Grow faster.

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.
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404 Media

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A journalist-founded digital media company exploring the ways technology is shaping—and is shaped by—our world.

Jasons Sam Joseph Emanuel
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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.

The open network effect

Publish once.
Distribute everywhere.
No algorithms.
No nonsense.

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.

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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.

Globe
Globe
Globe

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.

For 12 years, we’ve been building open technology to make independent media sustainable.

Publishers
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.

Continue reading our 6.0 update