Happy New Year Ghostbusters (lame I know, just go with it)
Anyone using the Ghost subscription functionality for their blog?
Wins?
Fails?
Has anyone moved from an ad revenue model to a subscription service? Has it been well received?
My opinion is that most people don’t want to sign up for paid content. Personally, I won’t unless it’s a course or something of significant value.
Keen to hear about successes from websites with the Ghost subscription model.
Thanks 
Matt
To a certain extent I’d say that you’re probably asking somewhat a bit too early, and I think you have a bit of a misnomer in there.
In terms of the misnomer, I’m sure lots of people have upgraded to the Version 3 of the subscription functionality of collecting email addresses and using the platform itself to send out emails via Mailgun. Following that, I think you then mean to ask “Has anyone moved from an ad revenue model to a membership service?”, seeing how subscriptions is the email collecting functionality while members is the revenue functionality.
Anyway, much like how memberships and subscriptions is currently in beta and somewhat limited, I take it that there are some people/organisations out there who by extension can’t move out of beta themselves due to certain limitations imposed by the nascent functionality (that’s not a diss on Ghost in the slightest). Exceptions aside, some of those people/organisations may still even be in alpha, currently in the process of building out in order to get to somewhat of a beta phase, much like the functionality itself.
Give it a month or two and perhaps some of those people/organisations will be emerging from alpha into beta. 
Upfront, this isn’t a “success” story as of yet but hopefully it will be someday.
We just got our 1st paying member today at Glimmering.com. We launched last Friday. We aren’t trying to make a living off our site in the near future, but it was cool to get money for something we already do. It certainly paid the hosting bill (paid for an annual membership)! That said, we certainly plan to experiment with our site and see what we can do to provide value and increase the number of paid subscribers.
My opinion is that most people don’t want to sign up for paid content.
Of course not! Most people do not want to see ads either.
I think people building an audience have zero desire to appeal to “most people.” We are building communities of people who share similar values and have focused goals. I think subscription sites must really double down and forget most people and find “their people.” In our case, Gen X Families who don’t want to feel alone when it comes to dealing with the really hard stuff in life.