Ghost makes it easier to publish to the social web

The open-source publishing platform Ghost, which powers the websites and newsletters of many independent news outlets and positions itself as an alternative to Substack and Beehiiv, announced Monday that it’s introducing a number of upgrades aimed at increasing reach and understanding exactly what that reach looks like.

In the changelog for Ghost 6.0, the company also highlights one particularly interesting statistic: three years ago, when Ghost 5.0 launched, Ghost’s revenue was $4 million, while publisher earnings were a little over $10 million. As of Monday, Ghost’s annual revenue is “over $8.5 million” while publisher earnings have crossed the $100 million mark. “Indie media isn’t just surviving, it’s thriving,” they write.

Some notable changes from this update:

• Ghost now uses the ActivityPub protocol, and publications can be natively distributed across social platforms like Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, WordPress, Flipboard, and so on. Publishers will also get access to a built-in social feed — which looks a little bit like Substack’s notes, except it shows posts across multiple platforms — through which they can both read other publications and follow what users are saying across the internet.
• “The social web turns your Ghost publication into a networked social profile that people can find, follow, like, reply, repost and interact with from anywhere — bringing network effects directly to decentralized publishing,” the company writes in its blog post announcing the update. “Popular posts can be shared, re-posted, and discussed by millions of social web users.”
• “If you’ve been around on the web for a while, and you can remember back that far…you might even call it the return of the blogosphere,” Ghost says.

• A new analytics suite, powered by a partnership with TinyBird, will give publishers insight into web traffic, newsletters, and member subscriptions in real time, without the need for any third-party integrations.
• “Now you have the ability to filter all your data by audience to see what’s resonating across public visitors, free members, and paid members in real time, so you can understand what’s working, and make informed decisions about what to publish next,” the company writes.

Ghost is introducing some pricing changes to its cheapest plans, each of which support up to 1,000 subscribers; those plans are going from $9 and $25 per month to $15 and $29 per month. Existing users will be grandfathered into their current pricing structure, and pricing for accounts with the large numbers of subscribers is dropping, “in some cases by as much as 50%.” (By comparison, Substack takes a 10% cut of subscriptions and Beehiiv’s plans start at $43 per month for 1,000 subscribers. Neither Ghost nor Beehiiv, which itself recently hit $20 million in annual recurring revenue, take a cut of subscriptions.)

The full changelog, which also details a list of improvements that have been introduced in the three years since Ghost 5.0 came out, can be found here.