#Fontsporn
Download fonts for free by mining
In 2009, I’m starting my own digital foundry Fonts of Chaos. I share my font creations and I want to start a shop to sell them. The idea behind is not to become rich, but spend more time in creation without payroll needs, and it works! For years, I earn money with my fonts, and even if it’s not to the same extent as before, it helps me freeing up time for creation.
So, why do I want to share fonts for free? Since day one, I really believe that micro transactions could help generate income. The idea again, is not to generate tons of money, but save time for creative projects.
In 2017, I’m working as a UI/UX designer in the financial sector in Belgium, and I fall in love with cryptocurrencies. Well, I’m more addicted to the concept than actually trading. Coinhive provides a services of mining crypto with a link, so easy to set up that after few seconds, you get the font.
How much income does it generate? Well, it’s never easy to answer because it depends of the number of visitors, etc. But we can try to calculate. Each time a visitor clicks on the link, it generates 2048 hashes, which equals to approximatively 0.00000008 Monero (XMR). One Monero has a value of 45,00$ (but changing all time depending on the market, you can check its value here). So, to generate one Monero, I need to have around 12.500.000 clicks. It’s a whole lot, I agree. To make a comparison, a font I share for free on DaFont since 2006 has 125,781 downloads.
“Hey David, doesn’t launching a project that gives you such a low benefit sound like a bad idea?”
Right. But I’m still a dreamer and I’m pretty sure that this kind of payment method will become more and more popular in the future. The key point is to give users the opportunity to choose the way to consume, and not force them with a banner or a pre-roll video. I add links at the bottom of the page to provide possibilities to buy the font through more conventional markets.
Fontsporn.com is an MVP (minimum viable product), so this is just a start!
If you are a font creator who wants to share a font on Fontsporn, feel free to contact me, and I’ll give you 100% of the font income during the running period.
