I haven't listened to Gervais' podcast, but I find most of what he does to be quite funny. They might have had this planned from the get-go, building up the podcast's popularity and spread, by having it free, only to start charging for it at a later time.
In a free market such as ours on the Internet, where no one is -forced- to buy a product, we will soon see if this was in fact a good idea, or if it was a bad idea. I am sure they have set some kind of margin, at which they say e.g., "if we only keep 10% of our listeners, it was worth it financially."
I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes. Even as a person with a low income, I prefer to pay for things, even if they are available for free. It just.. tastes better? Oh, and it gives me the right to really complain and whine about things, if I've paid for it.
I think this sucks, not least because we already have 2 adverts in the podcast, and that it is promoted by a newspaper that invariably has paid for the Podcast in the first place.
Now we are asked to pay to receive it!
Well, lets get this straight. He gets nearly 3 million downloads, then the next moment he's announcing a

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