Love the show. The comments about plugs/ads are weird. Do these people listen to/follow podcasts online at all? The alternative to what they're doing is to go the customer pay route and that is death for most podcasts.
$5/mth for each subscriber? That works for the cream of the crop in the podcast world with hundreds of thousands/millions of subscribers, it doesn't work for anyone else. They have a great product with a sizeable user base. With that you do sponsors and ads, full stop. Insane to complain about that, it's literally the way the podcast world works.