Adobe's unlimited web license

Nadine Chahine

In the Enterprise Sales Q&A that we had last week it became apparent that most if not all attendees of the session had no clue that subscribers to Creative Cloud seem to be able to use the web fonts via their subscription for commercial websites and with unlimited page views. In other words, a brand owner is able to get fonts via the subscription to use for their brand's websites without any extra cost or any limitations on traffic to the site.

I am not aware of how Adobe calculate royalties and it is possible that foundries are properly compensated for this. However, it's good to keep in mind that unlimited usage can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars/euros/gold etc and it just seems very strange that foundries that distribute with Adobe are not aware of this. 

You can read the terms of service here.

And also check the FAQs here.

In case you don't want to click, I took screenshots of the relevant parts:

From the FAQ:


For the terms of service:


Is it possible that there is a restriction somewhere that I'm not aware of? Couldn't find anything to that effect so far.

Stuart Sandler

This is clearly stated in the Font Licensing page you shared:

Is there a pageview limitation for the web fonts I use on my websites?

No. There is no limitation on the number of monthly pageviews for web fonts hosted from your Creative Cloud subscription.


It is worth noting that participating foundries are compensated based on pageviews for all web font uses even as there are no restrictions on pageviews for its customers. Also there are cases where web fonts have been used in embedded online apps which is restricted by Adobe's TOS which we have successfully converted into a large recurrent enterprise use license.

DanRhatigan

Technically, yes, that is all correct. In practice, Adobe’s web font service makes it unwieldy solution for larger companies to use an Adobe kit for their web fonts. 

For one thing, Adobe’s license only covers web fonts served by Adobe, so no self-hosting, and the font delivery is entirely dependent on Adobe’s CDN. 

For another, those kits are tied to a single user. So although the kit can be transferred from one user to another, that’s another layer of site management that needs to be factored in. 

I haven’t seen stats on usage of the web fonts in quite a while (other than my own royalty reports, since they do pay on the amount of page views), but the lack of emphasis on web usage in the product suggests it’s not a huge part of the Adobe Fonts strategy as it was in the Adobe Typekit era. 

DanRhatigan

That being said, as a user it is a GREAT service for smaller sites that don’t mind hosted fonts and don’t need to worry about who owns the account. 

Nadine Chahine

From what I've heard foundries are generally happy with Adobe's compensation, but my surprise is mostly that foundries do not seem to be aware of the terms of distribution of their own fonts. Still to this date, after all the mess with quite a few distributers.

How can we as an industry sleepwalk like this? 

Also, how come Adobe does not limit the page views? Would it really make a difference to most users? It would make a lot of difference to foundries if the higher brackets were dealt with directly by the foundry.

Adam Twardoch

There’s a global conspiracy that has been going on for centuries. Not long after you’re born, a member of the legal profession visits your parents’ house, and performs a secret hypnotic induction that conditions you for the entirety of your life — whenever you come across one of the special trigger words, a sudden case of narcolepsy befalls you. 

I’ve been researching this for a long time. So far, I’ve uncovered a few of the trigger words (but I think there are more): 

“Whereas”, “Wherefore”, “Hereinafter”, “Hitherto”

To those who have woken up after a brief doze: don’t re-read the above words or you’ll fall asleep again. 

As a result of this, whenever a person starts reading a text such as terms of service, a EULA, a contract, they fall asleep or experience instant extreme fatigue. So people sign contract without reading them, never read the terms of their employment, or of the deals that they’re part of. 

Adam Twardoch

The above was obviously my attempt at satire On a more serious note: 

Also, how come Adobe does not limit the page views? Would it really make a difference to most users? It would make a lot of difference to foundries if the higher brackets were dealt with directly by the foundry.

Given that it’s all not spelled out very clearly, and most people don’t really read the terms — I think foundries are free to offer “unlimited web views” licenses. As Dan mentioned, some larger clients will prefer the freedom to (in addition) self-host, and some will prefer a license that’s signed directly with the foundry, which allows for better support etc.

