observe uses and get paid for them.  

Ray Larabie

There's a new generation that doesn't have the means or knowledge to make use of a traditional desktop font in a zip. That's the main reason I have faith in cloud fonts. But I wonder what kind of visual impact it'll have. Consider Google and Adobe's relatively limited selection. It reminds me of the 1980's where you'd mostly see Letraset/Mecanorma dry transfer display type while phototype catalog typefaces were vanishing. Letraset/Mecanorma had relatively few fonts available compared to phototype services link PLINC.

Thomas Phinney

Google, Adobe and Monotype online font libraries are all continuing to grow. Ray is doubtless right that some new folks don’t know how to use desktop fonts, but … for any given user, the selection of fonts available to them continues to grow.

Peter Constable

A few years back, one of the last major projects I drove while still working on text/fonts at Microsoft was to make it possible for fonts to be sold in the Microsoft online Store.

Now, this was mandated at the time from above—from the President over the Windows division—and there were various reasons why I didn't think it was a worthwhile investment:

• It didn't actually address the user scenarios that had prompted the exec resolve to make it happen. (What those scenarios really needed was font install that didn't require an admin account—we also did that in the same release.)
• We could only provide a Windows-only solution. (I thought at a minimum acquired fonts should be available in any MS products regardless of platform.)
• Potential customers who'd be willing to pay for quality fonts already had other retail channels they were using and that better suited their needs (larger catalog, better catalog browsing features, not tied to Windows, Web font options...).
• Potential customers that wouldn't be hindered by those limitations would be looking for free or very inexpensive offerings—i.e. crapware they'd already be getting from from various free-font-download sites. And adding crapware to the Store catalog would definitely not enhance overall perceptions of the Store.

However... and why I'm bothering to mention this here... there was one potential benefit I  saw for smaller type foundries: Microsoft would take a much smaller portion of the sales revenue as reseller fees. As I recall, at that time, it was as low as 5%. (I'm not sure what it is now.)

Of course, that might not have been enough to overcome the shortcomings. It's no particular surprise to me that it hasn't exactly flourished.

JoyceKetterer

@Peter Constable Yeah, I think that all the players missed the window in which an itunes model for fonts would have been desirable (e.i. "desktop licensing that's restricted to an ecosystem).  By the time they got on board music had already moved to a "spotify" model for which the counterpart is cloud fonts.  

JoyceKetterer

Bringing this thread back to Monotype, I don't see their cloud font model competing with other platforms because it misunderstands fonts.  Fonts are component software, not an end to themselves.  The best place to offer cloud fonts will always be document generation software.  For now, Adobe has a near monopoly but it's a matter of time before salesforce, squarespace or one of the design software upstarts makes a better product and starts to get some traction.

Chris Lozos

I hope so, Joyce, monopoly never breeds good work.

JoyceKetterer

@Chris Lozos true.  but it's gonna be hard on established foundries because Adobe has been good to us and no one else show signs of respecting us at all.

Andreas Stötzner

Since I see myself as font designer in the first place, I feel somehow uncomfortable with the fact that more and more attention shifted towards technical and policy issues over the last years (just have a look at the thread themes in this place). So, for me the favourable merchandise partner will be the one who offers a) a fair share; b) a system of procedures which helps me to concentrate my energy on the design work. This is why I moved from Myfonts towards Fontspring. Myfonts still offers my fonts which have been there for a while, but since 2017 they get no new releases. Also my next release (a handsome sans familiy) is most likely to become a Fontspring-only thing.

Chris Lozos

@Andreas Stötzner  I am also, quite primarily a designer and quite secondarily, a technologist.  I am thrilled that the technology is there as a tool and that there are people who love that arena and the business arena.  I would be happy just drawing letters and crafting fonts.  It seems unfair that those of us who create the product seem to have the least say in distribution and profitability of product.

Albert_Jan_Pool

John Hudson said:

Is it time for a type union?

You can't have a union unless you're employees. Organisation to protect or extend the interests of independent type designers and foundries would constitute a cabal and be contrary to antitrust laws. As I understand it, the only way independent designers and foundries could collectively organise and not run afoul of antitrust laws would be to cease to be independent and actually form some form of cooperative corporation with the same legal personhood as a company like Monotype.

[I have discussed this topic in the past with a lawyer, but I am not a lawyer and this does not constitute legal advice.]

The issue with the antitrust laws making in virtually impossible for independent type designers to effectively unite may be true for the US, it is not necessarily so in European countries.