Every platform has a highlight reel, and most of them are vapor — a logo wall of brands that "use" the product the way you "use" a gym membership you signed up for in January. So when I went looking at who's genuinely built something on Ghost, I didn't want the marketing reel. I wanted numbers, and I wanted the stories behind them. Ghost runs a public directory of publications at explore.ghost.org, ranked by subscribers and revenue, and it turns out the story it tells is more interesting than any case-study PDF.
Here's the short version: the people winning on Ghost are mostly journalists and obsessives who got tired of working for someone else's algorithm. Some of them walked away from major media jobs to do it. A few are now out-earning the salaries they left. Let me show you the actual examples, because the patterns in who succeeds tell you a lot about whether you should bother.
The defectors: journalists who left and didn't look back
The single most striking thing about Ghost's top tier is how many of its biggest names are people who quit a comfortable masthead to bet on themselves.
Start with the one at the top. Tangle, the non-partisan politics newsletter run by Isaac Saul, sits at the very top of Ghost's directory with around 802,000 subscribers. The premise is almost stubbornly simple: take one news story a day and lay out the best arguments from the left, the right, and the center, then add the writer's own take, clearly labeled. No outrage engine, no team of fifty. Saul has talked publicly about the economics, and they're the part worth internalizing — roughly a year after he quit his full-time job to go all-in on Tangle, the publication was pulling in something on the order of $850,000 in gross annual revenue from a few thousand paying subscribers. He's described it, with no false modesty, as the best-paying job he's ever had. That's the whole pitch for independent publishing in one data point.
Then there's 404 Media, which might be the cleanest case study in the entire directory because the founders have been transparent about everything. Four technology journalists — Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox — came out of Vice's Motherboard as the parent company collapsed into bankruptcy, and instead of chasing the next staff job they started their own reporter-owned outlet in 2023. They're now listed at roughly 260,000 subscribers, charging $10 a month or $100 a year. The setup was deliberately bare-bones: a Stripe account, a Ghost site, and four people who do their own art, mail their own merch, and meet monthly to decide how much they can pay themselves. The kicker is that they were profitable within six months. Their whole thesis was that new media companies don't fail for lack of audience — they fail under the weight of offices, consultants, executive salaries, and venture money raised at silly valuations. Strip all that away, pay journalists to do journalism, and the math works. Ghost is the part of that stack that lets a four-person company run memberships and a newsletter without an engineering team.
Platformer is the defection story that made the most noise. Casey Newton, a former senior editor at The Verge, had built Platformer into one of the most-read tech newsletters on Substack after going independent in 2020. In January 2024 he moved the whole thing to Ghost — a deliberate, public break, driven by his disagreement with how Substack was handling content moderation, but with a hard-nosed business logic underneath it. Substack took a 10% cut of revenue; Ghost doesn't take a percentage at all. For an established publication that no longer needed a discovery network to find readers, that 10% was just money leaving the building every month. He'd had something like 170,000 free subscribers at the time of the move, and the migration worked precisely because he owned his subscriber list and could take it with him. That last detail matters more than anything: portability is the difference between running a business and renting an audience.
And the model keeps attracting heavyweights. The Lever, the reader-supported investigative outfit founded by journalist (and Oscar-nominated screenwriter) David Sirota, runs at roughly 264,000 subscribers doing accountability reporting that's funded entirely by its readers rather than advertisers. Same shape as the others: independent, subscription-backed, owns its own house.
The lesson across all four isn't "quit your job." It's that once you have a real relationship with an audience, the infrastructure that lets you own that relationship outright — no revenue share, no platform that can change the rules — is worth more than the growth features you give up to get it.
The synthesizers: curation as a product
Not everyone in the top ranks is breaking news. Some of the most durable Ghost businesses are built on the opposite skill: filtering the firehose down to something a busy person will actually read.
Tangle is partly this — its product is synthesis, not scoops. But the purest example is The Browser, sitting around 182,000 subscribers, which has done the same disciplined thing every day for years: read a punishing volume of articles and recommend a handful of genuinely good ones. That's it. No proprietary reporting, just taste, consistency, and trust compounded over time. In an era where everyone is drowning in content, "I will read everything so you don't have to" turns out to be a remarkably defensible business.
In finance, The Diff by Byrne Hobart (around 74,000 subscribers) does the analytical version — connecting dots across technology and markets for a readership that pays for the thinking, not the news. The through-line with curation businesses is that they're nearly impossible to commoditize, because you're not selling information (which is free and infinite) — you're selling a specific person's judgment, which is neither.