It’s true that the Adobe Creative Cloud license “technically” gives me unlimited web views, but that’s tied to the Creative Cloud license, which is not very convenient for a larger company (as the CC licenses usually are tied to a person in the design department). 

So, while a company that wants/needs “unlimited” web views may get it via the CC license, this should not preclude foundries from advertising their own offerings — which could offer the client the ability to self-host, something that Adobe CC does not offer. 

Nadine Chahine

Hi Adam,
This isn't a question of foundries being able to offer unlimited licenses on their own shops (that's a bad idea in any case) but a question of what a distributer offers, and how much control does a foundry have over that. The fact that one employee (an admin account if need be) can take out a creative cloud license and have that be enough for millions of page views for a large brand is mind boggling, especially that I have serious doubts on how much that translates into royalties. The fact that a foundry does not have any control on the pricing of such a large license should be enough to raise alarm bells.

Adam Twardoch

My understanding is that Adobe decided to go with the idea of “Adobe Fonts partners with the world's leading type foundries to bring thousands of beautiful fonts to designers every day. No need to worry about licensing, ...” and “Simplified licensing”. 

This is in stark opposition to MyFonts, where each foundry brings their own EULA, and there's no way to even search for the terms and filter fonts by permissions & restrictions. Write a few people bought fonts on MyFonts only to find out later that the EULA of some of the desktop fonts disallows embedding in PDF documents for example. 

Because the dominant distributors didn't really present the licenses properly even though that's what they've been selling, a gap emerged for an offering that gave end-users “simplified” licensing. I can imagine that people at Adobe strongly favored this when Adobe Fonts got fully integrated into the Creative Cloud subscription. After all, the model of Adobe Fonts today is very different from the original Typekit.  

Adam Twardoch

Nadine Chahine said:

This isn't a question of foundries being able to offer unlimited licenses on their own shops (that's a bad idea in any case) (...)

Would you care to elaborate what you think is the bad idea? Any kind of offering of view-unlimited licenses for web fonts, or offering those on the foundry's own shop? It could be either and I'd like to understand your position better. 

TimAhrens

This is not as scandalous as it may seem. Adobe essentially purchases pageviews from the foundries and gives them to their customers. It is perfectly rational not to worry about how Adobe gives the pageviews they purchased from us to their customers. If I sold apples I wouldn’t worry about whether my customer sells them (and at which price), or gives them away for free, or uses them as a part of the apple cakes they are selling, as an all-you-can-eat offer, or not.

TimAhrens

It seems you are seeing a risk of abuse somewhere. For us as a foundry, I cannot see such as risk. In case a large company uses a single CC subscription for billions of page views then we as a foundry will earn a nice lump of money, and Adobe will pay for it. The risk is Adobe’s, not ours.

TimAhrens

Nadine Chahine said:

...The fact that one employee (an admin account if need be) can take out a creative cloud license and have that be enough for millions of page views for a large brand is mind boggling, especially that I have serious doubts on how much that translates into royalties. ...

Why do you have doubts? It translates into royalties just like small numbers of page views do. We wouldn’t have joined Adobe if we didn’t find the rate Adobe pays per pageview appropriate (or at least acceptable) for small volumes. This means they are certainly appropriate for unexpected large volumes.

Adam Twardoch

TimAhrens said:

This is not a scandalous as it may seem. Adobe essentially purchases pageviews from the foundries and gives them to their customers. It is perfectly rational not to worry about how Adobe gives the pageviews they purchased from us to their customers. If I sold apples I wouldn’t worry about whether my customer sells them (and at which price), or gives them away for free, or uses them as a part of the apple cakes they are selling, as an all-you-can-eat offer, or not.

