The following main model of Ghost has arrived, and our 6.0 launch is packed filled with extra upgrades and enhancements than you may shake a stick at.
When you’re brief on time, and also you simply need the highlights:
- Ghost publications are actually related with an open community. Individuals can uncover, observe, like and reply to your posts throughout Bluesky, Flipboard, Threads, Mastodon, WordPress, Ghost, and every other social internet platform. Distribution is now built-in.
- We’re introducing a local analytics suite for Ghost, providing you with detailed insights into how your content material performs throughout internet site visitors, newsletters, and member subscriptions – all in real-time, all from the identical place you publish on a regular basis.
- Collectively, publishers on Ghost have now earned over $100M in income to help their work. Indie media is not simply surviving, it is thriving.
- We have shipped hundreds of enhancements and updates since Ghost 5.0 that make the product extra highly effective than ever earlier than.
- For builders: Ghost is shifting to a brand new official Docker Compose env, and our manufacturing stack is now Ubuntu 24, Node 22, and MySQL8.
If you wish to strive any of this stuff (and the various different enhancements) go forward and join a free trial on Ghost.org and see for your self. It is dwell now.
Or, if you’d like all the small print about every little thing that is new, maintain studying!
Once we introduced Ghost 5.0 a number of years in the past, we had been proud to share that Ghost’s income had hit $4M – whereas writer earnings had surpassed $10M. It felt nice to have such a transparent signal that our objective to create a sustainable enterprise mannequin for impartial creators was succeeding.
Right this moment, Ghost’s annual income is over $8.5M whereas complete writer earnings on Ghost have now surpassed $100M.
Whereas the dominant narrative within the media business right now is one in every of layoffs and cutbacks in a market saturated with clickbait and AI — Ghost publishers, whose income has grown dramatically previously 3 years, are telling a distinct story.
These profitable media companies observe a easy mannequin that is been round for a very long time: They generate profits by immediately serving readers, relatively than advertisers.
After greater than a decade of clickbait undermining media credibility, subscription-based publishers are discovering a easy reality: Producing prime quality content material that readers genuinely worth is a much better enterprise than chasing low high quality web page views for diminishing advert income.
And after greater than a decade of watching questionable development ways from Large Tech™️ — Ghost itself proves that very same easy reality with regards to platforms. Not like our venture-backed friends obsessive about development in any respect prices, we’re structured as a non-profit basis that serves publishers immediately with open supply software program.
We consider impartial media can’t be beholden to proprietary tech corporations, so Ghost publishers do not simply “personal their electronic mail record” — they personal your entire software program stack that underpins their enterprise, finish to finish.
Not a centralized platform managed by a single company, however open infrastructure that is shared by everybody.
That is the dream of the open internet, and the driving power behind every little thing we do.
$100,000,000 later — we really feel assured saying: It is working.
Ghost is the house of your publication on the net, and it has all the time had help for a number of open distribution channels to ship new posts to your readers.
- Ghost 1.0 began with publishing by internet and RSS feeds
- Ghost 3.0 added help for publishing by API and webhooks
- Ghost 4.0 enabled publishing by electronic mail e-newsletter
In Ghost 6.0 we’re introducing one other new distribution channel: The social internet. Now, hundreds of thousands of individuals can uncover, observe, like and reply to your posts from any supported social internet consumer – together with Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Ghost, WordPress, Surf, WriteFreely, and plenty of extra.
Simply as individuals can go to your Ghost web site in any browser, subscribe with any feed reader, or obtain newsletters in any electronic mail consumer, they will now observe your Ghost publication from any social internet consumer.
Not like closed platforms with restrictive algorithms, open internet protocols create a direct connection between you and your subscribers which you have got full management over.
This direct relationship has been a serious driver within the resurgence of electronic mail newsletters over the previous few years. However, whereas electronic mail is a incredible method of sending out updates, it’s a a technique road. It would not, and may’t, have the community results which are so highly effective for producing development, and reaching new individuals.
The social internet turns your Ghost publication right into a networked social profile that individuals can discover, observe, like, reply, repost and work together with from wherever —bringing community results on to decentralized publishing. Fashionable posts may be shared, re-posted, and mentioned by hundreds of thousands of social internet customers.
What does that imply, in apply?
You now have a social internet reader in admin to observe and skim long-form content material from different Ghost, WordPress or Flipboard publications. It’s also possible to observe and share short-form notes with individuals throughout Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon and others.
And, after all, others can uncover and observe you.
