Web fonts on the rise

We launched the Google Font Directory and Google Font API to help establish a core set of web fonts that can be used openly across devices and platforms. Recently, the team took some time to reflect on our progress, the adoption of web fonts in general, and on the current limitations. We'd like to share some of the most interesting stats from our analysis:

• The Google Font API currently serves over 17 million requests [1] a day to users across the globe.
• We’ve seen a 30% month-over-month growth rate since we launched. (This corresponds to over 20x year-over-year growth.)
• Roughly 400,000 unique websites [2] use the Google Font API.

The adoption of the Google Font API has been fantastic, and we think it speaks to the potential of web fonts to change the web. Google isn’t the only player in this space to see promising adoption stats. In order to fully assess the state of the web font ecosystem, we worked together with our friends at Typekit. They performed a similar analysis and their results are equally exciting.

Although there is a long way to go for comprehensive browser and device support (especially for complex scripts like Arabic), we are highly optimistic. With web font adoption quickly gaining momentum, there will be increased pressure on the browsers and platforms of the world to support web fonts in a standard and consistent manner. But we need your help! If you have interesting example uses of web fonts, feature requests for the Google Font API, or encounter problems, please let us know by posting on our feedback page. Here’s to a bright web font future!

Posted by David Wurtz, Product Manager, Google Font API

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[1] A request is a single call to the Google Font API for one or more fonts.
[2] We count a unique website as unique domains, except that “www” subdomains are not counted. For example, www.myblog.com and myblog.com would count as one domain. However, sam.myblog.com and sally.myblog.com would count as two domains.