Changing Channels: Why Episodic Medium Moved to Ghost

On numerous occasions, I explained why Episodic Medium was remaining on Substack with an admittedly apologetic tone. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the ethical reasons others were leaving the platform, and why many of you who had been paid subscribers in the past were choosing to suspend your support. It was that managing the uncertainties of a move to a different platform required a level of engagement I couldn’t deliver under the present circumstances.

This is all to say that as I now formally announce our move to Ghost, I want to be clear that I cannot claim this as a moral victory; the ethical time to leave Substack was probably never starting a Substack in the first place. It also isn’t a direction reaction to any particular instance of moral decay within the Substack platform. Instead, this decision is about weighing the future of Substack with the future of Episodic Medium, accepting that the compromises required from this move—more on those in a second—are worth the benefits of independence from a venture-capital-backed platform whose priorities are only going to get worse in the near future.

There was also an important external change to how the Substack network was working for the newsletter. Recommendations have long been a significant driver of subscriptions, but the two largest recommenders of the site—Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps’ The Reveal and Alan Sepinwall’s What’s Alan Watching?—both moved to Ghost in the past few months. Having Friends of the Newsletter make this move offers both valuable insight into its impact on their subscriptions as well as support for navigating a new system. I still don’t know what growth will look like independent of Substack, but the real value of a network is not feeling alone, and I have that in this situation.

And so I’m excited to say that starting this week you’ll now be able to find Episodic Medium at its new home at www.episodicmedium.tv.

From now on, all of our new posts—starting with tomorrow night’s review of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I’m sending Alien: Earth through Substack tonight and cross-posting—will go out exclusively through Ghost. It’s a transition that’s been a long time coming, and I’m excited for us to enter our Ghost era.

Challenges of the Ghost Transition

There are, however, some drawbacks.1 Ghost makes it easy to transfer over our archive along with our paid and free subscriptions, so nothing major should change for you as readers. That doesn’t mean we aren’t losing some features that have been valuable, though, and making sacrifices for the future of the site.

The Loss of Unsubscribing from Shows You Don’t Watch

As Episodic Medium started growing, a concern I had was people unsubscribing from the newsletter because they were getting emails about shows they don’t watch. Substack’s platform had a way around this, albeit not one intended for this purpose: each new show we covered became a new newsletter, and Substack would allow you to then unsubscribe from shows you weren’t interested in.

The result was that Episodic Medium was technically 70 different newsletters, a functionality that Substack’s “all-in” pay structure allowed at no additional cost. When moving to Ghost, however, that functionality would have cost significantly more than their set plans, and I can’t justify paying more to save readers the hassle of slightly-more-clogged inboxes. It’s the biggest “compromise” in terms of what the site’s Ghost era will look like, and I hope that you’ll work with me by accepting your new role as “deleter of emails.”

The State of Comments

One of the greatest joys of running Episodic Medium is seeing when readers are catching up on a show and going through our reviews. I see this because they’re adding their own comments to the conversation that happened when the show first aired, or liking comments that I made on those reviews. Comments are a vital part of the community we’re building, and knowing that those exist alongside the reviews is a huge deal—just look at how strongly people (read: me) reacted when the comments disappeared at The A.V. Club ahead of its sale to Paste.

Unfortunately, Ghost cannot export comments from Substack, meaning that when the reviews move the discussions won’t move with them. And because our archive is going to remain accessible only to paid subscribers, I don’t even know how accessible the comments will be on Substack (where the archive will also remain) once the move is completed. My hope is that readers catching up on past shows will still leave comments even though no discussion exists, but I’ll miss this element of the archive more than I’m concerned about things like Google search rankings.

I’ll also acknowledge that commenting was no doubt easier for those of you who subscribed to this and other Substacks, and accessed them through the Substack app. Ghost runs on a Gravatar log-in system (which made me realized my 2009 avatar was still showing by default), which will hopefully still allow for meaningful discussion among paid subscribers, but there’s no doubt that the “social” parts of Substack had some affordances that won’t be easily replicated. They appear to be leaning into some network elements between Ghost publications, but the log-in experience will be something we’ll adjust to in the weeks ahead.

Opportunities of the Ghost Transition

In addition to offering a better financial deal in terms of keeping a larger percentage of subscription revenue, Substack also offers us an opportunity to create new membership tiers. Through Substack, the “Founding Member” tier gave some of you the opportunity to expand your support of the site, and I’m greatly appreciative of those who did so. As we make the move to Ghost, however, we’ll be moving to a new system to offer additional value.

Regular Viewer - $5 per month or $50 per year

Honestly, I think it’s fair to say that what we offer on a monthly basis at Episodic Medium—20+ reviews—is worth more than $5 a month. But given that the subscription newsletter market is only getting more crowded, and the general financial climate will make it harder to maintain the subscriptions we already have, I don’t want to raise the cost of entry. As a result, the $5 subscription tier will continue to get readers access to all of our reviews, along with commenting privileges to join the conversation.

Loyal Viewer - $10 per month or $100 per year

I enjoyed the opportunities that spaces like the Substack Chat or live broadcasts offered for engagement with the audience, but it was hard at times to justify spending time on them when they weren’t contributing to the site’s growth in a direct way. With the $10 tier, I’m building these elements into the value, with an Episodic Medium Discord server where you can talk TV with me, our contributors, and each other. This will also be used for live-viewing discussions for events like next month’s Emmys, and we’ll talk about other possible events in the future.

Any existing Founding Member subscribers will automatically shift to this tier. I know it’s a lot of what I talked about as possibilities for that tier but didn’t deliver on, but this is designed in part to create those opportunities. For Founding Members who would like to make more significant contributions on a yearly basis, there is now a “Tip Jar” available through Ghost that will allow you to do so.

And, in honor of our move to Ghost and as our yearly subscription sale, yearly subscriptions at the Loyal Viewer level will be 20% off—$80—for the first year through 9/30.

You’ll find more information about the new tiers over at our About Page on Ghost.

The TL;DR Version

• If you’re currently a free subscriber, you shouldn’t have to do anything—just watch and see if the introductory post tomorrow ends up in your Spam/Junk Email, and contact me if you are not receiving email at all.
• If you’re a current paid subscriber, you also don’t need to do anything—your payments will be processed as usual through Stripe, which will not be linked to Ghost instead. You can log into Ghost with the email you use to subscribe to this newsletter, and your subscription should have transferred over.
• If you want to become a paid subscriber, you should sign up over at Ghost.

Thanks to everyone for your patience on this. Many of you have emailed me or used the Substack platform’s “reason for unsubscribing” feature to express your concerns, and I want to be clear that they were never ignored. It was just about finding the moment where taking this leap felt feasible. We’re here now, and I’m excited to move forward with this fall’s schedule in the months ahead.