Democratising publishing

Ghost is a distributed non-profit foundation which gives away all of its intellectual property under a permissive MIT license. The company has no investors and, in fact, no owners of any kind. I don't own any part of Ghost, and neither does my co-founder Hannah.

We currently generate around $7.5M in annual revenue, and have been profitable and sustainable for the past 12 years.

"Wait, what?"

I'm glad you asked.

Some background

Around 14 years ago I was a contributor to the WordPress core team, but a frustrated one.

I had bought into the idea and the ideology of open source, but over time I'd become disenchanted by the office politics, drama, and conflicts of interest that constantly came to the forefront of conversations in the WP ecosystem.

Having seen how things worked on the inside for several years, the conclusion I personally came to was that WordPress and Automattic were not truly about democratising publishing, after all.

At the same time, I felt the product was becoming slow and bloated. WordPress was desperate to no longer be seen as "just a blogging platform" - and so it was adding features left, right, and center, to try and compete with Tumblr, Wix, Squarespace and Shopify. All at the same time.

I found myself constantly wondering: What could WordPress look like if the product, the technology and the organisation lived up to what I thought democratising publishing actually meant?

In November 2012, I wrote a blog post pitching my answer to that question. I called it Ghost, and it was made up of a few core ideas:

Software focused exclusively on publishing workflows. Not a general-purpose CMS.
Integrate the most important core functionality natively. Not require 50 plugins for things used by everyone.
A simple, permissive MIT license. No GPL drama.
Structured as an independent non-profit organisation. No owners, outside investors, no ulterior motivations, no conflicts of interest.
A sustainable revenue model with official, managed hosting. Not a giant venture-scale startup, just a simple business.

Even in 2012, the tensions around these issues were strong enough that the blog post immediately went viral. The idea tapped into something that others had felt too.

I roped in my best friend and one of the most talented developers I've ever known - Hannah Wolfe - as co-founder and CTO, and in April 2013 we launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the project and get it started.

It went on to raise $350,000 over the course of 29 days.

By the end of 2013, we delivered both the first version of both the product and the managed hosting platform. Just 11 months later, we were profitable and could sustain our open source development work indefinitely.

The business model was simple: We would make a great open source product that people wanted to use. Those people would need a server to use the product, so we would also sell web hosting. The revenue from our hosting would fund further development of the open source product.

Nobody is required to use our hosting. In fact, the majority of Ghost websites in the world do not use Ghost(Pro) — but the ones that do, directly fund the project for the benefit of everyone.

We've grown slowly but steadily since then, only hiring when we could afford to, and today Ghost has a full-time team of 30+ people working on it.

So how does it all work?

What confuses people most about all this, understandably, is that we're a profitable non-profit organisation. Ghost earns over $7.5M per year and is completely self-sufficient, with no outside funding of any kind.

The term "non-profit" is a blunt, confusing piece of language. Depending on which country you live in, it can even have entirely different meanings.

For instance: In the US, non-profits are heavily regulated in their operations, and exempt from income tax. In many other places, there are different kinds of non-profit structures that can operate more freely, but are not tax-exempt.

Across the many different structures, though, non-profits have one thing in common: They don't have owners. And that's what matters.

People often think that "non-profit" means that the company can't make a profit. It actually means that the company doesn't have any owners who can personally take the profits. Any revenue earned can only be reinvested.

Non-profit structures are particularly well suited to companies that specifically want to serve public community interests, like schools, hospitals, local news orgs, and — yes — open source projects.

Non-profit orgs still employ people and pay salaries, and they're generally audited by the government to ensure they're operating correctly and within reason.

At Ghost, we receive no tax benefits of any kind, and our annual accounts are subject to a mandatory audit every single year.

What's the point?

A shareholder of a for-profit company may decide to cut costs to the detriment of the organisation because they're motivated to increase profits and grant themselves larger dividends at the end of the year.

In a company making cardboard boxes, that's no big deal. Some short-term money will be made and then the company will probably fail. The market adapts.

In an organisation whose mission is to serve a community, though, the effects of decisions like this often have greater consequences.

The primary purpose of the non-profit structure is to protect against this and ensure that any decisions made benefit the organisation and its community, not its owners. Ghost has no incentive to slash costs and drive up profits, because it has no owners. It will always be independent.

The organisation exists for-purpose, rather than for-profit.

For a cardboard box company that might not mean much — but for a school, hospital, local news org, or open source project, it means a great deal.

It creates trust, alignment, and lasting independence.

