Very sad news that Florian shared on Twitter this morning:
http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=262832f6c05900ce22e8b14b6&id=847cdd319dhttp://blog.fontdeck.com/post/133786333191/fontdeck-closure-supportAre webfont service deemed not needed anymore as most foundries offer fonts for self-hosting, or just not lucrative or worth the trouble enough given the super large players in the room?
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I started out renting our types via Fontdeck, but soon felt that with sales totaling just a few dollars per year, it made sense to drop it and license for self-hosting instead.
An average of 47% web sites use self-hosted fonts.
For serviced-fonts 94% of web sites use Google Fonts, so TypeKit, Fonts.com and others are within a 6% usage ...
What surprises me most, honestly, is not that FontDeck announced that it is shutting down, but that it was not purchased by another font manufacture, webfont service company, or tech company. That is the bet which I would have placed!
If you are wondering how lucrative it is sell licenses for hosted-webfonts vs. self-hosted-webfonts, perhaps you now have an answer.
Frankly we probably gave foundries too much of a cut, but we never really went into to make money or to 'exit' through a sale (although a buyer would have been welcome). We genuinely set it up so that we - as web designers - could get to use quality fonts legally and have the type designers and foundries rewarded appropriately. In that I'm happy we succeeded.
Fontdeck had 1000s of customers and a six-figure turnover but that was not enough to spin it off into proper separate company. So between Clearleft and OmniTI, we ran it on the side and eventually that became too much of a burden on our resources. That and I wanted the service to become much better than it was - to be the best webfont service, providing the kind of tools, service, discoverability that are lacking from all services. But investment was never going to be forthcoming (as a co-owner of Clearleft I agreed with that position) and so the inevitable had to happen.
Self-hosting, or rather direct sales from foundries, certainly was a competitor, but our numbers were still growing albeit slowly. And anyway I'm perfectly happy if foundries and type designers are making direct sales.
If it's the former, what percentage of all web sites use service-based fonts?
Either way, what percentage of all web sites use web fonts these days?
Thanks!
In all seriousness, it was probably a sketchy idea from the start. It's like trying to open a lemonade stand when there's a huge, popular lemonade store next to you that has stayed in the business for years before you. It's not going to work. You'll get 2-3 customers a day, but the lemonade stand will get 20 or more customers in half the time. The longer the thing has been around that you are trying to introduce a competitor, the worse the success rate. I've always prefered more familiar things myself. Another thing is that people are attracted to free things. Google Fonts is free, why pay for fonts? There's always Open Sans (popular) and fonts like Alegreya (relatively very high quality). I could go on... but I don't want to waste your time.
Lars, would you be willing to publish those stats in a way they can be tracked over time? Might be good marketing for your license enforcement business
Our product's primary goal is not monitoring 348+ million websites and we only deal with web sites that use web fonts, not with those that do not use web fonts.
Most web sites use web fonts because the template/theme it uses came with them or because people nowadays tend to use cloud based CMSs that also come with a preselection of web fonts.
Publishing these stats or trends over time would just show the obvious, that Google, TypeKit and Fonts.com dominate.
http://httparchive.org/trends.php has 482k URLs indexed, and suggests 57% of all web sites use web fonts these days.
The answer it seems is that the majority are not actively choosing fonts from Google, they are having that choice made for them, which would explain the numbers.
Wrong. That might be your perception but your history is incorrect. Fontdeck was conceived in 2009, before Typekit came out. The two services were designed and developed independently not knowing of each other's existence. Typekit came to market a few months earlier, but Fontdeck was already in private beta at that stage. Our lemonade was already made and the stand ready, it's just that Typekit opened their stall first.
Looking at Themeforest's top 3 selling templates these use PT Sans, Lato, OpenSans ... Squarespace integrates Google Fonts and TypeKit, Weebly integrates Google Fonts, Jimdo integrates Google Fonts and so on and on.
For now Google seem to have the only free-and-speedy-hosting and easy-to-include-in-3rd-party-apps solution.