How Enterprise Partnerships Spark Growth for Your Foundry.
The business of typography is evolving rapidly. As technology transforms how fonts are created, distributed, and monetized, we at Monotype have evolved too — creating new opportunities for type designers like you to reach enterprise customers and build sustainable revenue streams.
Simply put, the Monotype today is not the Monotype of the past. Our ways of getting partner foundry fonts into the hands of our customers have dramatically changed over the past 10 years. With this in mind, we are introducing a series of articles written by experts to explain how Monotype operates and why partnering with Monotype can be a good fit for your business.
As a type designer, there is an obvious and understandable desire to see your fonts being used in the real world and to be paid for your work. We believe what you believe: Fonts are exceptionally valuable. Because of this, we’re eager to explain how our shared revenue model, the Monotype Fonts platform, and new user expectations have created value for the world’s largest brands, and we want our foundry partners to receive that value.
When one of our enterprise customers chooses your fonts for a campaign, the platform is built for you to receive a percentage of the value and revenue that your font creates for the customer. In the past, you may have been able to recognize a large sale at one time to a customer, but it was difficult to capture additional revenue as the use of your font increased or became even more prominent in generating revenue for that customer.
With the Monotype Fonts platform we track every sync, every download, and every time a font is marked as a production font by our customers. Each one of these actions counts toward your revenue. Perhaps most importantly, our platform model has been designed to ensure that each and every time our customer renews their subscription with Monotype, you continue to recognize the revenue associated with the use of your fonts.
Two Platforms, Two Types of Customers, One VisionWe see our main platforms, MyFonts and Monotype Fonts, as two ways for your fonts to be seen and used, but the users of these platforms are substantially different.
For over a decade, MyFonts has been the largest and most-visited marketplace for fonts. We use this large amount of traffic (4M+ visitors per month) as a showcase of your fonts and your work. We position MyFonts as a place to “seed” the marketplace, allowing your fonts to be used by small businesses and a way for your fonts to grow into the world. The more your fonts are used, the more popular they have a chance to become.
In contrast to MyFonts, the enterprise customers who use the Monotype Fonts platform are working at a different scale and have drastically different needs. For these customers, a single, unified license for all the fonts they use is exceptionally valuable. And this value is translated into overall revenue; Monotype Fonts earnings are exponentially larger than MyFonts.
Additionally, Monotype Fonts is licensed in the same way that enterprise customers are used to licensing much of their software (think Slack, Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, Google, etc.) so even if the subscription model is a bit unknown to you and your business, enterprise customers expect to pay for their software in this way.
Accessing Our Relationships for Your BusinessMonotype Fonts platform is the world’s best and largest font subscription platform and we are delivering over 250,000 fonts directly into the creative workflows of designers all over the world. Yes, Monotype has a fair number of fonts that we own, but we couldn’t have reached over 250,000 fonts on the platform without our partner foundries, which currently make up 88% of our inventory on Monotype Fonts.
The MTF platform is where the world’s largest brands and all our enterprise customers interact with fonts both as a tool for their creative teams but also as a platform for managing font licenses, usage, and deployment.
Adidas? On Monotype Fonts. Unilever? On Monotype Fonts. Netflix? On Monotype Fonts.
And whenever one of these enterprise customers syncs, downloads, or marks one of your fonts as a production font, you receive a percentage of their total contract with Monotype. This has the potential to become lucrative for type designers as your percentage based on a much-larger number than would have been possible through direct-to-consumer sales.
Rather than a single purchase that pays you once (like MyFonts), use of your fonts by a large enterprise customer can turn into significant and ongoing revenue to your business. Once our platform is integrated into these large companies’ workflows, they recognize the ongoing value of working with Monotype and overwhelmingly choose to continue renewing their contract.
Growing Our Businesses TogetherIn this evolving market for high-quality typography, we view our enterprise business as a win-win for your business and Monotype. We want to do our best explaining how and why we do business, so please let us know your thoughts and feedback. How can we help your business grow as partners in the always-exciting, creative world that is type?
About The Author:
Doug Wilson
Creative Services Director
This article was written by Doug Wilson; a designer, writer, filmmaker, and cyclist living in Denver, Colorado. Doug has 20 years of experience in advertising, design, web development, and video production. He has written for a dozen different type foundries & distributors and has presented at The New York Times, NASA, TypeCon, and TYPO Berlin.
Doug Wilson is Creative Services Director Monotype as well as a writer, filmmaker, and cyclist living in Denver, Colorado with 20 years of experience in design and typography.