Don't Make Your Customers Steal
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Don’t Make Your Customers Steal --- Nearly three years ago, I founded a small type foundry, Grilli Type [http://grillitype.com]. A type foundry designs and releases typefaces, which you may know as fonts.
Given that I’m both an avid internet and media user, I always think a lot about content piracy and what to do about it. As a content consumer that means I was easily swayed by Spotify’s offer for unlimited music for a tiny sum each month.
As a content producer, I was very unsure what I should do. Designers need to be able to show typefaces in use in their designs for their clients to sign off on those purchases. Because of this and font files’ tiny file sizes, digital font piracy is and has always been rampant. Most designers have thousands of illegally downloaded fonts on their computers.
A little over a year ago, we decided to do something about this. We started offering one of our typefaces as a free trial version, allowing our prospective customer to download and use it – with a limited character set – in their native design applications. The sales of that typeface roughly tripled after we started offering it as a trial version. Definitely a commercial success.
So from today on, we are offering free trial versions [http://grillitype.com/free-trial-fonts] of all of our typefaces. A demo version of our fonts, so to say. We’re only the second foundry [http://swisstypefaces.com] to do so, and it’s hard for me to understand why.
What I learned from this is that it pays off not to treat your audience as pirates even if most of them usually are. It validates my belief that if you give your audience a great path to pay for your products, your audience will pay. Give them a chance to do the right thing and those who would have ever paid for your product will do it even more gladly now.
Even the sometimes slow to adapt type industry can change. So let’s have some hope for the movie and music industry, too.