This is a valuable perspective. It's kind of an extension of the thinking: with a subscription like CC, the client doesn't need to think whether the fonts they end up using are from one and the same family or foundry or from different ones. A large client may have a website that uses 10 fonts from 5 foundries, each ranking below 20k views, or even 50 fonts from 1 foundry, each at 20k views, or the website might use one font from 1 foundry at 1M views. The result will always be "1M fontpageviews" but distributed differently. 

With a tiered model (up to so and so many views or above etc.) it makes the client's life complicated. But if it's the distributor (Adobe) who does the calculations & pays for the views to the foundries, and basically offests their own costs by collecting the same monthly fee from 1 client who "uses" 1M fontpageviews and 10 clients who use 0 views because they don't use Adobe Fonts or web fonts at all — that's one model. 

Nadine Chahine

Those types of deals should be offered offline, if at all, as often that requires bespoke negotiations with customers. This is one of the things we often discuss in the sales trainings with Julia and one of the most important things Julia had mentioned during the talk last week.

Johannes Neumeier

And to being with, pageviews are a horrifically vague measurement. E.g. on the one hand single page apps, endless scrolling pages, dashboards, etc. all may serve a lot of individual "views" to an end user, all for the price of "one pageview". On the other hand you have clickbait sites that drive users through funnels of as many page loads as possible (for ad revenue per pageview). Both practices distort the actual "value" of a pageview for the context of royalties.

To paraphrase a popular TV show... Who's webfont is it anyway? The business model where royalties are made up and the pageviews don't matter

Nadine Chahine

Oh I answered Adam without first refreshing the browser so missed Tim's notes! With regards to the issue of very large page views: these can be billed for hundreds of thousands for a single client. It is highly unlikely that Adobe is paying anything near that related to page views from a single client on a £50 license. The math doesn't add up. As an example:

A brand requires a family for 200 million page views a month. 

Scenario 1: they get the fonts from the foundry at a deal worth 312,530 euros (I chose this pricing from an existing foundry)

Scenario 2: they get the fonts via the Creative Cloud subscription at 50 euros a month

What kind of royalty scheme would allow for both to generate similar amounts for a foundry? Scenario 2 is underpriced by Adobe which is the whole point. Even if Adobe's model is paying well for this scenario now, if this scenario becomes more common, they will need to adjust how they calculate royalties or they will need to limit page views.

TimAhrens

Nadine Chahine said:

With regards to the issue of very large page views: these can be billed for hundreds of thousands for a single client.

Just to avoid a misunderstanding: When you say “can be billed” you mean (1) a client is willing to pay this amount, or (2) merely putting that figure on a quote, or (3) somehow extort this from the client?

Adam Twardoch

As with most subscription models (for electricity, internet, phone, hosting, streaming, various software offers), some users pay a flat fee and use the assets a lot, while others pay the same flat fee but use the same assets sporadically or they don't at all.

In a way, those who pay but don't use subsidize those who pay and use — but they themselves still get the benefit of the “potential access”. 

Subscription models are always a mix. The savings are usually in the transaction costs. There’s an additional cost (financial, uncertainty, labor) associated with researching, choosing, deciding, negotiating, maintaining records etc., signing a deal and then possibly canceling it, of a single license for a single product from a single vendor. 

Having a “library access” that's associated with a predictable tecurring flat fee, which allows variable usage — subscription models show that they can be convenient for the clients/consumers, but also (if done right) can work for the asset IP vendors. 

That's my understanding. If a font is used a lot by one client and Adobe pays high royalties to the foundry, Adobe doesn't finance these royalties from the subscription fees of that one client, but from a portion of subscription fees of clients who don't use fonts at all. 

John Hudson

Tim, do you mind if I ask when you signed up to distribute fonts through Adobe? The impression I have from talking to people at various foundries is that the royalty rates offered have decreased significantly over time, so not everyone has the same kind of returns.

Nadine Chahine

TimAhrens said:

Nadine Chahine said:

With regards to the issue of very large page views: these can be billed for hundreds of thousands for a single client.

