Monotype is, by a long shot, the biggest type firm in the world. They own some of the largest distribution platforms (MyFonts, Linotype, FontShop, FontFont) as well as having absorbed many foundries.
Their main competition appears to be large companies which invest in type as a secondary feature, like Google and Adobe—all other font distributors are small time in comparison.
Because of their market share, they are able to set the rules that the rest of the type world has to play by. Prime example: the 50% commission split on MyFonts (a mediocre website the upkeep of which couldn't possibly warrant a 50% fee).
Many type designers have little choice but to sell on MyFonts and similar websites: the alternatives are smaller distributors which are unlikely to make nearly as many sales, or to build a distribution platform of one's own, which can be a huge investment of both time and money.
While sources are scarce, according to
this Quora post (to which none other than
@Thomas Phinney replied), Myfonts made roughly $80 million in revenue from retail fonts in 2013. If we assume that only half of this 80 mil comes from typefaces distributed but not owned by Monotype, and that the 50% fee is universal, they would've pocketed $20 million simply by selling other people's work on their websites.
Of course, Monotype can afford more than any others to advertise their platforms, to ensure that they're always the first to pop up on Google, etc, and thereby ensure that they retain their market share. Essentially, they are big because they are big.
In the meanwhile, Monotype is owned by a private equity firm, who profit from your* labor, by "merit" of having purchased a struggling business in the early 90's for pennies on the dollar.
What I see here is concentration and centralization of capital, which consequently leads to a position in which the distributor is more powerful than the designer, and can therefore set unfair rules.
Am I completely off base? Does Monotype not dominate the market as much as it seems? Do they do good in ways I'm not considering? Is it time for a type union? I'm happy to be proven wrong. I welcome your thoughts either way, as little discussion on this topic seems to exist currently.
*Presuming you sell on MyFonts.
EDIT: As a sidenote, I know I'm coming off rather opinionated here, but I don't really have a dog in this fight as I don't sell on any monotype platform.
Comments
[I have discussed this topic in the past with a lawyer, but I am not a lawyer and this does not constitute legal advice.]
@Matthijs Herzberg Can you please tell us more about you and why you're asking?
I'm asking because I'm relatively new to the industry and because I'm a bit inquisitive when it comes to ethical business practices, and I was wondering how other people feel about the subject.
Woburn, Massachusetts, is best known for another reason entirely: a toxic waste (Trichlorethylene) calamity that poisoned the town’s drinking water and caused an outrageously high incidence of certain cancers. It was the subject of the book A Civil Action and a movie of the same name. Despite the most expensive cleanup operation in the nation’s history, some of the poisoned areas of the town remain off-limits today.
I do not suggest that there is even the most remote link between the font business and toxic waste, but the town of Woburn remains forever tainted in the minds of many older Boston-area residents (the matter was made public in the 1980s). To announce “I’m from Woburn” is to expect the response, “I’m so sorry.”
You are right that monotype looms large in the industry but I don't agree that they do so in a way that consistently benefits them. They make stupid decisions on the regular. So yes, when they sneeze we get the flu but also they leave room for us to have successful businesses if we stay outside their ecosystem. That's basically Font Beauro's business model.
My Studio (Darden Studio) doesn't sell licenses through Monotype first and foremost because their process undermines license enforcement but secondarily because it allows us to pick around their corpse. And make no mistake, it is a corpse at this point.
That said, I worry much more about cloud fonts. For now, I'm happy with Adobe but the problem in general with cloud service of music/fonts/etc is that it eliminates a space for indies.
To speak very plainly, Monotype's way of reselling font licenses is more dangerous to small foundries in the immediate term but doesn't have much reach if they aren't selling on the platform. I worry about cloud fonts in the long term, not specifically Adobe Cloud fonts.
What worries me about cloud fonts is that as time goes on customers will become more accustomed to starting their font search on cloud platforms. That means I can't really opt out, which is never a good thing, and that new designers can't go on their own.
Specifically about Adobe: they pay reasonable royalties for "basic"/"desktop" use. Additionally, Typekit never really got traction for hosted fonts for larger companies, Adobe hasn't bothered to solve for app embedding, and is therefor sending us lots of referrals. They have changed my business model so that my direct sales are predominantly for web and app but that's frankly better for me because it's easier to monitor and police.
