Critical Question: What Font Usage Data is Missing for Licensing & R&D Strategy?

FontScope · September 27

Hello TypeDrawers community,

We're working on a project that maps real-world typeface adoption across global brands. Our background is in brand intelligence and large-scale data systems, and We're trying to identify the crucial analytical gaps facing the font industry today.

We're building a database of font fingerprints across the web—including families, weights, styles, source and domains— and mapped to tens of thousands of the world's top companies.

I'd appreciate your expert insight on the key metrics you need to drive business decisions.

1. The Usage Verification Gap

Foundries who sell directly may know who bought a license, but not always where that typeface is deployed across a vast corporate ecosystem (subsidiaries, microsites, international domains). Others who sell via marketplaces may never know who bought a license.

If you could get the data of all the URLs/Domains across 10K-20K top companies which are loading one of your typefaces, how would your team use that confirmed deployment list
What specific piece of deployment metadata (e.g., page URL, font-weight, source domain, page view estimates) is most critical for your internal licensing verification process?

2. Market Intelligence & R&D Metrics

This data is vital for assessing market position and guiding product investment.

When evaluating the potential ROI of launching a new typeface or acquiring a legacy one, what competitive usage metrics (e.g., market share by style, regional adoption shifts, usage by industry) do you wish you had access to?
Would your team prioritize a platform that offers real-time data on the technical footprint of your fonts or one that focuses on market share trends?

I'm focused on solving a blind spot in the industry's data visibility. Thank you for your time and expertise.

Best,
Deepak aka FontScope
FontStat.com

Miles Newlyn · September 30

If a font includes non-latin support, what percentage of it's usage is non-latin?

Igor Petrovic · September 30

This is a potentially interesting and useful service.

For starters, I would appreciate you introducing yourself and your company more. Services that have a real person with a real name gain much more trust here than nicknames or service names.

Please take this as a constructive objection. I know that it is not understood by default for new members. Cheers!

FontScope · September 30

Igor Petrovic said:

This is a potentially interesting and useful service.

For starters, I would appreciate you introducing yourself and your company more. Services that have a real person with a real name gain much more trust here than nicknames or service names.

Please take this as a constructive objection. I know that it is not understood by default for new members. Cheers!

Thanks Igor, for your feedback. Much appreciated. Corrective actions have been taken. Apologies for the typical newbie behaviour, reddit habits die hard. Unfortunately I am not able to change my username to my name as the option is disabled for me.

About me & FontStat: My name is Deepak and I am an IT professional & entrepreneur from India, with background in big data, IOT, Gen AI, brand intelligence & cloud computing. Recently we were hired by a top consumer brand to build a brand threat intelligence tool for them that detects fake websites impersonating a brand in real time and automatically triggers takedowns to protect customers and reputation. While working on it, a key aspect of this detection was web fonts used and the source, especially when non-google fonts were used. That got us interested in typography and after a lot ot reddit browsing and talking to some local type designers on the pain points around usage and adoption data and trends, we decided to build FontStat as a BuiltWith for typography. We are at a very nascent stage with it at the moment, just collecting as much usage data as we can before moving to next steps of enriching the data and launch, hence wanted to validate here what is the most important aspects for type designers and foundries for which they will be willing to pay (only because otherwise it can be a long wishlist).

Igor Petrovic · October 1

Thanks Deepak, this is very insightful. I didn't know about BuiltWith, and now I understand your FontScope vision much better.

Regarding your initial question, I am a boutique one-man micro foundry. That means that I have no business plans, analysis of market, investments (except time and gear to produce a font). I design based on my personal inspiration.

That said, I am primarily interested in font usage identification and information that would help me to check and enforce the license. The most important data for me would be the size of the company (yearly revenue, profit, number of employees) and contacts of company representatives in charge (contact forms on a website don't always do the job).

Webfont usage is very useful, because then you can manually check the rest of the company's appearance and identify other usages like Desktop (print), App, etc. But if there is a magic to identify "offline" use alone, like a Desktop license for print, that would be a real game-changer.

Also, I do not have much to invest in external services (subscriptions), so it would be important for me to be able to test the service relatively cheaply for the first few months. And to pay more per the number of identifications, so you earn if I earn.

I know that I am a small fish, but many other type designers are, so I thought it's important for you to be aware of what's going on on this micro scale.

Miles Newlyn · October 1

@Igor Petrovic did you try FontRadar? They do what you're asking for.

Igor Petrovic · October 1

Thanks, Miles. I still haven't tried it, but I will consider it in the near future. I am a bit worried about not having full control of the communication with the end user, based on the reported cases that became public on the web. On the other side, I understand that license enforcment is not always easy, and that FontRadar established its methodology based on past experience.

I follow Alex's (FontRadar/FontNinja) posts here in that sense. I appreciate him being here to communicate with us. Also, I am not sure FR will accept such a small catalog as mine.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestion. I will probably write you in DM at some point to check specifics

Critical Question: What Font Usage Data is Missing for Licensing & R&D Strategy?

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