Audience Engagement Digital Publishing
1 min read

Ghost to the rescue of independent publishers

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Ghost wants to save independent journalism, and the independent content management system has the money and tech to fund it.

Launched in 2014 with a successful Kickstarter campaign, Ghost is a simple but powerful publishing platform inspired by robust content management systems like WordPress and Drupal. Users are free to download and run the open source software on their own servers or pay to use a commercial hosted instance. Both versions of the code are maintained and regularly updated by the Ghost team and community.

Ghost won’t disappear anytime soon, and Ghost founder John O’Nolan structured the company to support long-term goals. The company raised over $300,000 in initial funding and is now supported by the commercial product. Ghost is cashflow positive and currently generates about $720,000 in annual recurring revenue. “[We’re] a self-funded non-profit organisation, and [the code] is given away for free without any licensing restrictions… This means we’re building technology which is going to be around for a long time and which legally cannot be sold to [another company] or be shut down due to investor pressure,” he said.

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