From the vault (Week Notes, 15, 2025)

I’ve been doing a little work on my archives this week. Two posts got a glow up for different reasons.

Internet Heroes #1: Geoff Ryman

This is the first in an occasional series on people who have done interesting things to do with the Internet or digital culture, but who we don’t talk about enough, or perhaps who we d…

theplanJon Hickman

Reading the Reader’s Digest Prize Draw mailer

For the past few years I’ve been getting Prize Draw letters from Reader’s Digest. They are quite incredible things. The whole thing is painstakingly designed to suggest that (a) I&#8217…

theplanJon Hickman

Custom content features new to Ghost

Ghost's new custom content features unlock more than just adding adverts to posts and email, but that's going to be their main use case.

Custom content for every subscriber

Calls to Action got an upgrade, now you can fine-tune the design and who sees them in more detail.

ChangelogTeam Ghost

Subscriptions are still the core of monetising a Ghost site, but so many publishers want to be able to add sponsorship to the mix. And now they can. Easily.

Every week I talk to dozens of local news sites and online magazines who want to manage small ad inventory themselves, and get those ads onto the page effectively. They want to add a new revenue stream but they don't want crappy ad exchanges (looking at you Google AdSense), where they have barely any control over what gets served on their pages; they don't want ugly ads with low relevance to their audience.

Custom content visibility unlocks this revenue stream. You can now add well crafted messages to posts and emails with a few clicks. And you can control who sees them too (e.g. hide sponsored content for paid members). They look great on the page and can represent real partnerships—"Ads", sure, but ads that are relevant and meaningful to you, your audiences and your sponsors. I’m very hyped for this update.