Just to avoid a misunderstanding: When you say “can be billed” you mean (1) a client is willing to pay this amount, or (2) merely putting that figure on a quote, or (3) somehow extort this from the client?

It means both (1) and (2). You cannot extort (3) unless it's an IP infringement and that sort of behaviour is not recommended at all and will get clients to really resent you.

And just to be clear, that sort of pricing (above 300k) is reasonable for such a large license and I took the pricing from a very well respected foundry. It's also way less than what Monotype charges, as far as I've heard.

TimAhrens

John, we did sign up relatively early I suppose but what I am trying to say is not related to the absolute amounts.

Pricing, in general, tends to be nonlinear: The per-unit price is lower as the quantity increases. As far as I have seen, this is the norm for webfont licences as well.

The starting point of this discussions seems to be the possible scenario, “Oh no, we didn’t consider high-volume cases, which give us inappropriate royalties whereas they were appropriate for small volumes”. This scenario can only happen if the Adobe contract is significantly more nonlinear than the common practice. In case the Adobe contract is linear or follows a similar progression as the common practice, this scenario is impossible: If the royalties in the high-volume case are inappropriate then they must have been inappropriate to start with (also for small-volume scenarios). In other words, unexpected high-volume cases don’t constitute a “risk”. Hope this makes sense.

John Hudson

The per-unit price is lower as the quantity increases. As far as I have seen, this is the norm for webfont licences as well.

I have seen some cases of an inflection point in the case of per-page-view webfont pricing. The thinking is presumably to make pricing inexpensive for small sites and not to penalise them as they grow, but to flip the model in recognition that sites with very heavy traffic are more likely associated with very wealthy companies. So the per-unit price for page views decreases in the lower end of the tier pricing, but then increases past a certain point. Another way some foundries address this is by charging a one-time license fee for lower numbers of monthly page views but an annual fee for larger numbers.

TimAhrens

John, good point. In the end, pricing, in whichever field, is guided by the assumed willingness to pay certain amounts, by certain sectors of potential clients. Yes, in specific cases, we may decide (or assume) that this willingness is above-proportional rather than below-proportional. For my own type design tools, I suspect multi-user type design studios would be prepared to pay more than the multiple of a single-user licence price. Offering above-proportional multi-user licences would be really odd, though (they could just buy multiple single-user licences), so I am sticking with a linear model.

TimAhrens

Nadine Chahine said:

TimAhrens said:

Nadine Chahine said:

With regards to the issue of very large page views: these can be billed for hundreds of thousands for a single client.

Just to avoid a misunderstanding: When you say “can be billed” you mean (1) a client is willing to pay this amount, or (2) merely putting that figure on a quote, or (3) somehow extort this from the client?

It means both (1) and (2). You cannot extort (3) unless it's an IP infringement and that sort of behaviour is not recommended at all and will get clients to really resent you.

And just to be clear, that sort of pricing (above 300k) is reasonable for such a large license and I took the pricing from a very well respected foundry. It's also way less than what Monotype charges, as far as I've heard.

Sorry, I am still confused. Is this 300k webfont deal a confirmed case that has happened in the past? Or is it the price someone has asked for but we don’t know whether anyone has ever paid it? As foundries, we should be interested in what clients are actually, demonstrably willing to pay. Also, what does “Monotype charges” mean? Again, is it something they ask for (unsuccessfully), or are we talking about actual deals that have happened?

Igor Petrovic

I agree with Nadine on this. The logic of multiplying basic desktop/webfont price per pageview tier or the number of seats historically failed to take care of type designers, making type design an unfeasible profession in general.

If a decent font family takes one year to complete, that would mean $50k to match the average annual salary of a graphic designer, not to mention other factors that would raise this figure (delayed and unstable income, missing benefits, etc.). Not many type designers manage to extract this amount of money from a typeface.