For the primary time in Ghost, you may ship and obtain likes and replies, and work together with different creators from all around the world, and all around the internet.
Interactions like these have been the flywheel driving fast development for publishers and creators throughout closed platforms and social networks. Now they’re constructed immediately into Ghost on high of an open protocol referred to as ActivityPub.
No opaque algorithms. No suppression of hyperlinks. No unhinged mechabots.
When you’ve been round on the net for whereas, and you’ll bear in mind again that far… you may even name it the return of the blogosphere.
Our social internet integration is totally free, and works on all Ghost 6.0 websites, whether or not on Ghost(Professional) or self-hosted.
Till now, we have had easy analytics in Ghost targeted on memberships and newsletters. When you wished to trace web page views, site visitors sources, or customer habits in your web site, you needed to depend on third-party integrations.
In Ghost 6.0, we’re delivery detailed, first-party analytics immediately within the product, no further instruments or setup required. And, in contrast to third-party suppliers, it is totally built-in with every little thing you publish, providing you with a full image of engagement throughout your complete viewers — all from the identical place you publish day by day.
Now you have got the power to filter all of your knowledge by viewers to see what’s resonating throughout public guests, free members, and paid members in actual time, so you may perceive what’s working, and make knowledgeable selections about what to publish subsequent.
And that is simply the beginning.
We have wished to construct one thing like this for a really very long time, however up till now we did not have a great way to create a system that would take care of storing, retrieving and filtering on large numbers of occasions at scale.
Delivering knowledge insights like that is comparatively simple in a centralized SaaS app, however rather more advanced in a distributed open supply app you could self-host.
Actually, this function was solely made potential in any respect due to a deep partnership with our associates at Tinybird.
Over the previous few years, Tinybird has turn out to be the default method to combine analytics performance into trendy merchandise in the identical method that Stripe is the default method to combine funds. In addition they have an exquisite behavior of supporting open supply merchandise like Ghost, Dub, PaperMark, OpenStatus, and LocalStack.
In consequence, we had been capable of flip Ghost Analytics into a robust, first-party, cookie-free knowledge platform constructed on an open supply ClickHouse database.
On Ghost(Professional), our new superior analytics options are included free of charge on the Writer plan and better — with all knowledge saved in EU areas.
For builders who self-host Ghost, you may join a free Tinybird account and produce your individual API key to get issues up and operating following our integration documentation.
We have put an unimaginable quantity of vitality into making certain that Ghost scales and stays dependable as our clients have grown from small blogs and web sites, to profitable media companies with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, hundreds-of-millions of {dollars} in income, sending billions of emails.
It would not matter what number of new options you ship if they do not work nicely, so an enormous quantity of our focus goes into constantly updating, bettering, and refining our product primarily based on consumer suggestions.
This is an outline of every little thing else new since 5.0
- We have completed an entire rewrite of Ghost Discover, that includes high indie publications from all around the world.
- Assist for publishing in over 60 totally different languages with automated translations for portal, newsletters, search, and feedback.
- Newsletters have been upgraded in a giant method, with customized design settings, new conditional playing cards for promoting, premium previews free of charge subscribers, subtitles, built-in spam safety, help for exhibiting your newest posts, subscriber particulars, viewers suggestions, remark hyperlinks, supply troubleshooting, and automated record cleansing. You’ll be able to even edit hyperlinks in newsletters after they’ve already been despatched.
- Our suggestions function allows cross-promotion, so you may spotlight your favourite publishers, and so they can spotlight you.
- Improved fee expertise with help for 135 currencies, free trials, extra fee strategies like Apple Pay, Google Pay, CashApp and iDEAL, in addition to automated gross sales tax, and help for one-time funds with suggestions and donations.
- A number of new themes together with our new default Supply theme for information websites, Solo for particular person creators, Style for meals writers, and Episode for podcasters — all of which have help for brand new customized typography.
- We now have bulk actions for updating a number of posts directly, or duplicating them.
- We fully rebuilt the Ghost editor from the bottom up with a extra intuitive, highly effective writing expertise, together with edit historical past, emoji autocomplete, TK reminders, inner linking, an inline picture editor, and higher help for touchdown pages with header playing cards and signup playing cards.
- We constructed built-in feedback performance, permitting you to construct a group with high-quality, members-only dialogue in your posts, then we upgraded it with extra sorting, moderation and threaded replies.
- One in every of our hottest additions: A brand new announcement bar enables you to share breaking information or particular gives prominently on the high of your web site.
- New 2FA and gadget verification to enhance safety for Ghost employees customers, who now even have a historical past log, offering you with a full audit log of who-did-what, when.
