The market evolved into this state. Traditionally fonts were licensed as as software licenses per machine. It was not great but it was a standard. With web ther

The market evolved into this state. Traditionally fonts were licensed as as software licenses per machine. It was not great but it was a standard. With web there was more opportunity to change price based on impressions. But for big projects - logos, tv ads etc. you almost always need a special license. The problem is to make fonts cheap for solo designer doing local prints where 60usd is a lot vs designer in agency doing multi national ad where 3000usd is drop in budget. There are competing models in the market. As print slowly disappears most foundries are pricing on amount of web visits, app downloads and social media followers. Some progressive ones are even moving to pricing based on size of company / number of employees like Dinamo https://abcdinamo.com/news/about-our-pricing https://abcdinamo.com/news/about-our-pricing. There is also Fontstand https://fontstand.com/ https://fontstand.com/ thats "reting" of fonts but that's again mostly for small desktop publishers.