Continuing Community Story Payment Options Testing

Announcements!
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Hello Episodians!

You may have heard about or seen our previous testing of new payment options on select community stories. These tests are our way of exploring new methods of supporting our community authors, and making it easier for them to be able to become full-time Episode authors. Our team saw some promising results for options that are currently popular on other platforms, including purchasing early access of soon to be released chapters, and options to support the author directly.

The goal of these tests is to see if there are different ways of supporting Episode authors that we can provide. We would like to make sure you know that we have no current plans to permanently remove access to free content on Episode, including community stories.

We have partnered with authors within the community to run further tests on these options to see if these are viable ways of providing our community authors with additional methods of getting readers’ support on Episode. This will be another series of short-term tests on select community stories in the Episode app, and is being run by our team, with buy-in from the authors on the stories used and not run by the authors themselves.

If you have any additional feedback on this test, please contact our support team, and not the authors participating in the test. Reaching out to our support team is the best way to get your feedback directly to Episode.

— The Episode Team

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Hey, @Melani3 I don’t want to be disrespectful, but I’ll be honest, even though I will never, as is written in my lucky stars, be able to open the payment section, so this news doesn’t affect me.

I have a feeling that all those polls you posted and we answered, were never read by Episode or were simply ignored. Because the screenshots of results were never posted. I highly doubt that anyone answered in those polls any differently than here on forum threads.

First of all, this is an app for kids, this is what Episode decided last year. Most readers are therefore kids - or not. Whatever people said many times: they don’t have money to spend. Can be due to their age, covid unemployment, or unemployment in general.

But still, there are also those, who do spend money on this app. But people clearly said, they don’t want to pay for early access. They don’t want to buy gems. Or can’t. Doesn’t make difference.

So why enforce that?

We will probably create more gems choices now if that engages the possibility that we maybe earn something or rang on the shelves.

But making gems choices influent the possibility if we will rang enough or not, that’s not a fair game.

We all write as much as we can. Some more some less. Some have better stories, better advertisement, more reads, others don’t. But we are not all respected the same.

I don’t know what would be the best solution. From other apps, I only read one another. There is the same as here, free reading for 5$ on month, half the price as on Episode.

But you had a good idea in one of your polls. Raise the price for reading ads-free and add few gems, and that’s it. If necessary add more ads per chapter. That should be enough that every writer gets at least 0,01 for 1 read if is 18 or more years old. Is too much? Okay, how about 0,005 for 1 read?

Again I apologize if I sound rude. :heart: Sometimes it’s hard for me to explain with correct words what’s on my mind. :heart:

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I totally agree with you @CoraMae there are many kids on the app than adults. I personally as a 15 year old teen can’t afford to pay for gems. I only paid once but I can’t keep on paying. The Episode team should seriously consider it once again. I am sorry if I sound rude @Melani3

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hmm well as long as the limit for opening the payment method will be so high the support will still work only for the most popular authors.

I understand than you get the money from the gems and adds and I also understand there has to be limit so you will not pay every bad story just because it has 100 reads.

But there are so many small author who do not reach the limit yet their stores are trending in top 1000 or 100 in genre - I get that due to smaller amout or reads they would by payed just symbolic but it would be so motivating if the limit would not be only the number of reads but lets say if the story keeps in top 1000 for a month than its obviously author worth of supporting so why to not open him payment section? Even if he would make 5 dollars per month it would mean a lot that you “see them”.