Adobe Royalty reports

Miles Newlyn

There's a lot of data in the Adobe royalty reports, none of which is intelligible to me.
Just wondering if anyone had made something that makes them a little easier to understand - i.e. charting the data.

JoyceKetterer

Yeah, the format is hard to read, but also the data is so flattened that it's not super good for tracking trends.

 I decided a while back to only think about the total for each family, not even styles or sub families.  I move all the families to individual tabs and then make a tab for totals.  Then I at least know how much each family earned each quarter.  I also have a spreadsheet for each family for our retail earnings to which I add the adobe totals.  Then, I can say intelligent sounding things like "in its fourth year Halyard made 3/4 of what Omnes made," which are actually nonsense but it makes me feel like I know things.  

Occasionally, I want to know more detail like "is it only Jubilat medium that's making all the overage, now that Bernie Sanders' used it for his logo in TWO presidential campaigns?"  The Adobe reports do have that information if you bother to look. But, when I want to know something more complicated it's generally too anonymized to be useful.  

Christopher Slye

Hello from the inventor of the Adobe royalty reports! It’s been a few years now but I recall there were some partners who liked having all the details in a relatively dense CSV, but I appreciate that having all the data put into something more visual and digestible would have helped.

To be honest I considered it a starting point and just never had the time and resources to pursue anything else. The rest of the team cared (and still cares I’m sure) about giving partners more insights, but there are always many competing priorities.

Compiling and computing what goes out today was a fairly serious undertaking with a relatively complex Python script to process the raw data that comes out of the Adobe backend. Just getting all the amounts reliably accurate was the first priority — and I believe it’s all held up pretty well since I left. Sorry I couldn’t make it prettier!

JoyceKetterer

@Christopher Slye Thanks for chiming in.  I didn't mean to imply criticism of your spreadsheet. I think you did the absolute best you could with a very complicated dataset.  Additionally, your document does a stellar job of conveying the information needed to verify that the payments comport with the terms of the contract.  Anything else would be gravy and I doubt it could be done inside that document.  As you know, I've always wanted to know which styles are being used together by the same users – there's no way to put that information into the royalty statement.

Christopher Slye

No worries! There’s plenty to criticize, at least as far as how dry the current report is. At Type Network I really am back to the same challenges with that (those) data. What we get from Adobe is shared out to our partners, and I am currently looking for ways to post-process it and improve on the presentation.

But meanwhile, if anyone is baffled by something specific about Adobe’s reports, I might be able to comment (depending on whether it seems Adobe-privileged or not).

JoyceKetterer

@Christopher Slye If you feel you can share what you end up doign at Type Network to digest the data and track it I'd be very curious.  Thanks!