Newsletter Platform Ghost Generates $3.3 Million, Doubling Its Revenue

The publishing platform Ghost has more than doubled its revenue over the last year, jumping from $1.5 million in March 2020 to over $3.3 million this year, a rise the nonprofit attributes to its unique corporate structure and the surging interest in creator ownership. The open-source nonprofit is structured as a company limited by guarantee, meaning it has no share capital or shareholders, it cannot be sold and must reinvest its profits into the product. Founded by developers John O’Nolan and Hannah Wolfe in 2013, Ghost has taken no outside investment and was profitable within its first year of operation. “We want media companies and individual creators to own their technology, so that no one controls their future,” said O’Nolan, who is CEO. “With Ghost, they own every part of their tech stack.” The nonprofit built its membership technology, which allows independent publishers to paywall their content, into its platform in 2019, a year before the newsletter boom arrived. Now, the platform has found itself well-positioned to capitalize on the “gold rush” of the creator economy and dissatisfaction with other newsletter services. Free software, revenue through hosting As an open-source publishing platform, Ghost allows anyone on the internet to install and run its software for free. The non-profit generates revenue by offering website hosting: $9 per month for Starter; $29 per month for Basic; $79 per month for Standard; and $199 per month for Business, when paying annually. Currently, Ghost has just north of 7,000 paying publishers. It uses these hosting fees to finance its product development and underwrite the salaries of its 21 employees, who have all worked remotely since joining. We love the flexibility, and we love paying 10 times less for a better service.—Uri Braum, publisher, The Browser Because the majority of Ghost publishers use the software for free, the nonprofit measures popularity by number of installations, rather than by revenue or number of clients. In March, 44,906 users downloaded Ghost, according to the open-source site npm. In total, Ghost software has been installed more than 2 million times since 2013, O’Nolan said. How Ghost compares The open-source publishing platform has risen in prominence thanks to the expanding newsletter economy. Unlike Substack or Revue, which make money by taking a percentage of subscriber revenue, Ghost charges a flat monthly fee. This makes Ghost less attractive for beginners, but the fixed fee becomes appealing the more a publication grows its paying audience. Media Newsletters Are Booming, and Substack’s Co-Founders Lit the Fuse Uri Braum, the publisher behind the newsletter The Browser, convinced his two partners to leave Substack for Ghost last August, after realizing how much money they would save by reaching their 11,000 paying subscribers through the nonprofit. In March, The Browser paid Ghost $350 instead of paying Substack $2,750. Over the course of a year, those thousands of dollars make a big difference for independent publishers. “We love the Ghost model, we love the flexibility, and we love paying 10 times less for a better service,” Braum said. Ghost has also benefited from a recent controversy at Substack, first reported by Adweek. The incident led a number of Substack’s high-profile writers, including Jude Ellison S. Doyle, to leave the platform and move to Ghost. The organizational structure and philosophy O’Nolan, formerly deputy head of design at WordPress, launched Ghost in 2013 with a mix of “frustration and intrigue.” The frustration stemmed from his time at WordPress, where he watched the product development team inwardly cater to investor whims while the company outwardly emphasized its devotion to customers. The intrigue stemmed from a question he soon found himself obsessed with: What kind of company would you build if you could never sell it? “You end up focused on building a product that your users love and trying to attract users that you don't hate, because you're going to be stuck with them,” O’Nolan said. “Those two things in combination lead to this pipe dream idea of: ‘How do you design the perfect company that you never want to leave?’” After a Kickstarter campaign raised $300,000, O’Nolan incorporated the nonprofit in Singapore as a company by guarantee, ensuring that it could never be sold. He and Wolfe are its trustees, meaning they assume responsibility for Ghost without owning it. The two have also decided to self-impose a 50-person cap on headcount, so the size of the staff never grows so much that it distorts the company culture. If Ghost expands so rapidly that it is unable to support its customers with 50 employees, the nonprofit will raise prices, making their product too expensive for the lower end of their user base, thus keeping the business manageable. In a world of open-source software, says O’Nolan, there is no need for a winner-take-all system. “The limitations we put on ourselves are not morally righteous, and they’re not anti-capitalist,” the chief executive said. “They help us come up with creative solutions so we can end up with a company that we like, as opposed to one that is the most valuable it could ever be.” As Newsletter Ad Revenue Heats Up, 6AM Plans to Double Revenue and Followers

Newsletters

Newsletter Platform Ghost Generates $3.3 Million, Doubling Its Revenue

The open-source publishing nonprofit has no owners and cannot be acquired

Mark Stenberg

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Mark Stenberg