In the days before embedding, if I saw a use by a large company (print) I had no way of knowing if it was licensed, under licensed or whatever because all the work could be outsourced. Its fine with static uses (print or rasterized digital images) for a license to be held by an agency because if the end client fires the agency and wants more branded product they don't have the font files present in their deliverable. That's a clear signal that a new license is needed. With web and app the font files are present and so Darden Studio requires that the license be issued to the the brand and held by the owner of the brand.
This is my first problem with the Monotype model – they allow developers to get a license in their own name for a client project. When a designer comes to me for help after they have tried and are failing to collect on a large license violation this is almost always the the source of the problem. The end client points to the developer as the licensee and the developer points to the end client because they were fired some time ago and didn't have any control over the site/app. The foundry can't really do anything because they not only don't have a contract with the end client but specifically have a contract with the developer. It's different when the whole use is unlicensed but I wont digress.
I'm aware that most foundries still issue web/app licenses the way Monotype does (they sneezed and we got the flu) but they have the ability to change it if they decide it's not to their benefit. We really still are in early days for web and app and I slowly see that foundries are listening to me about the logistics of enforcement and changing this.
Not only does Monotype not really care about that (their business is volume) but they issue "add-on" licensing using their own license even if the foundry has their own license documents and even if the client also has a foundry issued basic license. I'm not a lawyer and I don't know if anyone has tested my theory on this but my guess is that when Monotype issues a license in their own name the foundry doesn't have the option to enforce it on their own. If I'm right, in the case of a medium sized violation (10-100k), game changing to a small designer, which Monotype doesn't want to pursue you'd just be fucked.
I think the saving grace from an income perspective is going to be the move from graphic designer heavy output to embedding because I don't see developers wanting hosted fonts for apps or web any time soon. They have various concerns including hosting outages and security. So, I can keep selling those licenses directly.
The problem is that the desktop users will always be the ones who find and specify the font so we can't just turn our backs on desktop cloud fonts.
As an established foundry I'll be fine but I always think about those just starting out. Everything about how Darden Studio does things is influenced by the ways that Josh got a raw deal with Freight and the awareness that it's a common tale for young artists in music (an industry with a lot of similarities to fonts).
Also, through most of the ’90s, it was still pretty hard to distribute a typeface without the help of one of the established distributors. Before HTML/CSS got sophisticated, I think it was very difficult to a designer to succeed on their own. (It happened, but I think it was not easy.) Given the relative ease today of developing a website with seamless ecommerce, I’d say things are much better today for independents.
I don’t know what’s in store for Adobe now, but last year I heard a lot about how foundries were starting to feel they had no choice but to join Adobe Fonts. That was a sign of a certain kind of success, but I always wanted Typekit/Adobe Fonts to be a choice designers took because it was a sustainable, beneficial partnership for them (e.g. to reach many, many more users than they could otherwise), not because they had to. I do understand that there are certain unintended consequences of someone like Adobe or Monotype massively scaling up a service for millions of people, but for now it seems like there are still many options for a type designer to succeed on their own terms.
The era of paying for font licenses seems to be drawing to a close, or is in decline. Not in the sense that fonts won't be licensed — they still will be — but rather that the license won't be what is so often paid for. Before digital fonts, people were paying for the physical items necessary for printing. Then, for a brief time, people paid to license the design. Soon, people will be licensing the design, but really paying for the infrastructure to use them as web fonts (or somesuch) principally…
Now, this was mandated at the time from above—from the President over the Windows division—and there were various reasons why I didn't think it was a worthwhile investment:
- It didn't actually address the user scenarios that had prompted the exec resolve to make it happen. (What those scenarios really needed was font install that didn't require an admin account—we also did that in the same release.)
- We could only provide a Windows-only solution. (I thought at a minimum acquired fonts should be available in any MS products regardless of platform.)
- Potential customers who'd be willing to pay for quality fonts already had other retail channels they were using and that better suited their needs (larger catalog, better catalog browsing features, not tied to Windows, Web font options...).
- Potential customers that wouldn't be hindered by those limitations would be looking for free or very inexpensive offerings—i.e. crapware they'd already be getting from from various free-font-download sites. And adding crapware to the Store catalog would definitely not enhance overall perceptions of the Store.
However... and why I'm bothering to mention this here... there was one potential benefit I saw for smaller type foundries: Microsoft would take a much smaller portion of the sales revenue as reseller fees. As I recall, at that time, it was as low as 5%. (I'm not sure what it is now.)Of course, that might not have been enough to overcome the shortcomings. It's no particular surprise to me that it hasn't exactly flourished.