I was told by a friend that he was worried about the future of Ghost because the market share was tiny.
And he shared links to builtwith and wappalizer:
Then you go to About Ghost - The Open Source Publishing Platform and see that there are 22k active customers + the self hosting ones, which can be another 5k?
Those are still low numbers compare with old cms like Joomla, etc.
What do you think is the reason for these low numbers?
Is there any plan to involve the community more and grow?
PS:Not sure if this is the right category, I could not find a better one.
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Because it isn’t a simple php that any cheap host will setup and run. Arguably all apps start this way and grow as it’s been a decade and they continue to grow tell your friends to stop using survivor bias.
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Oh, has Joomla survived? 
Many technologies are still popular only because coders became used to them and haven’t learned anything faster. Such as node.js, which is faster and is used by Ghost, Netflix, NASA, Trello, PayPal, LinkedIn, Walmart, Uber, Twitter, Yahoo, and eBay. But can’t be auto installed using Scriptaculous on a shared CPanel host. You need shell access to install Ghost.
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You can see Ghost’s internal numbers and revenue here: About Ghost - The Open Source Publishing Platform
It’s not going away, it’s growing nicely and picking up signature clients.
It’s super power is around memberships so there are lots of use cases it will never be right for.
Market share is not going to be a useful tool for figuring out if Ghost is going away. There are real numbers you can use to actually figure that out.
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Thank you for all the answers.
I really think that market share is important, not the only thing, but important and a fair question to ask by a client or someone that is considering multiple options for their website.
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I think a bigger issue is that ads and e-commerce are a much bigger market than paid subscriptions.
The “paid newsletter” or “paywalled high-quality writing” business model is dramatically smaller, orders and orders of magnitude smaller, than ads and e-commerce.
Wordpress, Wix, Shopify, WooCommerce, even Squarespace all support various lucrative business models whereas Ghost is very opinionated about newsletter+blog.
And even within that niche, it faces competition from much more growth-focused providers like Beehiiv.
If Ghost uncoupled from “pay for newsletter and paid posts” and embraced things like “grow your Mediavine publication” or “sell digital products with Lemon Squeezy and Paddle”, it would be 10x bigger.
I don’t think that is the mandate of the non-profit, though!
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Would counter it is garbage for a company to eschew support of itself in favor of a third party as third parties fail all the time, they get bought, API’s go away.
Better to keep and maintain, you can run ads simply on Ghost, selling products is just a link away to the buy it page.
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