- We now have native search constructed into Ghost, so your readers can dig via the archives and rediscover your greatest items of labor.
- Embeddable signup types assist develop your viewers from wherever on the net, and further help for customized signup phrases.
- The Ghost Bookmarker browser extension enables you to bookmark any webpage in a draft put up, perfect for saving hyperlink roundup newsletters.
- E mail notifications provide you with a warning immediately when new members join or improve, retaining you related together with your viewers development.
- A totally refreshed Ghost settings interface makes web site configuration simpler than ever. Principally as a result of it now has search built-in.
- Assist for extra employees social hyperlinks to attach with followers throughout different networks.
Alongside the launch of 6.0, we’re making a handful of modifications to pricing for brand new clients on our official Ghost(Professional) managed internet hosting.
First: We have considerably lowered pricing for accounts with massive numbers of subscribers. In some circumstances, costs have been lowered by as a lot as 50%.
Second: We have elevated pricing and adjusted limits on our most cost-effective plans. Beforehand they began at $9 and $25/mo, now they begin at $15 and $29/mo.
Third: We’re introducing a launch supply for brand new clients, offering 50% off any plan for the primary 3 months, making it extra reasonably priced than ever earlier than to begin a brand new publication with Ghost 6.0!
When you’re at the moment a buyer, and these costs are greater than you at the moment pay, your pricing is not altering. We have all the time grandfathered all clients on pricing for the previous 12 years, and this time is not any totally different. You’ll be able to maintain your current worth and options.
When you’re at the moment a buyer, and these costs are decrease than you at the moment pay, you may change to one of many new plans and pay much less. We’ll even be proactively notifying all clients by electronic mail who fall into this class.
A couple of fast solutions to widespread questions:
Why are you altering pricing, now?
Like most companies, we evaluate and replace our pricing recurrently to ensure it is sustainable for us to function, and aggressive inside our market. This typically coincides with main model launches introducing new options which have new related prices.
It is too costly! Why is not it free?
Ghost(Professional) is a managed service with a full-time group of employees and servers who make it run. We’re a non-profit basis with no outdoors traders, so the one method we keep in enterprise is that if our unit economics are sustainable.
We predict it is fairly nice worth for artistic professionals who need to save a ton of time with a top quality service that routinely scales with you as you develop.
That stated, Ghost itself is free and open supply, so you may host it wherever you favor if our managed service would not align with what you are searching for.
I’ve a pricing query that is not lined right here
Drop us an electronic mail any time on help@ghost.org and we’ll get again to you as quickly as potential. When you need assistance making an adjustment to your subscription, our group is more than pleased to help.
On high of all of the user-facing modifications, we even have some thrilling updates and modifications for builders who build-on and work-with Ghost.
Ghost 6.0 represents the start of a serious enchancment to how Ghost is deployed. Up till now, Ghost has been put in with Ghost-CLI as a single app that runs on a VPS with one MySQL database, however our new social internet and analytics options have been constructed as impartial companies that run alongside Ghost.
So, we’re shifting towards Docker Compose because the formally supported method to set up, run and replace Ghost. That is now accessible as a developer preview, and can turn out to be the default from Ghost 7.0 onward.
Different developer modifications
- Ghost’s official manufacturing stack is now Ubuntu 24, Node 22, and MySQL8
- Footnote: Ghost does work with different working techniques, node variations, and databases – however as a small group, we doc, check and help one slender stack that we all know works rather well. OSS contributions are all the time welcome.
- We have shipped model new Developer Documentation, which is as soon as once more open supply (contributions welcome) and has upgraded search, in addition to model new help for llms.txt, so you may get Claude to do your bidding.
- We additionally shipped a VS Code extension final yr to streamline theme improvement with syntax highlighting and dwell preview
- Google AMP help has been deprecated. 🪦 RIP. Will not miss you.
- When you’re a theme developer, gscan has been up to date so you may check your theme for compatibility towards 6.0.
Already on Ghost(Professional)?
Log into Ghost.org and click on the “Replace to six.0” hyperlink your admin panel, any time. Get in contact with help when you’ve got any bother, we’re completely satisfied to assist.
When you just like the sound of every little thing you see right here, we’re actively hiring for extra gifted individuals to affix Ghost. We’re a totally distant group, positioned worldwide, with a ardour for utilizing know-how as a power for good.
Ghost
We’re hiring! Ghost is a proud non-profit organisation constructing open supply know-how for fiercely impartial, skilled publishers.
