What I do know, is that the laws of supply and demand are immutable. If the demand is high enough for your product, you can’t help but make money. That’s easy to say but hard to understand. Demand could be sky-high for something that looks a whole lot like your product which might lead you to conclude demand is high for your product. Take news, for example. Demand is high for news. Is demand high for your version of the news? Probably not unless you have a unique perspective or exclusive information. In economics, products similar enough to be indistinguishable in the eyes of the customer are referred to as substitute goods.

The scarcity newspapers previously enjoyed that led directly to their profitability has been long since explained in terms anyone can understand. While merely producing and distributing content no longer has much value in a digital, Internet-enabled world, other properties like immediacy, personalization, and authenticity either still have value or now have value they could never previously have had. If that sounds familiar, it should. Kevin Kelly outlined this over three years ago.

The free market makes no promises that the pie will remain forever the same size nor that the slices will be always of the same proportion. Winners under the old rules are often trampled by those taking advantage of the new. Charging for access to an abundant resource (more economics!) is a foolish and unsustainable strategy. So go ahead, try providing tiers of experience as a differentiator. It can’t hurt to try.¹

1. Here’s another free tip that could potentially ruin your entire business (not that it isn’t already a sinking ship), how about separating the organization into two teams? Team Curate provides narrow, focused experiences on any vertical you can own, examples are local live music, local politics, local food buzz — it’s up to you. The important thing is that the content isn’t limited by what the staff can produce internally. Charge for these experiences or show ads. Your choice. Team Create writes whatever you do best. That means not national news and not “opinion” about national news. Hard news, maybe even investigative reporting. This content gets syndicated (sold to third-parties) and / or packaged into one of the curated experiences from the other team. The once monolithic newspaper has now been broken into discrete units that can be scaled and supplemented in response to profitability. No more redundancy. The 19th-century newspaper structure has been retired as the relic it is, replaced by a lean, mean, Internet-native machine. (Oh, and if you want to, go ahead and print those components if you can do it for the right price.)

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

— Clay Shirky, “The Collapse of Complex Business Models”

As I’ve mentioned before, Shirky is a guiding light for Full Stop. We believe we’re living through monstrous societal disruptions, chief among them the Internet’s irresistible march to invisibility. It’s not a coincidence we decided to make our living helping people understand and react to that fact.

Sorry, guys. Jay said I could post whatever I want here.

N.B. Team Hayek, FTW.

Friends, we’re not in Mayberry anymore. The revolutionary power of the Internet to copy and distribute has made parochial notions of property nonsensical. It’s changing the rules right now for entertainment, newspapers, and, like it or not, font foundries.

The newspaper example.

I’m sure you’re familiar with and may have even read some of Clay Shirky’s writing. (If you’re not or you haven’t, you’d better. For the purposes of this diatribe, start with “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.”) Here’s Clay describing the mindset of publishers at the time:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!”

It’s important to note his phrasing. He said, they wanted to “preserve the old forms of organization.” He didn’t say they wanted to “profit mercilessly.” (That’s a phrase more appropriately applied to the entertainment industry.)

Font foundries think they’re entitled to an unchanged business model. They’re entitled to nothing. Preserving the old forms of organization is impossible. Somebody or several somebodies will arrive willing to sell high quality fonts at sensible prices. Somebody is going to laugh at the idea of making and selling electronic letters being called an “industry.” It’s about to become a lot less industrial. In fact, it’s already happening. Jos Buivenga gives away several weights of Museo (among others), and the entire family is only $29. Guess what? He’s massively successful.

Supply used to be determined by the producer.

Traditionally it was up to the producer to choose how many or how few widgets (to borrow a technical economic term) to make. Even if he wanted to make an unlimited number, his supply chain or the laws of physics made that impossible. You may have seen this coming, but that’s no longer a true statement, at least as far as fonts and other digital goods are concerned. A single digital copy, once created, is nearly free to reproduce, distribute, and, often, recombine in countless new forms. This fact doesn’t eliminate the laws supply and demand, it confirms them. Now that the supply curve is pushed right until it’s literally off the charts, the price is zero.

What font sellers (et al) attempt to do is artificially restrict the supply based on imagined “intellectual property” rights when they should instead be charging a lower price (per unit) reflective of the actual value they’re adding. That value is found in Kevin Kelly’s model “better than free.” If you want my advice, I’d start with immediacy, authenticity, and accessibility, to name just three.

Is it possible?

You’re thinking it’s not going to work, and you’re right, kind of. It won’t work for everyone, but it will work for a lot of people, maybe even more people will make fonts in the near future than make them right now. The industry will be realigned. Soloists like Buivenga whose Museo font was the #2 font in 2008 at MyFonts will thrive. Font aggregators may appear that enable easy font use and convenient ways to pay like Typekit.  You want an example from outside the font industry? How about Jeff Atwood who’s telling software publishers the same thing.

If foundries are unwilling to listen, that’s fine, because the market is eventually going to hammer those who copy and paste their licensing terms from a time before the Internet existed and base them on the obsolete notion that replicas are costly to produce.