A full-stack, modern publishing platform
Use memberships and subscriptions to develop a direct relationship with your audience and generate predictable, recurring revenue to support your work.
How can anyone make a sustainable living as an independent publisher in 2020? "
Advertising models no longer work
Google and Facebook have taken all the available ad dollars, leaving publishers to fight for the last remaining scraps of revenue by any means possible. Clickbait, fake news, content-farms and outrage are the desperate final attempts to hold onto past traffic levels.
Micropayments have never worked
Many predicted that the saviour of publishing would be micropayments. The old “if everyone paid just $0.02” argument sounds very appealing at first glance, but it never actually works out in reality. Micropayments are volatile and unsustainable.
By revenue, Google & Facebook are both larger than the entire US newspaper market, whose revenue has dropped by more than 70% to be consistently below pre-1950 levels.
Anyone who has ever made money from ads knows that it just isn’t what it used to be anymore.
Advertising Revenue Over Time
Adjusted for inflation, 1950 to 2014
So what does work?
Memberships + subscriptions
Sustainable, predictable revenue & incentives aligned with your audience
Create unique content
If you’re making something interesting that people can’t find elsewhere, then you’re at a natural advantage to provide value.
Attract a loyal audience
Rather than trying to reach as many people as possible, focus on a specific group of people who appreciate what you do most.
Offer premium membership
Ask your audience to become customers, paying a recurring subscription to receive premium membership benefits.
Build relationships
Create a community to connect with your audience, discover what is important to them and foster engagement.
Niche business is no longer small
It used to be that to find success online you had to create something that would appeal to everyone. Nowadays, niche markets are larger than the entire internet was a few years ago. A niche membership site can become a surprisingly big business.
Paid Emails
Andrew Sullivan at The Dish pulled in over $1million/year from his premium newsletter, while Ben Thompson’s Stratechery was making over $200,000 in 2015, and significantly more since!
Premium Publications
Modern news publishers like The Information and De Correspondent both earn $millions in revenue each year directly from their members, who pay for real news that they can’t get elsewhere.
New Media Creators
The new wave of online creators like Philip DeFranco’s daily news show and La Vagabonde’s sailing channel have tens of thousands of paying members who subscribe to support their work.
Start a membership business with Ghost
Until now, building a publication with memberships and subscriptions has been difficult and complicated — Ghost makes it easy
Transform anonymous views into registered members
An easy member signup system allows you to grow a real community of people rather than just anonymous clicks. Now you’ll understand what content is popular, and who in particular likes it!
Easily connect any existing mailing list, Patreon supporters, or user database to give an existing audience access to your brand new site.
Make sustainable revenue with recurring subscriptions
Turn your members into paying customers with straightforward subscriptions. The business model software companies (like us!) have used for years is now available to everyone. Just connect your Stripe account to start taking credit card and Apple Pay payments.
Best of all: Enjoy 0% transaction fees. Whatever revenue you make is entirely yours to keep.
Own & control your business, from customers to code
What makes Ghost truly special is that you own everything. We release all our code and intellectual property under an open source license. Not only do you own the customers, the content and the business — but you also own the platform and the code itself.
Unlike VC funded startups which pop up and shut down every few years, with Ghost you own the platform you depend on.
A suite of modern publishing tools
Ghost is a powerful content platform designed for the future
An extensible rich editor
A familiar editing environment enables a seamless authoring experience that allows you to focus on one thing: creating content. More than just a formatting tool the editor allows you to pull in dynamic blocks of content like images, embeds and videos and Markdown. It’s built on a sane, open-standard which means it’s fully extensible.
Flexible content management
Robust tagging functionality gives you fine-grained control over the categorisation of your content and a configuration layer called dynamic routing unlocks the power to structure your site content in almost any way you want.
Build any type of category, section, format or flow to adapt to your needs - including custom homepages, URL structures and multi-language content.
Work with your team
Multiples roles for authors, editors and administrators. Invite your whole team to collaborate, with dedicated public user profiles for everyone.
SEO & Structured data
Proper SEO built in directly. Semantic markup, permalinks, XML sitemaps, canonical tags and automatic meta data with manual overrides, with rich meta tags for Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards and Schema.org.
Enjoy simple site editing
Adding a logo, creating navigation menus, and injecting analytics code are all done with a couple of clicks. Save time on all the small changes you make.
Full-featured subscription commerce
Ghost has everything you need to run a successful subscription commerce business your users and customers will love
- Access all content
- Weekly newsletter
- Members-only comments
- Access all content
- Weekly newsletter
- Members-only comments
- Support indie publishing
- Advertising-free!
Work with all your existing tools
Explore hundreds of integrations for Ghost to speed up your workflow, or build your own custom integrations with our open source developer SDKs
Fully managed platform as a service
Our Ghost(Pro) service makes your publication stable, secure and fast.
State of the art, worldwide infastructure
Ghost’s core servers reside securely in Amsterdam, while our Content Delivery Network distributes your work across a network of 200+ data centres worldwide. Your site responds instantly, no matter where your readers are.
How to get started
Ghost has everything you need to run a successful subscription commerce business your users and customers will love
Members Guide
We've put together a detailed guide for how to get started with a members-based site using Ghost for the first time, from general concepts to creating a totally custom theme with payment flows.
Read the guide
Free Members Theme
Download our new members-based Ghost theme to easily set up a paid publication with straightforward account and checkout flows. All you need is a Ghost install and a Stripe account to connect to it.
Get the theme
Rediverge Demo
Want to see a real paid members publication in action? Check out Ghost founder John O'Nolan's new site, Rediverge, about world travel, remote work, and open source business models.
Visit RedivergeOur weekly newsletter about the future of publishing, technology & business
Issue #133 — The year of the subscription (again)
Newsflash, it is the year of the subscription. Wait, wasn't that last year too? Either way, that's what everyone is talking about this week after Reuter's published their latest report. Plus: Find out how to get 10k subscribers in a month, how to use exclusive stories to drive growth and the answer to a burning question: do email subscription pop-ups actually work? 💯 Top picks [Podcast] Growing a newsletter to 100k+ subscribers with Codie Sanchez [https://newslettercrew.com/ep34-growing-a-news
Read issue