The obsessives: going an inch wide and a mile deep
If the defector stories are about scale, the niche stories are about the long tail being real and lucrative. Ghost's directory is full of publications that would never survive an ad-based model but thrive on a few thousand people who care deeply about one thing.
The Race has built a serious motorsport operation — F1, MotoGP, Formula E — with newsletters, video, and podcasts, listed around 34,000 subscribers. Escape Collective does member-supported cycling journalism for people who want real reporting instead of press-release churn. Soft Launch London turned the narrow, specific job of finding good London restaurant deals into roughly 62,000 subscribers. There's The Dink for pickleball, Rascal News doing fearless, voicey journalism about tabletop roleplaying games, and No Depression covering roots music to around 31,000 readers.
My personal favorite, because it punctures any idea that this is only for tech and politics: The Apiarist, a publication about sustainable beekeeping. Bees. Tens of thousands of words on the science and craft of bees, and a real audience paying attention. There's also Wheelchair Travel, built by accessibility advocate John Morris into what he describes as the world's largest resource for disabled travelers, around 32,000 subscribers — a publication that exists because one person decided an underserved audience deserved serious coverage.
The pattern here is almost mathematical. A topic too small to interest a big media company is exactly the right size for an independent who can reach the entire global population of people who care. Narrow your scope until you're the obvious best option for somebody, and the niche stops being a limitation and becomes a moat.
The plot twist: it's not just solo creators
Here's the thing that surprised me most scrolling the directory. Ghost is usually pitched as the indie-creator platform, but a striking number of serious companies use it as their content and newsletter hub — not their solo founders, the actual organizations.
Cloudflare publishes engineering content on Ghost. So does Y Combinator, First Round, and Mozilla.ai. Kickstarter runs a Ghost publication on crowdfunding tips and success stories. MIT has one. Brilliant, Tally, Readymag, Bitpanda, Epidemic Sound — even Domino's shows up. These aren't hobby blogs; they're brands that could afford to build anything and chose a focused publishing tool instead of bolting a blog onto their marketing site.
Why does that matter for you? Because it's a signal about the ceiling. A platform that only ever hosts hobbyists tends to have hobbyist-grade infrastructure. The presence of companies like Cloudflare and YC means the thing scales, holds up, and does the boring reliability work that big organizations refuse to compromise on. You're not choosing a toy that you'll outgrow.
What the winners have in common
Stare at enough of these and the same handful of ingredients keep showing up, regardless of whether the publication is about Silicon Valley or honeybees.
They own the relationship. Every success story here controls its own subscriber list and data. The Platformer migration is the cleanest proof — the business was portable because the audience belonged to the publication, not the platform. When you can walk out the door with everyone, you have leverage; when you can't, you have a landlord.
They keep the whole revenue. Ghost doesn't take a cut of subscription income, which is precisely why an established Substack newsletter like Platformer did the math and left. At the scale these publications operate, the percentage a platform skims isn't a rounding error — it's a salary, or a second hire.
Memberships are native, not bolted on. The reason a four-person shop like 404 Media can run a real subscription business without an engineering team is that Ghost treats memberships, paid tiers, and email as core features rather than plugins to be wired together. The tooling disappears so the people can focus on the work.
They're built on trust, not reach. Curation businesses like The Browser and synthesis ones like Tangle don't win by being everywhere — they win by being reliably worth a reader's ten minutes. That's a slower game than chasing virality, and it produces something virality never does: people who pay, and keep paying.
The niche is a feature. The beekeeping site and the pickleball site and the accessible-travel site all work because they stopped trying to be for everyone. Depth in a narrow lane beats shallowness in a broad one, every time, when your revenue comes from subscriptions instead of ad impressions.
The part that should actually motivate you
I'll leave you with the single most quietly persuasive number from Ghost's own directory. According to the front page of Explore, in just the past week, 13,806 brand new publications got started on the platform. Most of them will stay small. That's fine — most restaurants stay small too, and the ones that work change someone's life.
But a meaningful slice of those will become the next Tangle or the next 404 Media: someone with a specific obsession and the nerve to charge for it, building a real business out of an audience that nobody else was serving. The publications above aren't winning because they found a growth hack. They're winning because they picked a subject they understood, treated their readers like the source of their income rather than a metric, and used infrastructure that let them keep what they earned.
The tool, in the end, is the least interesting part of any of these stories. But it's not nothing — it's the part that let a beekeeper, four laid-off reporters, and a guy summarizing the news each find the same thing: a business they actually own.
