New: Monotype is transitioning Monotype Library Subscription (which customers signed up with for webfonts on Fonts.com) into Monotype Fonts.
MLS (which sounds like a disease you do an ice bucket challenge for) paid regular royalty rates (as far as I know) so it would be 50% or so based on the contract. Monotype Fonts pays only 25% royalties.
Will the foundries receiving royalties on those existing subscriptions get 50% or 25%? Will the revenue remain as direct to the fonts used or will it be split across all synced and production fonts as is the case with Monotype Fonts?
Whichever way it is, once a plan is up for renewal, only Monotype Fonts is available as an option and therefore farewell 50% and hello 25% royalties.
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It appears that Monotype has found a delicate balance in their approach, exerting just enough pressure on type foundries and their customers to maintain profitability while still retaining their business. From my perspective, Monotype’s strategy results in a situation that's somewhat uncomfortable, but not untenable. The diminishing returns from Monotype, though smaller, still outweigh the potential gains I might achieve by removing them. While removing my fonts from Monotype would cause an increase in sales through other vendors, it likely wouldn't tip the balance. This makes it financially imprudent to remove my fonts from their platform, despite the challenges posed by their increasingly severe optimization strategies and blatant disregard for type designers.
I was on both Myfonts and FontShop before they were bought and saw what happened to my own sales.
There won't be separate font files, just documents.
In print media, PDF output from those a.i. powered authoring tools will be indistinguishable from a PDF made 20 years ago.
Ditto the video data file uploaded to tiktok.
I guess the typeface name trademarks might be licensable, but it's going to be hard to get royalties from something that no one uses any more.
More recently, Adobe licenses have contributed towards generous royalties for foundries, in part due to the minimum payments per font. My understanding is that Adobe will not be offering minimum payments to new foundries, and I am not sure if they will offer it to existing foundries once contracts are up for renewal. I don't have details on this, but it would make sense that Adobe would try to reduce the cost of fonts in its subscription given that the role of fonts is not so critical for people actually getting the subscription.
A more general note: for quite a few foundries, font prices have remained relatively static for many years now in spite of massive inflation. In practice, this means that the income generated for foundries provides less purchasing power than it used to 10 years ago. That's less food on the table and a smaller apartment.
Again, these are general trends that I see coming for indie foundries. It would be great if these do not materialise, but the risk is real.
While you're probably right about fonts not being critical in gaining subscribers, you may be overlooking how important they could be for retaining them.
I have no inside knowledge of what goes on at Adobe; this is all conjecture. I think the value of fonts in this context extends beyond their immediate design utility; they play a critical part in the overall Adobe ecosystem.
Consider a user who primarily engages with Photoshop and Illustrator within the Creative Cloud suite. Over time, they integrate various Adobe CC fonts into their workflow and documents. Given the flexibility of Adobe’s model, which allows for extensive font usage without additional costs, these users are likely to utilize a much broader range of fonts than those purchasing fonts individually.
The potential switch to a competing product introduces a significant hurdle. The loss of access to Adobe’s fonts would mean that all their existing documents with embedded Adobe fonts would face compatibility issues. For these users, the task of sourcing and licensing each font individually or finding suitable replacements could be daunting, labor-intensive, and costly. This scenario is not limited to graphic designers; it extends to professionals in other fields, like video editing, who are equally reliant on Adobe's font offerings but, unlike the Photoshop/Illustrator example, have lots of viable alternative applications available.
Adobe’s subscription model, with its inclusive access to a wide range of fonts, serves as a powerful incentive for users to maintain their subscriptions. The cost and effort required to replace these fonts if they leave the Adobe ecosystem could be a deterrent to switching to alternative platforms. While paying royalties to foundries might be a significant expense for Adobe, it appears to be a calculated investment in customer loyalty and subscription retention.
With a library subscription model, there is a third party standing between you and the user. The user is no longer your customer. They are the third party's customer. The foundry is just an expense to the third party, the price of which is decided by the third party. It may be a good price, but it's no longer directly connected with satisfying users. It's more about satisfying the financials of the third party. At any point they may decided that your foundry is costing them too much and renegotiate the price they pay you. And it will have little to do with how happy users are with your fonts.
FWIW, Adobe Fonts did very well for me before I sold to TTF (and I believe it still does for TTF), but this aspect of the relationship made me a bit concerned about the incentives of the arrangement.
When you mentioned traditional sources of income, I thought you meant straight font licensing. Basically customers paying for fonts based on their need. I don’t think that’s in danger, fonts are largely a b2b market and most businesses seem to want to do the right thing regarding licensing.
From what I have seen and experienced, fonts will be priced at the maximum the market will bear, like almost any other good. And resellers will pay the minimum royalty %, always trending down. I don’t think there’s ever been a font reseller that has announced to its “partner foundries” they’re upping the %.
The Klim website's had iterations and improvements throughout it's lifespan, expanding it's initial design to suit it's growing requirements (ie. PDF type specimens are no longer featured/needed and the visual scope of each release has grown etc etc). Given how Klim has grown from strength to strength, I believe many people would be interested in your take on the journey you've taken in establishing and growing your foundry's online scope.
My ideal scenario would be an equitable font eco-system and a healthy relationship between the parties involved.
The text elements of latest image generators is compelling, to me.
https://x.com/chaseleantj/status/1737816505507795060?s=20
https://x.com/chaseleantj/status/1737750596768370876?s=20
https://x.com/Itsyopahadiboy/status/1737726617340842094?s=20
Whenever you say stuff like this, all I think is “wow Dave would love to just cut humans out of the typeface design loop”. Perhaps you don’t mean it as that, but being responsible for commissioning fonts for Google has a certain frisson, don’t you think?
We'll have to agree to disagree on this, chaps. I don't think retweeting even means agreement, lmao - I think it's worth discussing how new technologies effect a technology business like type, worth being aware of what even marginal voices are saying.
It's not that I love to see it, but that I do see it, and I think it's dangerous to avoid seeing it.
I see mid journey v6, or https://jingyechen.github.io/textdiffuser2/ , and so I suggest a discussion of the future of royalty rates is incomplete without including a case where they all drop to zero.
In this case, I also see my own current job going the same way, absolutely. That's what I mean about the whole enchilada.
The history of type is packed to the gills with rapid revolutions in the technology base, and very few brands survive these turns. Are we next year going to be in the same spot the phototype companies were in 1985 when Adobe PostScript, Apple LaserWriter, and Aldus Pagemaker were out, and Fontographer was about to - similar to hot metal companies when the Lumitype came out in 1946, or cold metal companies when the Linotype arrived in 1884?