For our latest quarter we've seen nearly a 50% drop in our Adobe royalties. This is close to the point of us deciding to pull out of Adobe, but we'll wait to see the results of the next quarter. I'm curious if anyone else has experienced a sudden drop in their royalties.
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I can return the share by saying I saw a very small drop over last quarter, and have seen very small drops for the past three quarters consistently. It hasn't been enough to really worry me. We're still hovering around the same dollar amount I have regarded as our average since the new counting system came in.
Have you analysed the reports? There is some chance there's an explanation for this that isn't Adobe's fault. Had it been that you were getting a lot of overage from a single family (which might have been one or two large customers that just rebranded)? Is it possible that your efforts with Font radar to teach graphic designers not to host client websites is having this side effect?
I find the reports completely incomprehensible, so I'm not able to do any analysis.
Regarding FontRadar, we've moved about 30 users over to Adobe hosted fonts. We haven't lost any AdobeCC users, rather the opposite; we've 'sold' AdobeCC subscriptions to some clients.
Adobe web royalties comprises about 6% of our Adobe royalties.
Here's what I do every time I get a report from Adobe:
1. import to a spreadsheet
2. move each font family to it's own tab
3. create a summary tab for a the totals of each family. this way I can see if any change is distributed or only from one family
4. go back to the family tabs and sort for each family by the overage column. this way I can see how many styles got overage and if my overage per family has gone up or down. Overage doesn't equate directly to dollars but its a consistent number I can track.
I have a fairly complex script that ingests the Adobe reports, and it’s on my list to examine a little deeper, e.g. how much of the payment is the guarantees, the difference between that and “earned” royalties (from actual use), and so on. I do know from experience that it’s common for a new font to take a while to build up a following, so to speak, but I’m not sure I’ve ever looked to see if a typeface has experienced a big drop over time. That would be interesting to look for.
Miles, if you have any specific questions about the data on the Adobe reports, I could try to answer them here, or DM me if you prefer.
@Christopher Slye Good to know TN's Adobe royalties are healthy. I'll DM you for a little assistance.
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There were a lot of them and they are new and exciting.
It doesn't really explain a 50% drop (not sure over what time frame the drop happened, @Miles Newlyn) but it could explain some drop. Maybe all the new exploration energy went to variable fonts, so that the numbers are more about the steady committed users of a given font.
Since Adobe is now auto-deactivating unused desktop fonts, I wonder if there was a lag over the holidays where people just used fonts less, so fonts were deactivated more than average.
1. A while back we corrected a mistake in the naming of our fonts. This will have caused all the old versions to be deactivated. Due to the timing of the "activation window" the drop in use was delayed until Q1 2023
2. Adobe had a system change in December to prevent users in mainland China from accessing their service which they cannot legally allow. This may have contributed a minor change to the overall payment.