12 years of Ghost

Last week marked 12 years since the launch of Ghost on Kickstarter. I was 24 when I first started working on the idea, and back then I had no idea what I was doing.

Fast forward to 2025 and I still have no idea what I'm doing, but we've come a long way nevertheless. What started as little more than an idealistic open source pipedream has blossomed into a business with $8M/year in annual recurring revenue and a full-time team of 34.

The core idea behind Ghost, in 2013, was a simple one. I've always believed that independent publishing on the web is essential, and that the technology behind it plays a significant role in its ultimate success or failure.

Back then, Vox and Buzzfeed were at the forefront of a major shift in the publishing industry. Being technology startups as much as media companies, their proprietary software was a distribution lever to which the rest of the industry had no answer. They were miles ahead of traditional media orgs, many of whom had only recently been convinced of the need for a website.

It was as if a couple of outlets had built the world's first printing press, while everyone else was still sitting around writing out news bulletins by hand.

The ambition for Ghost was to create a dedicated open technology stack for independent publishers, from solo-creators to large newsrooms, to compete in a fast-moving digital media landscape – without becoming beholden to closed networks owned and controlled by private companies like Facebook and Medium.

A small band of loyal early adopters understood our ideas from the very start, but many were less convinced. They saw these large tech platforms as neutral, benevolent infrastructure providers, unlikely to screw anyone over, for it would not be in their interest to do so.

That outlook has shifted substantially after twelve years of algorithm changes, data capture, privacy scandals, and business model pivots.

So, as awareness and interest in independent technology have grown, so has interest in Ghost.

Over the years, we've focused consistently on building the best tools for publishing on the web. In the past 5 years, in particular, we've also focused heavily on building ways for creators, journalists, and publishers to run a sustainable business on the web.

We added paid subscriptions in Ghost a few years ago to allow publishers to charge for their work and, since then, our own growth has primarily been a side-effect of our work to help others grow.

In fact, we're about to pass $100Million in revenue earned by independent media businesses using Ghost.

Along the way, we've seen a fantastic group of publishers adopt the product. From hard-hitting journalism of 404Media and Platformer News, to political coverage from Tangle News and Lever News.

From The Harvard International Review to The Stanford Review, and JSTOR in academia.

From local journalism at Hell Gate, Kyiv Independent, Mill Media, Berkeley Scanner, The Dublin InQuirer, and The 51st, to the latest in music from Hearing Things and Drowned in Sound.

YCombinator runs on Ghost, as do First Round Review and The Diff, along with the media arms of Duolingo, WealthSimple, Kalshi, Cloudflare, DuckDuckGo, Domino's Pizza, and (fittingly) Kickstarter.

OpenAI, originally a research lab, first launched as a Ghost publication before it grew into the $300billion behemoth it is today. At one point, around the launch of ChatGPT, Ghost served more traffic for OpenAI each month than all our other publishers... combined.

I'm incredibly proud of how far we've come as a small, independent non-profit organisation shipping free, open source software.

As ever, we're competing with prominent, VC-funded platforms with tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of employees, playing zero-sum games to try and control the entire media industry.

Now, though, it feels like there's more appetite than ever for something different.

Incidentally, if indie publishing, open source, and JavaScript are your thing – we're hiring! Our team is fully remote, distributed globally, and passionate about building a healthy future for the open web.

We're hard at work, and this summer we'll be shipping Ghost 6.0 – our next significant step forward in publishing. It's going to be a big one.