Adobe's unlimited web license

JoyceKetterer

Foundries are mostly run by creatives who don't know lots of things that a business side person would make sure to know.  Some of them matter but you get a lot of passes in life.  This is one that doesn't matter.

The much more likely scenario is that a very big company finds a font they love on Adobe CC that they wouldn't have otherwise found and the the foundry gets a referral to sell them a locally hosted web embedding license directly. 

TimAhrens

Thanks, John and Joyce, that’s very insightful.

Maybe how much you can ask for (and get paid) also depends on the design quality of the fonts you are offering.

There are fonts out there for which you can ask for six-figure amounts (and get paid) because there are wealthy clients who want them really badly. This probably means they are really outstanding designs (or because the client has been using them for a long time).

Other typefaces (most of them, I suspect) would never sell for such an amount as they are not unique enough, or, plain and simple, not that great. From the less desired ones you may earn hardly anything, that’s the harsh reality, not only because of a changing, unfair market.

Is this a naive view? Can you sell a 300k licence for almost any typeface out there if you are just bold enough to ask for it?

Johannes Neumeier

I suspect above a certain base quality this has less to do with font quality (aesthetic or technical) and more with foundry brand. Corporate Janes and Joes don't just decide on a random font for which to dish six figures out. They are advised by a branding agency to do so. Of course, what is en vogue is a chicken and egg type of situation between agencies and foundries, where the cool kids play in a market somewhat removed from bulk retail.

Stuart Sandler

Dare I say there's a ton of overthinking going on here - Buying a font is no different than buying a car or groceries or a phone. You find the thing you want, then you find the best price then you buy it. The less stores that carry it means you MUST purchase the item from one of those stores and if they're all high prices, you'll pay if you really want it or look for a lesser priced similar item.

Consumer buying habits don't change for fonts vs other items purchased just because they're fonts. Even corporations don't want to overspend and any internal buyer will know this is part of what they do to keep costs down (to earn their keep).

As a foundry, you can 'strike a deal' meaning you'll get as much as the buyer is willing to pay and if you ask more than the buyer will pay, they may go elsewhere. If you ask too little for the license, you'll only know if they agree too quickly to your offer and you could've asked for more.

The ultimate goal is to find the 'market price' meaning just like when ordering seafood at a restaurant, the restaurant knows what it has sold the same item for over time to its customers and has established a price based on that. It's much easier to come to the table with more purchased licenses under your belt to know what to charge because you've established a track record.

It's entirely possible for foundries to find their own market price and estimate licenses based on these - As a distributor given the volume of OEM license estimates we generate, it's just much faster for us to get to the correct market price since we know what buyers will pay that is fair to all parties and in concert with what has been paid for similar uses by others.

Thierry Blancpain

@Stuart Sandler Fonts are bought by professional buyers, i.e. this is a B2B transaction. Comparing these to B2C (business to consumer) transactions will always be problematic. Buyers function differently and deals are reached differently.

Beyond that: fonts licensing is usually bought at the end of a long, and for large corporate clients, expensive process. There’s a certain path dependency and nobody wants to go back and edit hundreds of templates, designs, guidelines that already use that typeface, get approval from your CEO, and so on. The cost of changing all of that factors into the willingness to pay a certain price.

John Hudson

Buying a font...

Fonts are bought...

We do not sell fonts (except when actually selling the IP): we sell licenses to use fonts. I know y’all know that, and that talking about buying and selling fonts is just shorthand, but the fact that what is purchased is a use license—the customer buys into a legal agreement—means that fonts are actually very little like cars or groceries (but, yes, like phones for a lot of people).

Further to what Thierry wrote, and borrowing from Stuart’s analogies: lots of corporations and their branding consultants are unaware that more than one store exists. When told that other, smaller stores exist where they can buy things directly from the people who make them, and probably more cheaply, they lean towards what they know because of ‘convenience’—not wanting to have to pay lawyers to spend time reading and querying different license agreements—, and because they prefer not to buy into mutiple legal agreements with multiple unknown entities, even if this ends up costing them more in terms of purchase price. Ironically, the larger the price of a particular purchase, the more likely a corporation may be to opt for the more expensive option if it is viewed as more convenient and lower risk.

Stuart Sandler

Ultimately @John Hudson puts a fine point on the fact that there are as sophisticated buyers/sellers as there are unsophisticated buyers/sellers each with their own reasons (known/uknown/assumed) as to their buying/selling/pricing behaviors.

With respect @Thierry Blancpain, I think the lines are blurring around professional buyers vs employees tasked with buying font licenses as to my comment just above.

Thierry Blancpain

@Stuart Sandler I believe you’re misunderstanding what I mean. Just being a part of a B2B transaction doesn’t make someone a “professional buyer of font licensing”. I’ve met very few of those over the years. But they are nonetheless a professional buyer in the sense that they represent a business buying an asset / tool from another business. There’s extremely limited impulse buying, for example—a behavior that many B2C transactions are based on. 

Importantly, the typefaces that we’re talking about here show an inelastic price behavior, i.e. demand is not primarily based on price and is in fact not primarily influenced by price.

For example, compare Lineto’s $225 per style pricing (and their licensing terms) to some $75 full sans family discount offer on MyFonts. If buyers thought that these two products were interchangeable, Lineto would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.

Stuart Sandler

@Thierry Blancpain if we're referring to the specific font being licensed and why it's being licensed, of that there can be no argument - The buyer buys what they want/need/are directed to as they desire and for whatever purpose it is intended (as granted by the seller) - Arguing that point is a fools errand. I don't assume it's trivial for a committed buyer to just hot swap because the price was higher than the budget.

My point addresses comments from to a few posts ago that both the foundry and the buyer (the parties) range wildly in their sophistication, strategy and understanding of what is being bought, sold (as to Nadine's point), the price the license is being purchased at and the minutia of the license language.

Christopher Slye

Late to this conversation, but I can say that Adobe eliminated Typekit’s original tiered webfonts pricing because it was simply too complicated to manage. Presenting simple entitlements and pricing in the Creative Cloud era was the priority.

But as Tim and others said, the compensation to foundries didn’t change substantially. Extremely high-traffic sites were rare, but they did happen occasionally and they did generate some significant royalties. I like Tim’s apple analogy; Adobe was happy to pay foundries for all the usage and saw benefits in making fonts a value-add in the larger CC subscription model. Presenting font usage tiers to subscribers — which would amount to pro-level add-on pricing for a relatively minor component of all CC products and services — was not (and still is not) tenable.

We communicated a lot with foundry partners when these changes were happening. I’m sure some were less engaged than others when it came to understanding how Adobe’s plan limits would be implemented, but there was nothing secret about it and we were all eager to help foundries understand it.

JoyceKetterer

@Christopher Slye put what I was trying to say better than I had.  This wasn't a secret and isn't scary at all.