A premium channel, within Brian Swichkow's 📝Ghost Influence community, was a paid topical track offering knowledge, guidance, and ongoing discussion on a single channel — online marketing, business development, or 📝Lifestyle Design for founders. Members of any premium channel had full access to all public channels.
The model rolled out in 2018 with a lifetime discount for the first 150 members of each channel (as low as ten dollars per month), structured so that the earliest participants would shape the channel's resources and the community's character through the initial dialogues. The first four premium channels were ghost_reddit (April 2018), ghost_slack (May), ghost_chatbot (June), and ghost_linkedin (July).
As a category, "premium channel" describes a recurring-revenue product common to creator-led communities: a paid tier inside an otherwise free or low-cost community space, where members pay for access, depth, or curation rather than for content alone.