I believe the problems lies in the implementation. The novels shouldn’t have been tagged as Premium but Novels with Premium Chapters instead. This means not changing the regular release schedule of a particular novel, but adding Premium chapters on top of the regular updates. This way, free readers won’t feel the effect and Premium readers get their dose of 10 or so Premium Chapters.
What happened was a drastic change in the release schedule. Let’s take Immortal Mortal (IM) as an example. The regular releases were 3 updates a day. Once the change was implemented, it became one regular chapter a day. Of course, the free readers would complain (me included).
Btw, what I meant as regular release, were the ad supported releases prior to the change.