Rise of Ghost Blogging: How it made its place? 📈

Ghost is an open-source blogging software and a successful crowd-funded project. We see the strategy taken by Ghost to enter a market that had been conquer by a few options. This is the rise of Ghost blogs. 📈

Table of content:

  1. Background of Ghost Blogging Platform
  2. Competitors of Ghost
  3. How Ghost conquered the competition?

We will go over the above points in more depth.

1. Background of Ghost Blogging Platform

Ghost was started in 2013 by John O'Nolan, a former employee of Wordpress (the biggest player in the game and competitor of Ghost).

Ghost started with a crowdfunding campaign for 29 days during which they raised around 197K pounds. It was a successful beginning.

After initial versions, Ghost was launched as an open-source project. It has a minimal design and is focused on serving the blogging community only. Today, Ghost has presented as a platform to earn online and has over 100K sites running on Ghost.

2. Competitors of Ghost

The biggest competitor to Ghost is Wordpress that powers 70% of the web.

Wordpress is more than a blogging site. You can create shopping site, checkout sites, forums and more over Wordpress using plugins that are available.

As Ghost grew, it positioned itself as a content creation platform to enable people earn over it. It grew its competitors list to:

  • Medium
  • Memberful
  • Patreon

In short, Ghost is your own platform where you are create content and earn.

3. How Ghost conquered the competition?

Ghost was able to beat the competition in this domain because of:

  1. Successful Crowdfunding
  2. It is open-source so anyone can use it for free.
  3. It got big companies as partners early.
  4. Allowed developers to earn over Ghost's success.
  5. It focused on a small utility but competed on large scale.

We have explained over the points resulting in success in depth.

  1. Successful Crowdfunding

When you get funding from the general crowd for an idea which has not been developed, you get potential users beforehand. You are ready for success.

Ghost raised 197K pounds, a good amount and this was first of a kind for a project like Ghost where success was slim. If you look for top crowd-funded project, Ghost's funding is an ant and majority of the fund came from people who convinced to do so beforehand.

This was publicized a lot and the general community was convinced to participate in a potential success. The hype was set.

  1. It is open-source so anyone can use it for free

Ghost is an open-source blogging platform.

This means you can build over it to customize according to your needs. Most importantly, you can host your Ghost instance on your own and use it for free.

If you go for Ghost Pro plan, your Ghost instance will be managed by the team and will keep your instance updated of the latest features.

  1. It got big companies as partners early

Ghost is being used by large companies like IBM, Tinder, Sky News and VEVO.

This brings in a sense of trust and reliability among the general Developer community and hence, more and more developers and smaller companies start using Ghost.

This strategy is taken by several projects and most offer their services for low price to large companies or use their sources to become a prospective partner. This is more effective than large personalities promoting a product.

This is impactful for Ghost as Wordpress has taken the larger part of Market share and Ghost is playing by the sentiment that premier and large platforms use Ghost over Wordpress. This has a large impact over the general audience and has the power to turn the tables in a couple of years.

  1. Allowed developers to earn over Ghost's success

Developers sell themes for Ghost and lists them in their official marketplace.

A few companies provide the service of a managed Ghost instance at a low price. This is same service through which Ghost earns.

Allowing developers earn over the platform by developing features or providing support services have proved to be an effective technique to form a strong developer community around the project.

Ghost lists freelancers and agencies on its official marketplace along with paid themes.

  1. It has a small focus but competed on large scale.

Ghost competes with Wordpress and other alternatives and is open about it.

The main advantage comes in the blogging space where the presence of Ghost gets highlighted but in reality, Ghost cannot replace Wordpress. This is because Wordpress is more than a blog and can serve to other platforms which Ghost currently cannot.

For example, one can make a complete production ready shopping site using Wordpress in a couple of hours but this is not possible using Ghost.

In summary, Ghost is competing with a larger company for dominance in a part of the market. People in that part assume it as a alternative and acts as a positive point when you compete with a large figure.

Now, you know how Ghost became a success.

With this article at OpenGenus, you have decoded the success of Ghost in the Blogging market which had been in stiff competition.