Let’s say there is this market called “web content creators” and we are trying to sell them a product, a font. We want to sell them something that is going help make their web content a little better.
A really good way to sell them something would be to compare the dollar value of our product to the increased dollar value that will be added to their final product. Damn, their final product is free. Scratch that.
Since there is some labor and tools cost to creating their product we could compare our superior *professionally* created product to all the other tools they are using. Hrm…. it turns out all the tools and technologies used to create web content are pretty impressive and at a very low cost if not completely free.
Alright, let’s just hope these guys really like fonts. Let’s research the price of fonts of comparative quality and price our fonts below theirs. Uh oh, it turns out there are a lot of great quality free fonts to choose from already and it’s increasing every day.
In this market creating a font once and selling it a number of times does not seem like a smart business model. Maybe an alternative business model is more suited to this market.
There **are** other business models for individual font creators. The amount of people that **can** use newly created fonts is now increasing exponentially. Surely the creation of new custom fonts will still get some business as long as you’re willing to give them the font in an open format they can use anywhere.
Maybe the revenues aren’t enough to sustain an office and a half a dozen employees but it’s certainly enough for freelance font creators. I know a few web content creators that would love a one-on-one relationship with a font author and would pay a decent stipend for a custom tailored font.
Font creators will be fine. Font creation is sure to increase. But maybe the institutions that used to house font creation, “the foundries”, don’t have a sustainable model in this market.
I’m not sure if metasyntax is accepted, so I’ll stick to old fashioned quotes.
“A really good way to sell them something would be to compare the dollar value of our product to the increased dollar value that will be added to their final product. Damn, their final product is free. Scratch that.”
I know you are being brief for the sake of clarity and have oversimplified the situation, but I want to break down the potential market into three groups.
There are plenty of vanity and hobby websites which are around which will never generate a dime of income, and isn’t designed to. Nevertheless, those people (including me) having invested many hours developing a site, have some pride in its appearance and would be willing to spend some money to improve a site’s style. To them, it would probably be worth tens of dollars, maybe even $100, but not $1000.
Then there are those who have websites which are designed to generate revenue, via ad placement and the like. Obviously billions of dollars are in this ecosystem, and these web developers could easily justify spending hundreds of dollars on better, more appealing fonts.
Finally, there are the corporations who use their websites to directly promote their products. These guys have deep pockets and budgets which are already set aside for spending on this. They spend tens of thousands of dollars hiring web design professionals, and the cost of a few fonts is relatively peanuts.
The problem for the foundries right now is that there is no good means of selling use rights to these three different classes of users for use on the web without also running the nearly certain risk that these fonts will be copied and widely used by the non-paying public.
“Since there is some labor and tools cost to creating their product we could compare our superior professionally created product to all the other tools they are using. Hrm…. it turns out all the tools and technologies used to create web content are pretty impressive and at a very low cost if not completely free.”
I don’t get this point at all. Unless those free tools can directly replace one of the tools which costs money, the free tools do nothing, zero, zip to put price pressure on the costly tools. To someone with a fixed budget to spend developing a website, having free tools for part of the design only relieves the cost pressure in acquiring the other design tools.
Or let me put it this way. I have some hobby websites, which I try to put together as cheaply as I can for the most part. However, I had a gotten sick of spending a lot of time scanning materials for the websites using my old scanner, so I spent $500 to get a slightly used one built for high volume scanning. Would you argue that because not everything in my tool chain is free anymore then somehow I am now more able to spend even more money on fonts?
“Alright, let’s just hope these guys really like fonts. Let’s research the price of fonts of comparative quality and price our fonts below theirs. Uh oh, it turns out there are a lot of great quality free fonts to choose from already and it’s increasing every day.”
This is the argument I buy. Free, high quality fonts will strike down the livelihoods of the existing foundries. From what I’ve heard anecdotally, though, the commercial fonts with rare exceptions are of notably superior quality.
“Maybe the revenues aren’t enough to sustain an office and a half a dozen employees but it’s certainly enough for freelance font creators.”
Linking to the comments of the thread that lead me to your website, here is a font designer who had to give it up because his high quality (as others attested to) fonts netted him $115/year:
(search for the comments by “Chris MacGregor”)
If his case is representative, there won’t be a whole lot of people interested in doing the work until someone figures out a means of making a reasonable living at it.
As a webmaster , I’m glad to see that someone thought to post this topic.
Quite a few people out there don’t grasp the concept of what all is involved in our industry, and I think also we are many times underrated
or taken for granted. Never the less I’m immensely glad to see that you may feel the same way I do , thanks so much for this post!