Governance & the road ahead

The structure we've chosen for Ghost — a single-entity non-profit organisation — has helped us to create a lot of trust and clarity around the Ghost project and the Ghost brand. Neither myself nor Hannah own any shares, assets, domains, trademarks, or other companies related to Ghost. Everything is owned by the Foundation.

We very deliberately set out to avoid competing priorities and conflicts of interest as much as possible, which created a strong base for us to build upon over the first decade of the project's life. There's been remarkably little drama.

Thinking ahead to the next few decades, what stands out to me as critically important is that Ghost's governance model evolves as the project does.

I personally don't believe you can democratise publishing and serve a community for public benefit unless that community has some influence over its governance. But, the timing and implementation of governance matters, too.

When a new project is getting started, the most important thing is to just get going. Start doing the thing you said you were going to do. Prove that it works. Prove that people care. Prove that the mission and purpose you've chosen is one that matters. When you start out, few people are affected by your decisions, and you're lucky if anyone cares at all about what you're doing.

From the beginning, Ghost's governance structure has had a board of trustees made up of its two founders, myself and Hannah. This has been all we've needed to get started, and looking back over the past 11 years I think we've done a fairly good job of stewarding the project so far.

Looking ahead, though, we don't think it's sufficient for where Ghost is going.

Our intention is that the Ghost Foundation team will never be larger than around ~50 people. This is an artificial limitation we've chosen for a simple reason: Running a big company doesn't seem very fun, tbh.

We'd rather stay small, be selective about what we work on, and know everybody's name.

In the context of an open source project, this decision creates some interesting side effects. For example: If demand for Ghost-adjacent services exceeds what we're able to offer with our 50-person team, then significant opportunities will emerge for other companies to step in and fill those gaps.

For about 10 years or so I've been telling anyone who will listen that we don't want to grow a giant company that we control, we want to grow a giant ecosystem that we support. One with a broad range of hosts, developers, agencies, partners and publishers who can build on top of shared infrastructure — where our role as a core team is helping the collective ecosystem thrive. Growing a larger market, rather than trying to capture all the value within it.

To be able to do that effectively, though, we see a need for a more diverse and representative governance structure for Ghost. So, as we reach our headcount limit of 50 people — which is likely to happen in the next couple of years — our intention is to expand the seats on Ghost's board of trustees beyond myself and Hannah.

The purpose of this is twofold: First, to ensure that Ghost remains accountable to its ecosystem, and second, to bring in a wider range of perspectives that can guide the project. We'd like a board that includes people who deeply understand open source, publishing, journalism and technology, ensuring that Ghost’s mission is protected and upheld over the long term. We also intend to have some seats be actively elected by the Ghost community itself — something which other open source projects, like Drupal, provide a great example of.

By decentralizing control, we hope to prevent any one individual or small group from exerting too much influence over the direction of Ghost — including ourselves. This aligns with our belief that nobody should "own" the project or have the ability to steer it away from its founding principles.

It should also serve as a mechanism for continuity. Projects like Ghost, which are built to last, need structures that outlast their founders. We want to reduce our bus-factor, and we ultimately want Ghost to grow beyond us.

In short: No 'BDFL'.

Another idea I'm excited to explore is formal Ghost Foundation membership with both individual and company tiers. This is something that organisations like the Connected Standards Alliance do very well. As a member, you get benefits such as voting rights on policy decisions, access to licensing and certifications, as well as a community of others who are invested in the future of what everyone is building together. By inviting people within our ecosystem to help shape how we do things, we hope to ensure that Ghost continues to embody the values we set out to champion when we first started.

We also intend to continue to increase transparency around how we work, how decisions get made, and who makes them. We already publish public revenue data and live statistics, and we have many ideas for ways to open this up further and do more which we intend to pursue.

Ultimately, these ideas are a reflection of our desire to democratise not just publishing, but also the governance of the technology that enables it. If we want quality, independent journalism to stand the test of time, we need technology that can do the same.

These are all things we plan to work on as Ghost grows and we reach ~50 people. We're not quite there yet, of course, but the turbulence of the past few weeks in open source has raised a lot of good questions from both inside and outside our community.

So, to answer those questions, it felt like good time to share how we've structured things so far, and how we think about the future.

If you're a webhost, agency or developer, we'd love to invite you to explore joining us and building within the Ghost ecosystem. There's a large and increasing amount of demand from publishers moving to Ghost who are looking for themes, integrations, hosting, and services.

With Ghost's core team remaining intentionally small, we don't just want you to succeed. In order for our ecosystem to thrive: We need you to.