That is because basic desktop or web font licenses are very cheap. This model was invented to serve the rise of web and desktop publishing in the 90s and is orientated toward a small single user. Multiplying very cheap is still cheap, and big companies that make millions or billions practically misuse this model to get away with paying a few thousand for a font.

Not to mention that desktop licensing is very hard to follow, number of seats, distributing font on the internal net, etc.

All in all, even if Adobe pays proportional royalties for enterprise clients that is cheap because the base price is unbelievably cheap.

Miles Newlyn

Adobe web royalties are approximately 1% of the price of a web license from Monotype, based on page views.

Nadine Chahine

TimAhrens said:

Nadine Chahine said:

TimAhrens said:

Nadine Chahine said:

With regards to the issue of very large page views: these can be billed for hundreds of thousands for a single client.

Just to avoid a misunderstanding: When you say “can be billed” you mean (1) a client is willing to pay this amount, or (2) merely putting that figure on a quote, or (3) somehow extort this from the client?

It means both (1) and (2). You cannot extort (3) unless it's an IP infringement and that sort of behaviour is not recommended at all and will get clients to really resent you.

And just to be clear, that sort of pricing (above 300k) is reasonable for such a large license and I took the pricing from a very well respected foundry. It's also way less than what Monotype charges, as far as I've heard.

Sorry, I am still confused. Is this 300k webfont deal a confirmed case that has happened in the past? Or is it the price someone has asked for but we don’t know whether anyone has ever paid it? As foundries, we should be interested in what clients are actually, demonstrably willing to pay. Also, what does “Monotype charges” mean? Again, is it something they ask for (unsuccessfully), or are we talking about actual deals that have happened?

The 300k is pricing that can be seen online on an indie foundry website. As far as I know, it is possible to get license deals that are this much or higher (and yes this happens so not hypothetical). For MT pricing and from what I have heard, there's been many instances of multi-million dollar/euro/pound deals for a single typeface family. You can try to look for shareholder reports from back when they were publicly traded to get a sense of what revenue used to be like.

John Hudson

There is a numbers game played between large, well-capitalised corporations that is at an order of magnitude above what most small foundries assume to be normal or typical pricing. This is an example of vertical market segmentation. The amount you can charge for things depends on the market in which you operate.

JoyceKetterer

There's a chance Nadine is looking at my pricing, given we are an indie foundry and we publish our entire web pricing table.  

I can tell you in all honesty that our highest prices are generally only used in license enforcement. This is because we price per style and have very big families. A company that is going about this carefully is going to get a license for only the styles they need. We have been compensated at those levels and we  routinely sell licenses at the various pricing teir for fewer styles.

I also want to agree with other posters who have expressed incredulity at Nadine’s shock and disgust over the way Adobe web works.  

@John Hudson , My understanding is that the reason foundries who signed on more recently with Adobe make less is not because the pricing table is different, but because the guarantee is lower. Those of us who signed up ages ago may have a fairly high guarantee, but the guarantee we have is still applied to the same pricing table, I think.  That means that in the scenario where a large company used our fonts via the Adobe web service we would all make the same amount of money.

it’s also my understanding, as @DanRhatigan said, that large companies generally find it too cumbersome to use Adobe Web fonts.  I have several large customers who use our fonts at the  basic level through Adobe, but purchase a web license from us for exactly this reason. Also, most Europeans think that GPR prohibits Adobe fonts.

 It’s probably the case that the reason most foundries don’t understand that the Adobe license theoretical permits unlimited use is because they don’t really need to. 

Adobe does things this way because when Adobe initially bought  type kit they did try to Monetize third-party hosted Web embedding and discovered that none of the big companies even wanted it. That’s when they just opened up the license to make it more simple. This is a non-issue, in practical terms, even if it can be made to sound very scary.

Nadine Chahine

For clarification, it was another foundry that I looked at. My feelings on the issue are not disgust for sure, but rather disbelief that foundries don't know the terms of their distribution. That is the real problem as far as I can see.