Turn your audience into a business
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.
Full-featured subscription commerce
Ghost has everything you need to run a successful subscription commerce business your users and customers will love
Member management
Simple administration makes tracking, managing, moderating and supporting your members a breeze.
Paid subscriptions
Create a stable publishing business collecting recurring revenue from your audience every week, month or year.
Fast, global payments
Connect your Stripe account and accept payments from all over the world, delivered directly to your bank in as little as 2 days.
No transaction fees
Ghost takes 0% of your sales. However much you make from your paid blog, newsletter or community: you keep it.
Secure authentication
Enjoy passwordless JWT email-link based logins for your members. Fast, simple, and completely fantastic for security.
Real content gating
Your premium content is properly protected and cannot be accessed in any way without an account. Even if JavaScript is disabled.
Personalised experiences
Build out custom experiences, flows, and functionality for your users based on whether they’re logged out, logged in, or paying customers. You’re in control.
Deep user analytics
Understand how to build a better site with product analytics and discover not only what actions happened on your site, but also who did each one of them.
Open source + adaptable
All of Ghost is MIT licensed and open source, so the whole thing can be customised, changed and extended to work however you need it to.
- 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
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 #124 — Developing a better (content) product
The top stories this week are about the benefits of treating your content business as a product. Plus: Ads are appearing on Substack, the industry is adjusting to the changes of 2020, and mistakes to avoid in mobile publishing. Enjoy! 💯 Top picks Content is product and product is content: Why deeper alignment is the only way forward [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/content-product-why-deeper-alignment-only-way-forward-dmitry-shishkin?utm_source=Reuters+Institute+for+the+Study+of+Journalism&utm_
Read issueHundreds of thousands of happy users
Since 2013 people have been telling us how Ghost has helped them get more done. Here are a few of the highlights:
