We apologize for the confusion surrounding some testing that is currently running in the Episode app. We see that many of you are concerned about what you’ve seen and we hope we can shed light on what’s going on.
We’re running a short-term test for a few weeks on some top Community stories to explore new ways of helping support our community authors. We partnered with community authors to have their stories in the test, however, they are not responsible for the options presented to you, the player. We’ve heard from authors that it can be difficult to become a full time Episode author, and we’re looking for options that might make this easier for them to achieve that goal.
We’ve heard your feedback on this test, and wanted to let you know that this is a only a test, and not indicative of anything final that may happen on Episode in the future.
We also want to let you know that we have no current plans to permanently remove access to free content on Episode, including community stories.
We modeled this test after other ways you can support creators on different platforms. The idea behind this test is giving readers options to support authors by purchasing the content from them you’d like to continue reading. This includes a purchase per episode option, an entire story purchase option, and the option to wait for weekly releases of new episodes, or pay early to read ahead.
If you have any additional feedback on this test, contacting our support team (not the authors themselves) is the best way to give Episode feedback directly.
