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Connect to the world’s largest open publishing network and grow your audience.
Understand your audience and what’s working with native analytics.
Build a sustainable business using open technology you own and control.
The biggest upgrade to Ghost we’ve ever made.
404 Media
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A journalist-founded digital media company exploring the ways technology is shaping—and is shaped by—our world.
by Jason, Sam, Joseph, Emanuel
Welcome to the social web.
Bringing back the blogosphere
Millions of people can now discover, like & reply to your posts, in any open social web app.
Build a social following through your own website. Publish long-form posts and microblogging notes. Get notifications when people share and respond to your content.
Native discovery, distribution and interaction across Ghost, Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, Flipboard, WordPress, WriteFreely, Surf, and more.
For a long time, centralized publishing platforms have had one major advantage: An integrated network that allows people to find & follow one another for greater discoverability and growth for everyone on the platform.
Now Ghost has one too, but, rather than another closed network where you can only follow people who use the same platform as you – we’ve connected Ghost to the open social web.
That means millions of people can discover, follow, like and reply to your posts from any supported social web client - including Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Ghost, WordPress, Surf, WriteFreely, and many more.
Just as people can visit your Ghost website in any browser, subscribe with any feed reader, or receive newsletters in any email client, they can now follow your Ghost publication from any social web client.
Unlike closed platforms with restrictive algorithms, open web protocols create a direct connection between you and your subscribers which you have full control over.
No opaque algorithms. No suppression of links. No unhinged mechabots.
If you've been around on the web for while... you might even call it the return of the blogosphere.
Go deeper, with native analytics
End-to-end reporting across traffic, email, and member subscriptions. In real-time.
Powerful growth insights to drive decision making. You’ve always been able to use web analytics tools in Ghost, but now we’ve built data collection and reporting directly into the core platform.
Thanks to a new analytics database and a deep partnership with our friends at Tinybird, you have more power than ever before to explore your data.
Understand what’s working, across every channel
No more publishing and hoping for the best. Get a detailed picture of how your content is performing, so you can confidently decide what to create next.
Web traffic
Track how many visitors and views your publication gets.
Email reports
Detailed engagement metrics for your email newsletters.
Member engagement
View signup events, sources, and performance data.
Conversion events
Find out which posts make people upgrade to paid.
New tools to create, engage, and earn.
Payment methods
Accept paid subscriptions with credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, CashApp, iDEAL, Bancontact, and more.
Contextual content
Choose which readers see what content, so you have fine grained control of sponsorships, ads, and special offers.
Tips & donations
Give people a simple way to support your work with one-time payments, no membership required.
Branded newsletters
Stand out in a crowded inbox with your own custom email template that looks as good as your website.
Custom fonts
Native support for custom typography and even more control over your brand.
Upgraded comments
Now with threaded replies, new sorting options, and improved moderation controls.
Internationalization
Support for publishing in over 60 different languages, so your subscribers feel right at home.
Spam protection
Control who can sign up on your site, so you can keep bad actors and automated spam at bay.
For 12 years, we’ve been building open technology to make independent media sustainable.
The good news? It's working.
When we announced Ghost 5.0 a few years ago, we were proud to share that Ghost's revenue had hit $4M – while publisher earnings had surpassed $10M. It felt great to have such a clear sign that our goal to create a sustainable business model for independent creators was succeeding.
Today, Ghost's annual revenue is over $8.5M while total publisher earnings on Ghost have now surpassed $100M.
While the dominant narrative in the media industry today is one of layoffs and cutbacks in a market saturated with clickbait and AI — Ghost publishers, whose revenue has grown dramatically in the past 3 years, are telling a different story.
These successful media businesses follow a simple model that's been around for a long time: They make money by directly serving readers, rather than advertisers.
After more than a decade of clickbait undermining media credibility, subscription-based publishers are discovering a simple truth: Producing high quality content that readers genuinely value is a far better business than chasing low quality page views for diminishing ad revenue.
Launch your big idea
Last week, 6,954 brand new
publications got started with Ghost.
Today, it's your turn.
