Aileen

@Ghost @TransistorFM Whoop whoop!

🚀 NEW: Podcasting is one of the most popular ways publishers share their work — and now you can run members-only podcasts on Ghost, with our brand new @TransistorFM integration Quality writing 🤝 Quality audio

Today @Ghost crossed $10M ARR, as a bootstrapped non-profit foundation building open source software. Indie publisher revenue earned with Ghost now ~$130M, and accelerating. The world of technology is shifting rapidly, and so is the world of media, creators and journalism. It's hard to keep up with, and even harder to predict. My strong belief, though, is that open software that you own and control is going to be even more important and relevant in the future than it is now. So we're going to keep building it.

Today @Ghost passed $9M ARR — the first time we've ever crossed a $1M milestone 2x in a calendar year 🎉 Publisher revenue is growing even faster! Now more than $120M GMV earned by writers and journalists using the product to fund their work

Google search is broken. Social algorithms suppress links. Finding good independent writing online has never been harder. We built something to fix that: 🌍 ghost.org/changelog/ghos…

Aggregate publisher revenue on @Ghost is currently growing at ~$1M ARR per *week* The business of independent publishing and journalism is looking in better shape than it has in a very long time

Ghost 6.0 has arrived! An enormous amount of work went into delivering our biggest upgrade yet: 🔥 Networked publishing with ActivityPub 📈 Deeply integrated native analytics 🛠️ Thousands of upgrades and improvements 💸 $100,000,000 earned by indie publishers

@JohnONolan @DanielLockyer 😂😂😂

@DanielLockyer Hetzner

ok so who is going to have an outage today

Time to drop what I have been putting together for a few weeks now. If your looking for design, animation, motion or just a canny professional editor who can deliver, have a gander at my new service. design.laikalabs.io Easy to request work, no onboarding to your company and you can pause at anytime if and when I'm not needed and pick back up when I am. Jump on the site and book a 15 min call with me and I can go through the details in a lil more detail. Let's make cool stuff.

After 5.5 years, today is my last day at Ghost! I’ve decided to leave in search of something new - the next mission is TBD. Freelance, contract and other opportunities welcome. DMs are open and RTs appreciated 🙏🏻 Whilst I'm mostly known as the "server guy" on X, I'm a generalist and enjoy working with the entire stack: frontend, backend, CI, databases, infra, CDNs, performance. Give me a problem and I'll solve it. I've pushed over 14,000 commits to the Ghost open source and internal repositories. Many features, bug fixes, perf improvements and stories will live on in those commits. During my time at Ghost, Ghost(Pro) grew from 5,000 sites to over 30,000 hosted sites, the open source product was installed millions of times, and publishers collectively earned $100M. Many thanks to @JohnONolan and the rest of the team for the great memories ❤️
 It’s been an exciting journey and I’m looking forward to whatever comes next. (and yes, I’m also going to be exercising my solo entrepreneurship skills)

Another year, and several milestones all at once. 12 years since @Ghost launched on Kickstarter, now at $8M ARR, and powering almost $100M in revenue for independent publishers 📈 A few thoughts and reflections on building an open source publishing platform, for a long time. I was 24 when I first started working on the idea for Ghost, 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. What started as little more than an idealistic open source pipedream has blossomed into a sustainable non-profit org with 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 @404mediaco and @platformer, to political coverage from @TangleNews and @LeverNews. From @HarvardIR to @StanfordReview, and @JSTOR in academia. From local journalism at @HellGateNY, @KyivIndependent, @millmediauk, @BerkeleyScanner, @DublinInquirer, and @51stnews, to the latest in music from @hearingthingsco and @DrownedinSound. @ycombinator runs on Ghost, as do @firstround and The Diff (by @ByrneHobart), along with the media arms of @Duolingo, @WealthSimple, @Kalshi, @Cloudflare, @DuckDuckGo, @dominos, 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.

🚢 Shipped 🚢 Ghost staff user logins now have automatic verification for unknown devices, and Email-2FA can be enabled in your admin panel, under: Settings→Staff→Security 🔒

New: Custom content for every subscriber 🎯 Now you can control where sponsored content shows up and who sees it — from a single post. Want to fine-tune the design? We added new settings for that too!

Now in beta – increase your reach by connecting your Ghost website to the fediverse 🌏 Discover and follow your favorite people and publications across Ghost, Threads, Mastodon, BlueSky, Flipboard, WordPress, & more – all in one place.

Binge watching into the weekend in 3,2,1. Probably a lil more poignant with everything AI that has now become reality since 2023

Ever read your own post and spot a typo? Yeah, us neither. But for people who do, you can add /edit to the end of a Ghost URL to quickly fix it! 🧑‍💻

It's been a while, but we are HIRING again 🚀 Join us as Staff Product Engineer and get paid to work on open source software shaping the future of independent media! 🌍 Fully remote since 2013 📅 4 day work week 💸 Competitive salary 🧑‍💻 Equipment paid for Link in bio ❤️

Made a thread about one of the workflows l use to generate consistent object/characters for animations using a 3d model as the base. It might not be for everyone but it works for moi 👻

Publishers on Ghost are growing faster than ever in 2025, and keeping 100% of their revenue 📈 Tangle is an wonderful example of a sustainable modern media business that's doing things right, winning both admiration and respect. Congrats on hitting $3M ARR!

🏚️ Broke: Allowing spam subscribers to sign up to your newsletter, then bragging about iNcReDibLe gRoWtH 📈 💡 Woke: Blocking those pesky little turds. 🪷 Bespoke: Using Ghost's handy new spam filter settings!